Vagrich Bakhchanyan

Biography

On 23 May 1965, his birthday, Vagrich Bakhchanyan and some artist friends hung paintings in a small courtyard on Sumskaya Street in Kharkov. The exhibition stayed up for one day. In the history of the Kharkov underground it is known simply as the “Exhibition on Sumskaya” and is considered the first unofficial one-day exhibition in the USSR.

Two years later he was already working in Moscow.

He was born in Kharkov on 23 May 1938 into an Armenian family, and jokingly called himself one hundred and fifty per cent Armenian. He had been an artist, he said, for as long as he could remember. He studied at an art school and in the studio of Alexei Shcheglov, an admirer of the art of the early twentieth century, and left general school after the seventh grade to move to the art studio at the Metallist House of Culture. In 1957 he entered the Kharkov Studio of Decorative Art, where Vasyl Yermilov, an avant-garde artist of the 1920s, taught; he later became Yermilov’s friend. He did his army service and worked as a commercial artist on the in-house newspaper of the Kharkov Tractor Plant. Even then, it seems to me, what interested him most was how word and image are connected, and he invented techniques of his own for this.

From 1967 to 1974 Bakhchanyan worked in the humour department of the Literaturnaya Gazeta, with its “Club of 12 Chairs”, and in 1972 he won the paper’s Golden Calf prize. His collages were printed by the magazines Znanie — Sila and Yunost. Many of his puns and aphorisms passed into folklore. It was also he who invented the pen name “Limonov” for his friend Eduard Savenko. His first solo exhibition was held in 1968 at the Sinyaya Ptitsa café in Moscow; in 1973 his work was shown in Paris, and in 1974 in Vienna and Salzburg.

In 1974 Bakhchanyan emigrated and settled in New York. There he worked with Sergei Dovlatov, Alexander Genis and Naum Sagalovsky and designed the last sixty-six covers of the magazine Vremya i My, published by Viktor Perelman. In 1977 his work was at the Venice Biennale, in the exhibition of unofficial Soviet art; the same year saw his New York exhibition “Save Time”, and in 1979 he presented the performance “Agitpunkt” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His solo exhibitions continued in Europe as well: in 1977 in Vienna again, in 1982 in Edewecht in Germany. His books “Autobiography of a Forty-Year-Old Author” (1981) and a visual diary of the whole of 1980, from 1 January to 31 December, came out. In 1985 the Paris publisher Sintaksis printed “Démarche of Enthusiasts”, written with Dovlatov and Sagalovsky. In 1986 came “Signac under the Eye: A Pointill-Aviv Poem”, “Not a Day without a Line (Annual Report)” and “Poems of Various Years”.

Alexander Genis considered him more of a formalist than a dissident, and a man organically incapable of adjusting his gift to other people’s taste.

Bakhchanyan came to Moscow for the first time since emigrating in 2003. That year the National Centre for Contemporary Arts opened his exhibition “Not a Day without a Line”, and the book “Mukh uima: Artistries” came out in Yekaterinburg. Then came the collection “Cherry Hell and Other Plays” (2005), and the exhibitions “Works and Days” at the Era Foundation (2007) and “Picasso — USSR” at the pop/off/art gallery (2008). His works are in the Tretyakov Gallery, the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Yerevan Museum of Modern Art and the Norton and Nancy Dodge collection at the Zimmerli Art Museum of Rutgers University.

Vagrich Bakhchanyan died in New York on 12 November 2009. Later the “Writings of Vagrich Bakhchanyan” (2010) and his “Notebooks” (2011) were published, and in 2015 Andrei Zagdansky made the collage film “Vagrich and the Black Square”. His ashes, as he had wished, were scattered in Armenia, in the Geghama Mountains, over a stone bearing ancient petroglyphs.