Huseyn Aliyev

Biography

According to family tradition, he painted his first landscape at the age of twelve. That is hard to verify, but the later dates show that he began drawing very early: in 1922, aged eleven, his cartoons were already appearing in the satirical magazine Molla Nasraddin. He went on contributing to it until 1931.

Huseyn Alirza oglu Aliyev was born on 22 April 1911 into a large family, in the village of Jomardli in the Zangezur district of the Elizavetpol Governorate. Other sources give the place of birth as Tanahat. The mountains of Zangezur remained his main subject for life: later he painted “View of Zangezur”, “Zangezur Mountains” and “View of Jomerdli”. From 1927 to 1932 Aliyev studied at the Baku Technical School of Art. He then went to Leningrad, to the Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he studied from 1932 to 1935. He was the first Azerbaijani within the walls of that institution. I have no details about these years: neither the names of his teachers nor the title of a diploma work survives in the texts available. On his return, in 1935, he joined the editorial staff of the republican newspaper Communist, working first as an artist and then as chief artist. The sources differ: by some accounts he stayed at the paper until his death, by others he retired after about fifty years there. In 1940 he was admitted to the Artists’ Union. He took part in the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviet Union calls the Second World War on the eastern front; what is known of his service comes only from his decorations: the medals “For the Defence of the Caucasus”, “For Valiant Labour in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945” and “Thirty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945”, and later the Order of Friendship of Peoples. He also received three Certificates of Honour from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Azerbaijan SSR and one such certificate from the Ukrainian SSR. In 1977 he was named Honoured Artist, and in 1982 People’s Artist of the Azerbaijan SSR.

Of his more than 250 paintings, only a small part is named in the articles. Among the portraits are Mirza Fatali Akhundov and Huseyn Javid, but landscapes take up most of the list: “Castle of Urud”, “Sheki Waterfall”, “Winter in the Forest”, “Autumn”, “Sunset”. In two years he painted more than twenty-five watercolours of Mount Kapaz. Later an album, “Landscapes of Goygol”, appeared, with seventeen works. It seems to me that the list shows portraiture running alongside landscape in his work, not replacing it, but it is hard to judge from titles alone.

In 2004 his works were shown in Abu Dhabi. In 2011, for the centenary of his birth, an exhibition opened at the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. Aliyev died in Baku in May 1991.