Vahram Manavyan

Biography

The collection “Egyptian Humour”, caricatures and cartoons, came out in 1916, five years after its author settled in Egypt. It is the only book by Vahram Manavyan that is reliably known, and one of the few firm records of his work as a caricaturist; the sources available to me give neither a print run nor a place of publication.

He was born in 1880 in Constantinople, one of the six children of the writer Dikran Manavyan; beyond that, almost nothing about the father has come down to us. The father died when the boy was about eight, and for several years he and his elder brother Harutyun lived in an orphanage. There it was noticed that he drew, and he was allowed a year of study with the academic painter Simon Agopyan. Then came the Academy of Fine Arts in Constantinople, from which he graduated. What followed is less clear: it is said that after a clash with the authorities the Ottoman government exiled him to Rhodes, from where he escaped and made his way to Paris; I have seen no documents that confirm this story, and the sources name neither the year of the exile nor the year of his arrival in France. In Paris he studied at the Académie Julian.

In 1911 Manavyan moved with his family to Egypt and settled in Alexandria. He lived by teaching drawing, later set up a business of his own to make ends meet and worked as a photographer, and he did not give up painting. What he painted in those years, portraits, views or genre scenes, cannot be said from the available sources; he is remembered as a painter and a caricaturist, and it is these two words that stand side by side in every reference entry. In 1934 he moved to Cairo and held a joint exhibition there with the painter Yervant Demirjian. His second exhibition, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Cairo, took place only in 1951, a few months before his death. Seventeen years lie between the two Cairo exhibitions, and what filled them, apart from the photographic studio and the lessons, we do not know.

Vahram Manavyan died on 9 April 1952 in Cairo, the city where he had spent his last eighteen years. His paintings still appear from time to time in exhibitions in various countries, though, as far as I know, there is no catalogue of them.