Suvorovsky Boulevard, 12-a, tel.: 291-03-41, 291-02-12
The museum's new exhibition complex has opened in the celebrated "Lunin House" — a rare monument of "high classicism, or the Empire style," the work of the renowned Moscow architect D. Gilardi. The restoration of the building's interior was carried out by the masters of the Soyuzrestavratsiya association. Specialists from the Giprotheatre institute took part in adapting the monument for museum use. As the work is completed, the museum's principal exhibition activity will unfold in the house on Suvorovsky Boulevard.
The first display here was an exhibition of works by R. Khachatryan, Honored Artist of the Armenian SSR. It comprises some one hundred works: portraits of figures of science and the arts, and landscapes.
Rudolf Lorisovich Khachatryan was born in 1937 in Yerevan. He began to draw early, and by the age of 18 he was showing his graphic works at republican exhibitions.
Rudolf Khachatryan is a poet of the line. Attentive and responsive to the searches of contemporary visual art, he remains a convinced "traditionalist," an adherent of classical drawing, in which success depends solely on the artist's talent and steadiness of hand and entirely excludes the possibility of accidental technical effects.
The nature of Khachatryan's gift and his artistic temperament always hold within them the possibility of discoveries. The most striking of these came when he transferred his drawing onto levkas (a gesso-primed panel), that is, onto a board primed by a special, old method. The gesso panel allowed him to achieve still greater monumentality and still greater scrupulousness in the drawing.
Khachatryan's art is inseparably bound up with reality. The entire human world is his world. He lives and works in Moscow and loves Russian culture, but he feels himself above all an Armenian artist. This position of an internationalist artist does much to further the development of his humanist art, allowing him to see in every person the essential thing — the exalted creative principle.
