Keywords:
Minas Avetisyan, Martiros Saryan, fauvism, expressionism, national artistic traditions, supranational worldview, Armenian fresco, Armenian easel painting, Armenian landscape, Armenian portrait, Armenian genre scene, associative-symbolic imagery, monumentality of the image
To cite this article
Steklova I.A., Khachaturyan G.A.
National and Supranational Origins in Minas Avetisyan's Painting. // Theory and History of Art.
2024.
N 1/2,
p.190–208
The research object within the framework of this article is the works of easel and monumental painting by Minas Avetisyan. The subject of the research is the artistic construction regularities of plots, themes, images of this painting in specific spatial, linear-rhythmic and light-tonal peculiarities. The aim is to determine the formal and substantive essence of Avetisyan's style in the circumstances of its formation and impact on his contemporaries, which continues to this day. In the formation of the style, the influence of the medieval frescoes and manuscripts traditions and Martiros Saryan's personal innovations, in which the fascination with French Fauvism was sublimated, is emphasised. It follows the traditions traditions and the innovations that the artist's evolution is traced, as well as the expression metamorphosis of patriotic, religious and philosophical themes in Armenian painting in the 20th century.
The comparison of the images on differently dated paintings is carried out in the methodology of semantic and formal-compositional analysis. As a comparison result, it is concluded that Minas Avetisyan's style is characterised by the modelling of simplified, expressively stylised forms in sharp light-tonal contrasts, saturated with epic drama <...>. First and foremost, it demonstrates national world-understanding stable priorities; secondly, of the supranational humanistic world-understanding. It is shown that Avetisyan's exceptional aesthetic sensitivity and outstanding scale of personality allowed him to organically combine the former and the latter, to become a kind of guide-educator for a multitude of inquisitive, truth-seeking viewers, to contribute to the fact that the various arts of Armenia are recognised almost immediately all over the world, and are perceived as an integral iconographic and symbolic-associative phenomenon.
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