Minas Avetisyan

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Minas Avetisyan (Armenian: Մինաս Ավետիսյան, July 20, 1928 — 1975) was a painter.

He was born in the Armenian village of Djadjur. Leningrad, with its Academy of Fine Arts and its Hermitage, played a significant role in his becoming an artist. Avetisian always remembers with gratitude his teachers, Johannson, Zaitsev and Khudiakov: they never hindered the natural expression of his own artistic individuality.

Both in his student years and after graduating from the Academy, Avetisian traveled widely around Armenia, eagerly seeking out historical monuments; he studied the Armenian miniature and the works of the greatest Armenian artists, above all, Saryan's.

Self Portrait, 1960

His real emergence as an artist was at the "Exhibition of Five" in Yerevan (1962), where he revealed himself as a mature painter with a bright individuality. Numerous specialists and visitors to the exhibition thought highly of his work. In the presence of a large group of visitors and representatives of the press, the French artist Jean Lurcat exclaimed: "This artist rivals France's best painters".

He follows the national traditions in painting, yet he never resorts to slavish imitation or stylization. But he shows great freedom and originality in his use of means of expression found in the work of ancient miniaturists: bright sonorous colors, coordination of pictorial tension throughout the entire surface of the canvas, rhythmic arrangement of lines, the static quality of representation, and the absence of perspective.

And this is quite natural: like any artist of great talent, Avetisian has achieved an understanding of reality not so much through the study of the work of other masters, as through his own perception and interpretation of life.

Avetisian is one of those Armenian artists who put the color back into painting. "Put the color back into painting"-such an expression might seem strange, but if you go into the Matenadaran and look through the yellowed pages of the ancient manuscripts there, you will understand what is meant: there on the parchment, in all their splendor, shine the bright, sonorous colors- blue, yellow, green, red... Color plays an enormous role in the work of Avetisian. Some of his pictures are unequaled in contemporary Armenian painting in the intensity of their colors.

A few of Avetisian's main canvases are devoted to the past of his people. It was by pure chance that the artist's parents escaped the 1915 massacre. Not far from Djadjur several thousands of people were killed in a ravine. The generation which saw these terrible events with their own eyes is still alive. Often on winter evenings, sitting by the hearth of his village home the artist heard the accounts of eye-witnesses. Perhaps this is why a dramatic note is perceptible in many of his works. Laconicism, reserve and thoughtfulness are characteristic for the artist too. The dramatic quality in Minas Avetisyan's history paintings is a tacit tribute to the memory of the dead.

To the most significant canvases of this cycle belongs the picture "The Road: A Recollection of My Parents" (1965-1967). Unfortunately, like many of his other works, it perished in the 1972 fire.

In the night of the January 1, 1972, while the artist was in Djadjur with his family, his Yerevan studio was burnt down together with a large portion of his best canvases selected for a one-man show.

After the profound shock inflicted on Avetisian by the burning down of his studio, which for a time brought his creative activity to a halt, the artist actively engaged in work and produced a series of significant canvases, among them "Meditation" (1972), displayed at the republic's exhibition, and "Baking Lavash" (1972) and other.

Minas Avetisian belongs to those modern Armenian artists who prove, as did Martiros Saryan in his time, that one can be useful to one's people, expressing its hopes, in all sorts of ways, but with one absolute condition—in a language worthy of art.