THE ARTIST WHO DISCOVERED AMERICA
"I very much wanted to see all my works together. And now it has happened," said the well-known Moscow artist Rudolf Khachatryan at the opening of his one-man exhibition.
These days the halls of the Central House of Artists show the artist's work of forty years. Portraits of Alexander Pushkin, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, Arkady Raikin. And the latest cycle — "Metamorphoses".
Everything began far from smoothly for the artist. Admitted at fourteen to the Yerevan art college, Rudolf was expelled a few months later… for disagreeing with the principles of the curriculum. A year later he set off for Moscow and Leningrad, to the museums.
He first showed his works at eighteen, at a republican exhibition in Armenia. At twenty-three he was admitted to the USSR Union of Artists. In the late seventies, at a review by a group of republican artists at the Sinezh house of creative work near Moscow, Khachatryan showed a series of lithographs with "open forms". According to an eyewitness, the art historian Mikhail Lazarev, "the strict mathematical logic of the construction, the ascetic purity and the self-containment of the composition in its own inner life made an utterly unexpected, shocking impression on the officials of the USSR Union of Artists". By a miracle the works were saved and expulsion from the Union avoided.
The hard times had passed by 1978, when the artist's first one-man show in Moscow opened in the halls of the Union of Artists; other exhibitions followed, among them one in Detroit — the first post-war exhibition of a Soviet artist in America, incidentally. The gravely ill Arkady Raikin agreed to sit for him. The capital's elite came in crowds to the artist's studio.
After that everything rushed by as in a dream. In 1987, on a commission from Time magazine, Khachatryan painted a portrait of Gorbachev. The following year Central Television made the documentary film "Self-Portrait" about the artist's life and work. A first trip to London with his wife. He was invited to stay there for good. He could not. On 3 September of last year Rudolf had an extensive myocardial infarction, and two months later he began a new series of works.
His pictures are for those who find it sheer bliss to come back again and again to "The Lovers", to delight in "The Kiss" and to wish for exactly such a "Bouquet"…
Tatyana NEMOIKINA
