Монохромная полифония Рудольфа Хачатряна Rudolf Khachatryan's Monochrome Polyphony Rudolf Khachatryan's Monochrome Polyphony

Rudolf Lorisovich Khachatryan, Honoured Artist of the Armenian SSR, was born in Yerevan in 1937 to an ordinary family of modest means, untouched by the influence of any of the arts. The sole exception, perhaps, was his mother’s fondness for embroidering white on white, building the thread into relief; perhaps her passion helped awaken her son’s gift. He was not yet five when he began drawing the patterns she would embroider.

As a child, he could dream while awake. Once he had a vision of something radiant and beautiful, yet so terrifying that he hid beneath the covers. A sound of monstrous force shook the confines of his tiny room, with its single small window and outer shutter. The sound was piercing and brilliant: it dazzled the eyes and could not be distinguished from piercing light. What little Rudolf saw and heard was repeated three times. He later said that he cried out like a child at birth. In it he divined a sign: art had called him. As though foreseeing his future, he began in earnest, and with passion, to draw from life.

Rudolf Khachatryan entered art school at a very early age. There, however, his audacious individuality asserted itself. He could not abide coercion of any kind, while the school required him to follow its conventional drawing curriculum. For him, that stage was already behind him. His time at the school was brief. He was expelled.

He then wandered the streets of Yerevan, drawing the old men and women he encountered and capturing their likenesses with astonishing accuracy. Their faces attracted him by their contrast with his own still-boyish face: their watering eyes, their wrinkles, and the expression of concentrated sorrow that belongs to old age.

One day, the painter and sculptor Yervand Kochar came upon him at this work. Kochar was also a thinker and a leading figure of the Armenian bohemia, widely known among the people as the Maestro. No one addressed him otherwise: “Maestro! Maestro!”

Rudolf Khachatryan was fifteen at the time.

“My boy,” said the Maestro, “bring me your drawings this very evening. My studio is just beyond that little garden.”

And so Rudolf Khachatryan experienced the sort of thing that sometimes happens in kindly fairy tales.

That evening, having chosen his best drawings, he went to see the Maestro.

Kochar looked at them and exclaimed with his characteristic fervour:

“The spirit of Leonardo lives!”

At the time, Rudolf Khachatryan did not yet know who Leonardo was.

Kochar said:

“It is a good thing they expelled you from the school. In my view, they have nothing more to teach you.”

Rudolf Khachatryan never drew in Yervand Kochar’s presence. He simply listened to his instruction and advice. The adolescent and the Yerevan celebrity became friends. The boy took that friendship, Kochar’s praise, and his counsel as another favourable sign, a promise that the future was bound to fulfil.

When Rudolf was expelled from art school, his parents decided that he was a difficult child, a hopeless artist without talent or prospects.

Uncle Nikola arrived. A tailor and cutter by trade, he was the family’s chief adviser.

Uncle Nikola insisted:

“There is only one road open to you: you will become my apprentice. In time you will be the finest tailor in the city. Enough of this daubing! You will earn your own bread instead of eating another man’s. Refuse to listen, and you will come to nothing.”

But Rudolf did not become Uncle Nikola’s apprentice.

Rudolf’s father, a stern man, declared firmly:

“I will no longer feed or clothe you. Do as you please. Earn your own bread.”

Yervand Kochar went in vain to see Khachatryan’s parents and predict a brilliant future for his young friend. Rudolf’s father stood his ground.

And so the adolescent left his parents’ house and the little room he had there, and hired himself out to a building site, and carried tuff, and the stones were large, heavier than bricks, and after work he worked again: he drew late into the night and past midnight and slept no more than four or five hours, and in the morning he could barely prise his eyes open, but he had to hurry back to the building site and carry stones once more, and there was no end to them.

Rudolf Khachatryan would never forget his friend and mentor. The spiritual image of the Maestro was engraved forever upon his noble heart. Nor would he forget the crushing weight of the tuff in hands intended for another purpose.

His friendship with a great artist and his labour at the building site formed the first true school—of art and of life—for the young master of drawing. His development was astonishingly swift: by eighteen, he was already taking part in professional exhibitions.

Like many young artists of our time, Rudolf Khachatryan did not escape the influence of the modernist schools. Cubism held him spellbound. He passed through Surrealism. He became obsessed with the so-called “forms in space.” Yet he overcame their influence. Love gave him the strength.

He met his future wife. When he conceived the idea of drawing her portrait, it was revealed to him that neither Cubism, nor Surrealism, nor forms in space would be of any use here; more than useless, they would be sacrilege. He understood that he must dissolve himself in his model, in the sacred presence embodied by this young woman.

Thus Rudolf Khachatryan returned to his beginnings, but transformed. Though essentially self-taught, he now commanded the art of drawing completely. The problem of achieving both outward and psychological likeness between drawing and model had ceased to exist for him: he resolved it with astonishing ease and freedom. The line sang beneath his hand. He was born a second time, emerging anew like Adam in the fresco of the Sistine Chapel. Rudolf Khachatryan had entered the mystery of the three-dimensional world’s spiritual nature. He knew with certainty that the life of the Nike of Samothrace in sculpture was carried forward in the painting of Leonardo da Vinci through its overwhelming spirituality and unmistakable three-dimensionality.

