Sattar Bahlulzade

Biography

One dawn by Lake Goygol, Sattar Bahlulzade woke before his companions, the painters Tahir Salakhov and Togrul Narimanbekov. The sun was just rising over Mount Kapaz, and the view seemed so unusual to him that he cried out and woke them both. The three of them stood and looked in silence. He made no sketches. He painted “Tears of Kapaz” (1965) back in Baku, from memory, and his friends, as he later told it, were astonished when they saw it.

Usually he began with studies. But some things he simply kept in his head.

He was born on 2 (15) December 1909 in the village of Amirjan near Baku, to Bahlul and Okuma Bahlulzade, the third child after two elder sisters. When his father gave him coloured pencils, the boy began drawing everything around him: the Novruz holiday, the kosa dances, the jumping over bonfires. At home there were carpets woven by his mother and grandmother and old copper dishes; in his diary he later recalled that his mother arranged the dishes and folded the blankets like an artist, matching the colours. At school he read Nizami, Vagif and Khaqani avidly, but Fuzuli most of all, and drew Layla and Majnun on the covers of his exercise books. His teachers told him there was only one path for him: to become an artist.

In 1927, on the advice of relatives in Baku, he entered the Azerbaijan Art Technical School. There Azim Azimzade took him under his wing, and after graduating in 1931 Bahlulzade spent two years working under him as a graphic artist on the newspaper Kommunist. His first published works were cartoons for critical notes. Azimzade, he admitted, had an enormous spiritual influence on him, and it was he who advised him to continue his studies.

In the summer of 1933 he went to Moscow and entered the graphic arts faculty of the Moscow Art Institute, under Vladimir Favorsky. The turning point came during summer practice in Crimea: Grigory Shegal, who was in charge of the plein-air work, noticed his studies from nature and invited him to his painting faculty. It was with Shegal that he completed his training. His diploma work was a history painting, “The Uprising of Babek”. He studied weapons and costumes in the museum and in libraries, and painted the landscape and the horses from nature in Amirjan in the summer. In the view of the art historian Rasim Efendiyev, the complex historical subject was beyond him, while what was painted from nature came out most alive. The war prevented him from defending his diploma. Later he was invited to Moscow more than once to defend it, but he did not go: “Does an artist need a diploma to prove his worth?”

In 1942–1944 he taught at the same Baku technical school where he had once studied. He painted portraits of historical figures, Fatali Khan and the calligrapher Mir Ali; in 1941 he joined the Union of Artists of the USSR. The turn to landscape can be seen in 1947: his lyrical “Early Morning”, about Absheron, was shown at the All-Union Exhibition in Moscow, and “Salute in Baku” appeared at the same time. In 1949–1950 he painted series on the Absheron villages, Buzovna, Zagulba, Fatmai and his native Amirjan, and looked closely at the landscape painters of the past, at Corot and Levitan.

Then came journeys around the republic. In 1953 “The Gudiyalchay Valley” appeared; in midsummer 1954, after his third trip to Quba, he went to the Oil Rocks, the oil workers’ settlement out in the Caspian Sea, and brought back studies of trestles, derricks and tankers at their moorings. In 1957 the Karabakh pictures “Jidir Duzu” and “Outskirts of Shusha” hung at the All-Union Exhibition. He worked on each canvas for a long time, day after day. There are no winter landscapes in his work: in winter he stayed in the studio and painted pictures from his summer studies. Bahlulzade began with the realistic manner he had been taught, but gradually arrived at his own, freer one: light combinations of white, blue, pink and green, bold brushstrokes, sometimes fantastic forms. Some of the late works really do look like photographs of the Earth taken from space. It seems to me that this comparison is more accurate than the label of Impressionist that has stuck to him. He used to say that he had no need to go to Tahiti for inspiration, as Gauguin had: the life and the land of one’s own people are the true source.

In 1964 an exhibition of his graphic work was held in Prague, the first exhibition of an Azerbaijani artist in Europe. Five works were selected for the gallery’s collection, and he refused the fee, giving them as a gift. Solo exhibitions were held in Baku, Yerevan and Tbilisi, and twice in Moscow, in 1965 and 1973. He received two Orders of the Red Banner of Labour (1959, 1969), the titles of Honoured Art Worker (1960) and People’s Artist of the Azerbaijan SSR (1963), and in 1972 the State Prize of the republic for the series “Landscapes of Azerbaijan”. The art historian Ziyadkhan Aliyev counted about six hundred of his paintings and about three hundred graphic sheets, but where most of them are is unknown: he gave them away freely.

He seldom went into town. He wore his hair long and, it is said, had it cut only twice. Once was before the sculptor Fuad Abdurakhmanov set about modelling his portrait: Bahlulzade feared that the sculptor would be more taken with his hair than with his face, and arrived at the studio already shorn. The marble bust with short hair now stands in the National Art Museum of Azerbaijan, where a separate hall is given over to his work. Young artists came to his studio, and he is thought to have had a strong influence on Togrul Narimanbekov.

Two days before his death the art historian Mursal Najafov found him in a Moscow hospital: sitting cross-legged on the bed in the Eastern way, Bahlulzade was drawing in felt-tip pen the dark red pomegranates lying on his bedside table. He died in Moscow on 13 October 1974 (according to other sources, on the 14th). He was buried on 16 October not in the Alley of Honour in Baku, as had been expected, but, at his own wish, in Amirjan, beside his mother. Over the grave stands a monument by Omar Eldarov: the artist with two empty picture frames.