Hakob Hakobian

Biography

At nine, Hakob Hakobian found himself at the Melkonian Armenian school in Cyprus. His parents sent him there; they had fled to Alexandria from Antep after 1915, escaping the Armenian genocide.

He was born in Alexandria on 24 May 1923. In 1941 he came back from Cyprus and went to work in a textile factory. Three years later he moved to Cairo, where he became a designer and at the same time entered the Royal Higher Academy of Art. He graduated in 1947. Then come five years about which I have found nothing; what he did before leaving for France I cannot say.

In 1952 Hakobian went to Paris and until 1954 studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. According to some accounts, he received a scholarship for this and also worked in the studio of André Lhote. His early pieces from this time are small: oil canvases with a single figure in an interior, and still lifes. “A Woman Frying Fish” (1962, oil, 70 × 80 cm) dates from the early 1960s. Critics who wrote about his figures noted that his people are social and occupational types, static in a shallow space; the feeling of constraint and isolation comes from them as from the inhabitants of a cramped room.

In 1961, in the wave of repatriation of Armenians from abroad, he moved to Soviet Armenia; according to some sources this happened in 1962. From 1962 he lived in Leninakan. The Armenian landscape became his new material, and from then on he painted mostly that: orchards in bloom, vineyards in winter, the Garni gorge, Ararat. His known canvases include “Garden near the Church of Hripsime, Echmiadzin” (1976), “In Bloom” from the series “My Land” (1977), “Vineyards in Winter” (1979), and “Ararat” and “The Garni Gorge” (both 1980). “In the Artist's Studio” and “A Neglected Corner” (both 1980) stand outside the landscapes. It seems to me that in pieces such as “A Neglected Corner” one can still hear the tone of the Cairo and Paris interiors.

He was tied to the public life of the republic directly: in 1967 he was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Armenian SSR (the republic's legislature), seventh convocation, and remained one until 1971. In October 1967, in the same period, he received the medal “For Labour Distinction”.

In 1977 Hakobian was given the title of People's Artist of the Armenian SSR (an honorary state title) and was awarded the republican State Prize. In 1986 the painting “Spring” (1971) brought him a gold medal at the first Transcaucasian Biennale in Tbilisi. In 1987 he received the State Prize of the USSR for the cycle “My Homeland”: “Spring in the Garden”, “Road and Trees”, “Gently Sloping Field”, “Still Life. In the Studio”, “A Peaceful Day” and “Armenian Landscape”. In 1988 he was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Arts.

In 1989 he painted “Sumgait”, devoted to the events in that city in February 1988. The film “The Painter Hakob Hakobian” was made about him by the Hayk studio in 1990, twenty minutes long. His exhibitions were held in Yerevan, Moscow and other cities; in 2011 the exhibition “The Song of Earthen Colors” was shown.

In 2001 Hakobian was made an honorary citizen of Yerevan. He was awarded the Order of St Mesrop Mashtots. He died in Yerevan in March 2013 and was buried in the Komitas Pantheon.