In Moscow, on Suvorovsky Boulevard, the new wing of the State Museum of Oriental Art has opened its doors to visitors. The former Lunin house, built at the beginning of the last century to a design by the architect Domenico Gilardi, will soon take in a considerable part of the museum's collection. For the time being, a one-man exhibition of Rudolf Khachatryan, Honoured Artist of the Armenian SSR, has opened here. Five years ago Muscovites already had a chance to become acquainted with his work. The present exhibition covers the artist's work of recent years.
"The artist does not simply copy reality," says Rudolf Khachatryan. "Freeing himself of everything superfluous, he looks for the essential. In a work of art the essential is not the outward likeness but the inner world precisely reproduced."
This thought of the artist's is most fully realised in his portraits, which occupy six halls on the museum's second floor. Visitors to the exhibition — and there are already more than 31,000 of them — have been able to meet portraits of people both famous and unknown.
The artist often depicts a person as though outside time and outside any particular subject.
The portrait of Eldar Ryazanov is restrained and severe. Only the face of the well-known film director is drawn in detail here. What matters in the portrait is the faintly mocking glance from under half-closed lids; the rest — the folds of the clothing, the outline of the chair back, the hands — is barely indicated in pencil. Attributes would be out of place here.
But here before the viewer is the "Still Life with a Mirror". And even here the sense of terseness does not disappear amid the abundance of objects. R. Khachatryan conveys masterfully the springy hardness of metal, the soft body of wood and the cold indifference of the mirror, in which everything is reflected and lives in other dimensions. Subtler still is "Flowers", where the poetry of transparent glass and water makes a sharp contrast with the [...] stems shown against a white ground.
There are many portraits of women at the exhibition. The hard graphic contour gives way here to soft lines with endless gradations of light and shade. And as a symbol of eternal, unfading beauty, the theme of the apple recurs in the women's portraits — the apple which, in the ancient Greek myth, Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, took from the hand of Paris.
The precisely reproduced inner world of our contemporary is the chief merit of Rudolf Khachatryan's portraits.
O. KORYAGIN, Moscow
