Рудольф Хачатрян Rudolf Khachatryan ՌՈՒՏՈԼՖ ԽԱՉԱՏՐԵԱՆ

Translated from Armenian

[Editorial introduction:] Harutyun Nagulian, familiar to readers of "Bagin" through his creative writing, also possesses a cultivated knowledge of cinema and painting. The article he wrote about Sergei Parajanov, one of the Armenian giants of the cinema (No. 4), as well as the short piece below heralding the discovery of Rudolf Khachatryan in the field of painting, testify sufficiently to the soundness of the knowledge he has accumulated in these arts.

H. Nagulian has promised to contribute regular art chronicles to "Bagin" about artists of Armenia and the Diaspora.

The drawings by Rudolf Khachatryan reproduced below were provided to us by the artist himself and are being published for the first time.

We are speaking of one of the most talented painters of Armenia — one nourished by the roots of twenty-five years of artistic labour, who has found his own distinctive features and attained mastery: Rudolf Khachatryan.

In Rudolf Khachatryan's work the development of the traditional in Armenian painting has reached a contemporary way of thinking and feeling, and he has raised his painting to an international level. International in the sense that his style, depth and mastery — being entirely Armenian, being a true continuation of the Ingres-like mastery of Hovnatanyan and his school — can arouse the interest of a person of any nationality as a new word and a new feeling in art.

The Armenian classics who formed the axis of our Tiflis painting, in the person of Hovnatanyan, should perhaps be regarded as a bridge from the miniaturists to our own era.

Europe had Giotto, then the Renaissance, then Ingres, then the Romantics and, finally, the moderns — original artists, each with a brilliance of his own.

Armenian painting had only the miniature and Tiflis. The rest, in our view, does not correspond to the distinctive development of the art of a civilized nation.

Today, perhaps, is our renaissance — a renaissance that fills in the periods left blank, fills them and, by a kind of subconscious detour, brings our painting up to the present-day standards of art (norme).

In this process and in this spirit, our painting over the last hundred years counts only a few Armenian figures, in Armenia or outside it (Surenyants, Bashinjaghyan, Kojoyan, Saryan, Gorky, Orakian and Kochar), who have a true spiritual bond with the history of our painting. We certainly have many other talented painters, but they are different, and we see no connection between them and the miniaturists, between them and Hovnatanyan, between them and Komitas, however much the Armenian land, its mountains and churches may have been the object of their interest and their brushes.

Our painting, in all its stylistic diversity, is today living through a renaissance. It has a shared rhythm in harmony with the peaks of our art history [the original has the unclear phrase “բլուր չինած գագաթներուն,” literally “peaks that made a hill”] — whether miniaturists, a khachkar master toiling on foreign soil, a carpet-weaver or the builder of a church dome.

Rudolf Khachatryan is one of the most important figures of this renaissance.

His still life is not limited or framed by a socialist or capitalist understanding, by progressive or decadent labels.

His faces, his people, his mothers and sons, his eyes and girls are not this or that kind of eyes or mothers — not smiling socialist mothers or sad capitalist eyes — but simply mothers, eyes and sons.

There is such subtle mastery of style in Rudolf Khachatryan's works that in the forms and lines of a horse and a woman you can see the features of an image that has nothing to do with the woman or the horse. And the image itself has no body: it is a vision, a moving atmosphere, an abstract bond between you and the lines that has no title. In the head of Christ you can see a piece of a horse, a piece of Christ, a piece of Armenian piety, a piece of Narekatsi, and an artistic mastery that makes the work cease to be a head of Christ without suggesting a new title. It is what you feel and think.

Indeed, the most important point about our painting is precisely this: it has no punctuation of content. It is a beauty that creates content together with the viewer. With the miniaturists, for example, the Gospel subject (sujet) ceases to be evangelical, and each Christ acquires a different form, a different eye and a different meaning.

For Khachatryan what matters is the human. His lines have absorbed this feeling in a style of their own — whatever they may represent as drawing. In the end you arrive at art when you know how to give breath and life to colour and line.

In Rudolf Khachatryan's lines there is a contained outburst, outwardly calm and masterfully restrained within the delicacy of the lines. Yet it still overflows the frame, infects you and makes the works saturated with emotion.

There is no doubt that his artistic thinking is, so to speak, saturated with culture. This very often makes a work forced and artificial. But here it is not so, in the following sense:

When we look at the works in series, group by group, we see an ennobling of thought — a line of feeling and intellect that embraces four or five, sometimes ten works: a content that becomes whole through the force of several pictures that complete one another and strive to surpass one another. Here lies Khachatryan's intellectuality (intellectualité). A single thought has produced several works that subconsciously complement one another. So the ideas of a given period seem common to the pictures of that period. Such is the impression.

In this sense we do not look in Khachatryan's work for a feeling of human freedom or of beauty, or for manifestations of various noble emotions; we simply look for the human being, the beautiful, the spiritual [the original reads “ոգեղը”] and the composition of life, and for the abstract influence they exerted on the artist in a given period.

A selection of his graphic works. The series (made on stone, in an edition of 10) consists of 10 sheets, of which only seven are at our disposal. Seen together, all ten, for all the variety of their subjects, merge in their depth and meaning, and this is because together they represent a procession of horses, perhaps a gallop of horses, while individually one is Christ, another is R. Khachatryan himself, another is flight, another is the day — night and day — another is his wife, and in the end there is a subconscious and purely intellectual bond between the woman, himself, Christ, the day, the flights of the soul, and the everyday people who rush about like horses...

H. NAGULIAN

[Captions:] Night and Day (p. 60). The Kiss (p. 61). Self-Portrait (p. 62). The Head of Christ (p. 63). Woman (p. 64). Flight (p. 65).