The solo exhibition of works by Rudolf Khachatryan, People's Artist of Armenia, held in Moscow this spring, comprising more than 300 works and reflecting the principal stages of his artistic development with the utmost completeness, was timed to the sixty-fifth anniversary of his birth. This is a unique event in our cultural life. The singularity of the display is determined by the distinctiveness of the works and of the creative nature of a master who from his first steps in art has followed his own path, independent of the "issues of the day," a master who, amid the chaos of today's art market, has managed to remain faithful to his original gift.
The very beginning of Khachatryan's biography is surprising. He was born in 1937 in Yerevan and there, in 1951, entered the art school, from which he was expelled a few months later for disagreeing with the guidelines of the curriculum. Khachatryan stepped off the traditional track of an official career supported and directed by the state, and by a fortunate turn of circumstance he became acquainted the following year with the outstanding artist Yervand Kochar. Contact with Kochar and his circle of friends, who represented the flower of the Armenian intelligentsia, became for the young man a spiritual and professional Academy, an Academy of universal enlightenment and comprehensive education. To it he owes in large measure his impeccable aesthetic taste, his lofty artistry, his spirit of unhurried service to the muses and his fidelity to the humanistic ideals of Great Art, beyond the reach of any ideological or commercial expediency and of passing fashion.
The practical outcome of this contact was a brief enthusiasm for Cubism, Surrealism and other currents of twentieth-century Western painting. However, unwilling to be assigned to any artistic grouping, he returns to the road in art intended for him alone and devotes himself entirely to drawing, seeking to find and to express in it his own style and manner, unlike anyone else's, and later his own technique of execution.
In the 1970s and 1980s there arose the series of Khachatryan's best-known drawings, which won him an all-Union and soon an international name and fame. These are chiefly portraits ("Female Portrait," 1977; "Woman in a Turban," 1978; "Portrait of Arkady Raikin," 1986, and others), self-portraits, still lifes ("Still Life with a Mirror," 1983; "Flowers," 1988), landscapes ("A Little House in the Woods," 1987; "Spring," 1987) and biblical subjects ("Judith," 1976; "David," 1978).
The associations they evoke with the creations of the masters of the Italian and Northern Renaissance reflect a striving to return to easel drawing the status of a work of self-sufficient value, capable of adorning any museum or private collection.
For ordinary lovers of art, for collectors and even for professional art historians who had come to love these works, it was hard to accept the master's transition, in the late 1980s, to new cycles ("Double State," "Two-in-Oneness" and others). In most of these works one may trace the principal tendency, which led Khachatryan to the multidimensional objects that now define the chief aim of his conceptions. The "heroes" of the multidimensional objects, designated as a rule by ordinal numbers, are far removed from the ideals, going back to antiquity, of a human being beautiful in soul and body. These many-armed, many-legged creatures, as though escaped from some unknown fantastical pagan sanctuary, can be assembled, disassembled and rotated in space before the viewer in various ways, at angles that are not firmly fixed.
The process of their creation resembles an individual myth-making and an act of the creation of a particular world, one that possesses the right to a life independent of its creator. This inviolable world is not intended for the lazy and incurious viewer; it is inaccessible to him and open only to people who think, who feel with it, who possess the gift of imagination.
Archive note: the same text by Grigor Grigoryan was printed in the newspaper Noev Kovcheg (Moscow) in May 2002 — Pub-0226 — and in the news bulletin of the Russian Academy of Arts, 2002, no. 7 — Pub-0228. This is the shortest version.