The artist who worships the human spirit dies in the finished picture, only to rise again in the new work just begun. One must lose oneself in nature, in the model, to attain a new and higher plane in art. Whoever loses himself shall find himself.

This is Rudolf Khachatryan’s unwavering belief.

* * *

What is his medium?

Sometimes it is paper and pencil—silverpoint or graphite. More often it is a large panel coated with polished levkas (traditional gesso ground), on which the artist draws in sepia or sanguine.

Levkas expands the possibilities of drawing to an astonishing degree. The work ceases to look like graphic art in the conventional sense. It becomes three-dimensional through the properties of levkas as a light-bearing element. This is Rudolf Khachatryan’s discovery, born of an artist’s search for a new field in which to exercise his extraordinary gift.

Levkas existed before him, of course, but no one before Rudolf Khachatryan had used it in this way. In his hands it acquired a new nature, a new expressive language. For years he searched for a material that would be his alone, and at last he found it. Levkas began to sound anew. This became Rudolf Khachatryan’s monochrome polyphony.

Like Fellini, the celebrated film director, in Juliet of the Spirits, he arrays his models in fanciful garments, turbans, and hats. In this, Rudolf Khachatryan is kin to Rembrandt and the painters of the High Renaissance. There is Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (1973), in which we see her pregnant, a wreath of flowers on her head and flowers in her hand, her lips parted slightly and her gaze turned inward, toward the depths of her soul. There is the portrait Jemma (1976), the sitter wearing a broad-brimmed hat tied with a scarf. Judith (1976), too, wears a fantastical headdress. Then there are Woman in a Turban (1976) and Armenian Sphinx (1978). Yet here as elsewhere Rudolf Khachatryan remains wholly independent, intensely individual. No trace of imitation can be found; his resemblance to the old masters is only outward.

Rudolf Khachatryan’s drawing on levkas, whether in sepia or sanguine, is essentially monochrome, yet it produces an unexpected impression of polychromy. The reason is that the snow-white levkas seems to shine from within. Light shimmers and glances between the strokes, working a miracle: it seems to lead the viewer into the cave where Aladdin, in The Thousand and One Nights, discovered his many-coloured treasure. Everyone who has seen Rudolf Khachatryan’s work has felt this magnificent effect keenly; I felt it too, in his Moscow studio. I am not an artist. The whiteness of the levkas… Yet one can never quite grasp what other means create this effect. Something miraculous lies hidden here.

And what of the artist’s early works, the drawings on paper from the time “before levkas”? Take Nadya (1973). The subtlety and latent tenderness of the chaste, impeccably precise pencil inspire reverence before an image of maidenly nudity in its purest form. Such works resemble nature reflected in water; this makes them akin to the feminine, silvery, aqueous element of Lermontov’s poetry, of his Taman.

* * *

All Rudolf Khachatryan’s works leave an indelible impression of beauty made flesh. His devotion to his native land and people finds generous expression in his portraits of figures from Armenian culture and of those whom some, with a certain lordly condescension, call “ordinary people.” Yet how often they prove to be anything but ordinary; indeed, there are no “ordinary people” in the world.

I would call the animating spirit of Rudolf Khachatryan’s “graphic art” heroic. So the celebrated painters of old portrayed their sitters in fresco and on canvas, passing freely into the innermost substance of their souls. Following the artist, I too wish to believe in the heroism of humankind.

Rudolf Khachatryan drew more than Armenians. He cast every sitter in a heroic light: in his portraits they appear as legendary heroines and knights of the spirit—which, at their finest, human beings truly are, if only one looks closely enough.

Rudolf Khachatryan’s credo is his affirmation of the human being’s exalted spiritual power and rightful place at the centre of the world. Here lies the essential strength of this outstanding master—not merely in the commanding authority of his draftsmanship, to which one yields so gladly.

* * *

It is above all in Rudolf Khachatryan’s large works on levkas that the virile courage of his art declares itself. With sovereign force, he compels the model to serve his avowal of faith in art. Stroke by stroke, he accomplishes the feat for which his arduous life has trained him, surrounding the model with the luminous air born of the whiteness of his favoured material.

I visited the artist’s studio and looked through a great many of his works. Before me passed, one after another, girls and women whose inner being possessed a beauty that insistently demanded homage; heroic devotees, armoured in singularity and nobility.

Rudolf Khachatryan’s still lifes are rendered down to the smallest detail, whether their subjects are flowers, fish, or bulbs of onion. Like the portraits, they too are miracles of art. Here the image has arisen from the very being of the objects and phenomena around us; because they are dear and necessary to human beings, the artist grants them such grateful, searching attention, such truthfulness, such exhaustive fullness of detail.

The creative feat of a lofty human soul, as we see it in Rudolf Khachatryan’s service to art, is humanist in its very nature. The artist believes that nothing in the world is mightier than the human spirit, nothing more precious than fragile human life and the soaring promise of humanity’s brightest hopes.