Minas Avetisyan

Biography

The Spitak earthquake of 1988 destroyed some of Minas Avetisyan’s frescoes in Leninakan and his house museum in his native village of Jajur. The house was later restored and is open to visitors again. By then the artist had been dead for thirteen years.

He was born on 20 July 1928 in Jajur, then part of the Leninakan uyezd of Armenia, into a peasant family. His mother, Sofo, was the daughter of a priest from Kars; his father, Karapet, was a blacksmith from Mush. In 1947–1952 Avetisyan studied at the Terlemezyan Art School in Yerevan, then at the Yerevan Art and Theatre Institute and at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad, where one of his principal teachers was Boris Ioganson. From 1960 he lived in Yerevan.

Recognition came in 1962, after the “Exhibition of Five” in Yerevan.

He did work from nature, but a study remained a preparation for him, and the main work on a canvas was done in the studio; in this he departed from the plein-air manner once widespread in Armenian painting. He painted the Armenian landscape, above all the country around Jajur, its mountains and fields, the village people and their faith, and he painted self-portraits. His mature works are built on contrasts of colour and a broad, expressive brushstroke; the principles of Fauvism come to life in them, and there is an echo of the medieval art of Transcaucasia. On the whole he leaned towards French modernism and the early avant-garde of the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet at official exhibitions his saturated colour and epic, dramatic tone were seen as a breakthrough to freedom, and in this he came close to the Russian “Severe Style” of his day. I think this kinship says more about how he was seen at the time than about his own search.

Between 1960 and 1975 he painted about five hundred canvases and almost as many drawings, made twenty large frescoes and designs for more than a dozen stage productions. “Baking Lavash” (1972) and “Landscape with Khachkars” (1974) are in the Yerevan Museum of Modern Art, “Conversation” (1973) is in a private collection; the place of “Textile Workers” is the waiting hall of Zvartnots Airport in Yerevan. In 1970–1974 he painted murals in factory interiors in Leninakan, and in 1974 he designed Aram Khachaturian’s ballet “Gayane” at the Spendiarov Opera and Ballet Theatre in Yerevan. In 1968 he was given the title of Honoured Artist of the Armenian SSR.

He first appeared on film in the documentary “The Color of Armenian Land” by his friend, the director Mikhail Vartanov; the film suffered at the hands of the censors. On 2 January 1972 there was a fire in Avetisyan’s Yerevan studio. What exactly was lost, I cannot say.

Minas Avetisyan died in Yerevan on 23 February 1975, at the age of forty-six. Soviet announcements gave the date of his death as 24 February, and that date long remained the accepted one.

In November of the same year he was posthumously awarded the State Prize of the Armenian SSR. Yunna Moritz dedicated to him the second part of her verse diptych “Armenia” (1983), and Mikhail Vartanov made the film “Minas: A Requiem” (1989) about him. In 2000 Armenia issued a postage stamp in his honour.