Fuad Abdurahmanov

Biography

The monument to Nizami in Baku was unveiled in 1949, and its proportions are worked out so that the height of the pedestal stands to the height of the figure as 1 to 1.5. The look of the whole square on which the monument stands depends on this calculation. Its author was Fuad Abdurahmanov, who at the time was not yet thirty-five.

He was born on 11 May 1915 (28 April, Old Style) in Nukha, now Sheki, into the family of a minor civil servant, Hasan Jafar oglu Abdurahmanov. In 1929 the family moved first to Yevlakh and then to Baku, where they rented a two-room apartment in Icheri Sheher, on Mammadyarov Street. That same year the boy entered the Painting School of Baku. In 1935 he left for Leningrad and until 1940 studied at the Academy of Arts under Matvey Manizer.

While still a student he showed a small composition, “Shot”, at an exhibition marking the thousandth anniversary of Ferdowsi, and it entered the permanent collection of the Azerbaijan State Museum of Art. The year 1938 marked the start of his large-scale work: he began a statue of Fuzuli. It opened a series of figures of Azerbaijani poets and writers on the loggia of the Nizami Museum of Azerbaijani Literature in Baku. This was his first monumental piece; before it there had been mostly portrait busts of Azerbaijani cultural figures. For the 800th anniversary of Nizami, in the late 1930s, competitions were announced for a painted portrait of the poet and for a monument to him. The jury entrusted further work on the project to Abdurahmanov and the architects Sadig Dadashov and Mikayil Huseynov. The monument in Ganja, then called Kirovabad, was put up in 1946–1947, and for it the sculptor received a Stalin Prize, second degree, in 1947. Then came the Baku Nizami. Azerbaijani art historians regard it as one of the cornerstones of local monumental sculpture; Jamila Novruzova calls Abdurahmanov the founder of Azerbaijani monumental sculpture. To my mind this wording is too categorical, but even cautious writers acknowledge the influence of the Baku monument on the next generation of sculptors.

In 1949 he was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Arts, the first Azerbaijani to be so. He was one of the first in the republic to work in hard materials: marble and bronze. In 1950 the plaster “Chaban” appeared, and in 1951 it was cast in bronze; the bronze version is in the Tretyakov Gallery, and for “Chaban” the sculptor received a Stalin Prize, third degree.

After that his range of subjects widened: Huseynbala Aliyev and Khidir Mustafayev, Heroes of the Soviet Union, the poet Samad Vurghun, the composers Uzeyir Hajibeyov and Asaf Zeynally, and historical figures such as Koroghlu, Javanshir and Babek. In 1954 he made marble busts of Choibalsan and Sukhbaatar for the mausoleum in Ulan Bator. In 1955 he created a marble portrait of Lenin, now in the Azerbaijan State Museum of History, and was given the title of People’s Artist of the Azerbaijan SSR. In Baku, to his designs, were put up the statue “Liberation” (1960), the monuments to Samad Vurghun (1961) and Mehdi Huseynzade, the gravestone of General Hazi Aslanov, and the monument “Liberated Woman”. The monument to Rudaki in Dushanbe was unveiled in 1964; for it the sculptor received a gold medal of the USSR Academy of Arts, though sources give the date as either 1964 or 1966. Together with Tokay Mammadov and Omar Eldarov he received a prize at the competition for a monument to Avicenna for Bukhara.

In 1962 he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He died in Baku on 15 June 1971 and was buried in the Alley of Honour.

Streets in Baku and Sheki are named after him, and in Sheki a children’s art school bears his name.