Martiros Saryan

"Life is an island. People come out of the sea, cross the island, and return to the sea. But this short life is long and beautiful. In getting to know nature man exalts the wonder and beauty of life"
Martiros Saryan

Biography: Saryan was one of the plead of major cultural figures of Armenia at the turn of the century. His work, in common with the library contributions of O. Tumanian and A. Isaakian, those of T. Toramanian and A. Tamanian in architecture, and of Komitas in national music, set the standard of national art, and laid the foundations for its flowering in the Soviet period.

Hi was born in 1880 and dead in 1972. In the course of his long life, Saryan experienced much sorrow and much joy. He witnessed the two World Wars and the tragedy of genocide in Armenia in 1915. He suffered the destruction of many of his paintings, and the death of his beloved son.

Recalling his own background, Saryan said, "My ancestors had come to the banks of the river Don from the Crimea, and to the Crimea from Ani, the capital of medieval Armenia. I was born into a family which followed the old patriarchal customs. There were nine children and I was the seventh." I do not know when the artist was born in me. It was probably in those days when I used to listen to my parents' stories about our mountainous, enchanted country, when I used to run as a small boy over the land around our home, and was filled with joy at the many colors of the butterflies, insects and flowers. Color, light and day-dreaming - those are what fired me".

The Fancies and Dreams present a synthesis of the aesthetic aims which the artist set himself at that time. He was striving to represent nature symbolically as a "living entity". The works of this period, which Saryan began to show at Moscow exhibitions, were executed mainly in watercolors and tempera. They include: "Flowering Mountains", "The Comet"," By the sea: Sphinx", "Two Panthers", "Under the Pomegranate", "At the Well on a Hot Day" and others.

A new stage in Saryan's work began in 1909. There is no longer anything fantastic in the subjects of such paintings as "Self-portrait" (two versions), "In the Grove at Sambek", "Morning at Stavrino", "Hyenas", or "Burning Heat with a Dog Running". In "Morning at Stavrino", an actual place is depicted, the yard of his father's farm, yet the canvas breathes the mystery of awakening nature.

Among his celebrated pictures belonging to the beginning of the 1910s are "A Street at Noon: Constantinople, Dogs of Constantinople, Date-palm in Egypt, Night Landscape, Still-life with Grapes, Flowers of Kalaki, Still-life with Masks, Flowers of the East". Each of these works, with its brilliant, joyous colors, overcomes the viewer with a sensation of the joy of life.

Landscape always remained a leading aspect of Saryan's art. But beginning with the 1920s landscape became more synthetic monumental in character. The artist creates a generalized image of Armenia. In the paintings "Armenia", "Mountains", "Midday Stillness", "Erevan", "Mount Aragats", an effect of spatial depth is achieved through a balanced arrangement of saturated color patches. The absolute harmony of color and light arouses in the viewer a restful feeling, a deep sense of peace.

The artist brings to each of his works the most delicate shades of a mood, an intimate, lyrical mood in most cases. He composes cycles in which the meaning of the present and the eternal is philosophically explored. One such series consisting of seven landscapes, "My Homeland".

Saryan's work is not limited to his paintings in oil and -later -tempera: he also drew a great deal and painted in watercolors. His sketches from life are outstanding. Saryan was famous for his work in the field of book illustration. Particularly in the 1930s, he worked enthusiastically in graphics and did his wonderful illustrations to the works of Tumanian, Isaakian, Charents, and to the poem of Firdawsi, "Shah-Nameh", Saryan also worked in monumental painting and in the sphere of theatrical design.

To the end of his life he never lost his talent for work or the freshness of his vision. The vitality of Saryan's genuinely national art lies in its truth to the character of the artist's homeland, in its originality and its purely coloristic beauty. The master always managed to achieve a striking clarity and simplicity in the expression of complex ideas. His works are in no sense rationalistic; they are deeply emotional.
http://www.armsite.c...ainters/saryan/

Also visit http://vision.info.bg/saryan/ .

[ March 05, 2001: Message edited by: MJ ]

Martiros Saryan
By Vera Razdolskaya
Parkstone Press, Bournemouth, England, 1998, pp 176, 114 color illustrations, $40, hardcover.

Artists have always flocked to Italy and France to paint; Armenia has never been a hot spot on the Grand Tour. But to the Russian-trained artist Martiros Saryan, son of Armenian settlers, it gave purpose to his life and work, drawing him back from abstraction. In Parkstone's recent release, Vera Razdolskaya paints a complete portrait of the man and his work. An examination of an intense colorist like Saryan would not be complete without plenty of color illustrations, and the book, part of Parkstone's "Great Painters" series, provides 114 color illustrations as well as 42 black-and-white photographs, many of the artist and his family and friends. Razdolskaya, a doctor of art history and professor at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in St Petersburg, Russia, writes that Saryan was a dominant figure in Twentieth Century Russian art who later in life became devoted to his homeland, Armenia. Not only did he live there for the last half of his life, but Saryan, a Russian-trained artist, helped to reconstruct Armenian culture for future generations organizing museums and art colleges. Early on, Saryan was caught up in the Symbolist movement, garnering much attention to himself. Then he honed his skills as a colorist, growing more abstract until 1923, when he turned to his homeland for inspiration. Not only did he paint landscapes of the countryside, but he executed portraits and during World War II turned to political subject matter. Razdolskaya, a leading specialist on Western European art, has produced an informative book on one of the artists who ushered in the Twentieth Century with innovation.

- By Amy D'Orio
http://www.thebee.co.../books/mart.htm

40 dollars!! I paid 4 pounds for my copy last month (in a remaindered bookshop).


The pictures are very nicely reproduced, the text is a bit empty.

WOW. Cant ague with that quote.

A Isaaksian: Isaac Hayes Grandaddy! It cant be anyone else!!!