Mariam Aslamazyan

Biography

She pasted her wartime posters up in Leningrad herself, right on the streets. “We Will Replace Those Who Have Gone to the Front”, “We Will Avenge”, “We Will Rebuild”: the titles sound like orders, and the artist, it seems, saw no reason to leave them to anyone else.

She was born on 2 November 1907 (20 October, Old Style) in the village of Bash-Shirak, in the Kars region, then part of the Russian Empire; the village was later renamed Çetindurak and today lies in Turkey. She received her secondary education in Alexandropol, now Gyumri. There in 1926 she attended an art studio under Yulia Verzhbitskaya, then entered the Yerevan School of Art and Industry and graduated in 1929; her teachers were Stepan Arakelyan and Stepan Aghajanian. From 1928 to 1930 she studied at Vkhutein in Moscow (the name by then borne by the state art school that succeeded Vkhutemas). Among her teachers were Nadezhda Udaltsova, Alexander Drevin and Vladimir Favorsky, but the one she remembered best was Konstantin Istomin. In 1930 she transferred to the Leningrad Institute of Proletarian Fine Arts, now the Repin Academy of Arts, and joined the studio of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. From 1932 to 1934 she did postgraduate work there under Alexander Savinov. In 1932 she was admitted to the Leningrad branch of the Artists’ Union, and from 1939 she belonged to the Artists’ Union of the USSR. In the same year, 1932, she won first prize in a competition for murals in a sanatorium in Sochi.

Her prewar work was varied in genre: the landscape “Autumn Mulberry Trees” (1939), “Yeran and I in the Mirror” (1939), the still life “Peaches” (1940), the interior “In the Studio of the Artist Vladimir Lebedev” (1940). Most of these works were lost during the siege of Leningrad, and her early years have to be judged from the little that survives.

In the war years she painted three pictures about one nameless soldier: “The Return of the Hero” (1943), “The Song of the Hero” (1944) and “The Wedding of the Hero” (1945). The subjects differ, but the hero’s fate can be followed from his return to his wedding. For “The Return of the Hero” she was, by some accounts, awarded the medal “For the Defence of the Caucasus”. She seems to have regarded the cycle as a turning point: large decorative murals followed. From 1938 to 1955, with interruptions, she and her sister Yeranuhi Aslamazyan painted walls: the Armenian SSR pavilion at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow, the Museum of Earth Science at Moscow State University, the Ararat café in Moscow.

After the war she increasingly painted still lifes. “Armenian Still Life” (1955) and “Blooming Red Cactus” (1957) are in the Tretyakov Gallery; in them a closeness to Martiros Saryan can be seen in the composition and the construction of colour. She painted flowers all her life. “Flowers for the Fallen Heroes” (1973) and the huge “Mountain Symphony of Armenia” (1976), the culmination of a series of still lifes painted at Ankavan, show how decorative quality in her work becomes a property of nature itself. Aram Khachaturian, so the story goes, compared the colour rhythm of this canvas to polyphonic music, in which a single theme is repeatedly restated and varied.

In 1958 she discovered ceramics. Later she designed for the stage: in 1959 “The Fire of Your Soul”, after a play by Araksmanyan, at the Lenin Komsomol Theatre, and a year later, at the invitation of the circus, she designed the ring and the performers’ costumes.

Her travels were so many that the list reads like an atlas: India (1957, 1970, 1973, 1975), Belgium and Sweden (1958), China (1961), Japan (1963), Madagascar, Egypt, Algeria, Argentina, Spain, Yugoslavia, Italy. From India came “Dancing Girl from Madras” (1967), “Student from Delhi” (1970) and “Folk Craftswoman” (1971). From Egypt she brought tempera sheets in which the day moves from “The Village of Aswan at Dawn” (1967) to “A Street in Luxor” (1968). For her Indian series she received the Jawaharlal Nehru international award in 1972; in 1976 she was given the Gamal Abdel Nasser prize. Her titles included Honoured Artist of the Armenian SSR (1961), People’s Artist of the Armenian SSR (1965) and People’s Artist of the USSR (1990). She sat on the board of the Artists’ Union of Armenia (1942) and of the Moscow Artists’ Union (1958). Her works are in about forty museums, among them in Gyumri, where the house-museum of the Aslamazyan sisters is open.

Mariam Aslamazyan died in Moscow on 16 July 2006. She is buried in the Komitas Pantheon in Yerevan.