The Moscow publishing house Izobrazitelnoye Iskusstvo (Fine Art) has recently brought out, in fifty thousand copies, an album of drawings by Rudolf Khachatryan, People's Artist of the Armenian SSR. In the foreword Tahir Salakhov, People's Artist of the USSR, rates the Armenian artist's work highly, calling it one of the significant manifestations of the multinational Soviet fine art. Khachatryan's original art is known today in different corners of the Soviet Union and abroad as well. His one-man exhibitions in Moscow and Leningrad, in Yerevan and Odessa have met with unfailing success.
Last year, in the American cities of Detroit and Los Angeles, the artist showed more than six dozen of his drawings, many of which were acquired by American museums.
Mikhail Lazarev, who compiled the album, gives in his introductory essay a brief account of Rudolf Khachatryan's life and career, touching also on the characteristic sides of his art. Speaking of the sources of the gifted artist's work, he rightly names, beside the masters of the Renaissance, the finest traditions of our medieval miniaturists, those unsurpassed masters of book graphics.
Khachatryan's art draws the viewer by the delicacy of its line and the directness of its execution. It is not by chance that he is called "the poet of the line". With an ordinary pencil he attains an astonishing expressiveness. In the perfection of their finish his works recall Armenian khachkars. For the artist there are no unimportant details. Under his attentive gaze everything — a beautiful coiffure or the fold of an old-fashioned garment — grows warm and comes alive.
Rudolf Khachatryan's favourite genre is the portrait. In it and through it he says what he has to say, glorifying the human being and the creative principle in him.
The album presents a superb series of portraits by the artist. They show thinking, creating individuals, notable figures of science and culture. It is hard to single out any one of the drawings presented. All of them are the author's self-expression and carry the stamp of a richly gifted artist's individuality. The artist's gift and mastery are displayed most fully in the works of recent years. Many of these drawings are already classics today. "Portrait of a Woman" (1973), for instance, has become a present-day symbol of motherhood and femininity.
Every artist, and the portraitist above all, expresses his creative credo best in self-portraits. Rudolf Khachatryan is no exception. His album of drawings opens and closes with self-portraits, from which the artist himself looks out at us, with his settled principles of life and his artistic view of the world.
No less known and attractive are Khachatryan's still lifes. They too stand out for their truthfulness and for the artist's tender attitude towards inanimate things.
In conclusion it should be said that thanks to the high quality of the printing (the album was printed in Finland) the hundred or so drawings it contains sound almost with the force of the originals, giving thousands of admirers of true art many moments of unclouded delight.
LEVON LACHIKYAN
In the illustrations: "Still Life" and "Vladimir Msryan".
