Minas Avetisyan

Painter, graphic artist, and stage designer Minas Avetisyan (Minas) was a pioneering figure of Armenian national modernism of the 1960s, admired by fellow artists and progressive intellectuals and scientists including the biologist Armen Takhtadjan and the physicist Artem Alikhanian. His artistic career was fairly short but prolific, leaving behind a rich creative legacy that, in addition to artworks, includes articles and speeches published in Armenian and Russian periodicals. Minas’s oeuvre is populated with thoughtful, introspective figures, embodiments of the “contemplative man” that emerged in Soviet art in the 1960s.

In 1947, Minas enrolled in Terlemezyan Yerevan Fine Arts College (now Terlemezyan Yerevan State College of Fine Arts). In 1952, he entered the Yerevan State Fine Art and Theater Institute (now the Yerevan State Academy of Fine Art). In 1954, he transferred to the Ilya Repin State Institute of Fine Arts in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg Ilya Repin Academy of Arts), studying under Boris Ioganson (1893–1973), Leonid Khudyakov (1915–1995), and Alexander Zaitsev. The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection includes one of Minas’s works from his student years, Untitled (1951, ZAM, D10274), depicting an elderly peasant woman seated by a window. Untitled indicates that even at this early stage, the artist was adept at rendering the reflection of light.

In 1960, Minas returned to Yerevan. In 1962, he participated in the first important showing of nonconformist art in Armenia: the Exhibition of the Five. The exhibition featured five modernists of the 1960s (Lavinia Bazhbeuk-Melikyan, Arpenik Ghapantsyan, Alexander Grigoryan, and Henrik Siravyan, along with Minas). These artists belonged to the shestidesyatniki, people who were seeking alternatives to the official art of socialist realism. Also in 1962, Minas joined the Artists’ Union of the USSR. The following year, he was elected to the Presidium of the Artists’ Union of Armenia.

Initially, Minas painted landscape studies and academic portraits, executed in light and soft colors. Then, his style and manner of painting gradually changed: subtle color transitions gave way to intense, often dramatic brushwork and striking color contrasts. This new approach to color was closely connected to Armenian national traditions and early-twentieth-century European avant-garde movements such as fauvism and expressionism.

Minas’s artistic output was strongly influenced by Armenia’s natural beauty, monuments, and memorials, including khachkars (stone crosses). Among his landscapes, Geghard (1960, ZAM, D10273) occupies special importance. The painting celebrates the titular twelfth-century mountain monastery, surrounded by spectacular towering cliffs. A photograph of Minas taken in front of Geghard captures the monastery’s significance for the artist. With its vivid contrast of bright blue and red, Geghard exerts a strong emotional impact.

Scenes of the artist’s birthplace, the village of Jajur—its scenery and cultural monuments—feature heavily in Minas’s oeuvre. His works present village life not from a descriptive or narrative vantage, but as an expression of the eternal harmony between humankind and nature. In paintings such as Churning Butter (1964, National Gallery of Armenia), people engaged in everyday acts seem to be engaged in a cosmic creation or performing a sacred ritual and appear petrified, like monuments.

Minas’s body of work also includes many portraits of his contemporaries, members of the progressive intelligentsia of the 1960s–70s. Some of these are featured in the Dodge Collection, including Henrik Igityani dimankary [Portrait of Henrik Igityan] (n.d., ZAM, D10746), which depicts the first promoter of Minas’s art and the founder of the Yerevan Museum of Modern Art, and Tchartarapet Hakob Jivanyani dimankary [Portrait of the Architect Hakob Jivanyan] (1974, ZAM, D14460). These images also include Minas Avetisyani kiny [The Wife of Minas Avetisyan] (n.d., ZAM, D19481), a portrait of Gayane Mamajanyan (b. 1943), an Armenian painter whom Minas married in 1964 and who remained the artist’s partner and muse until his death.  Mamajanyan appears dreamy in this rendering, seated amid various artworks.

Avetisyan was closely involved in the theater. His work as a theater artist began in 1962, when he created stage designs for a series of ballets choreographed by Yevgeni Changa at the Alexander Spendiaryan National Academic Opera and Ballet Theater of Armenia: Puppet World based on Gioachino Rossini’s Magic Toyshop, Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, and George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. His stage designs for Aram Khachatryan’s ballet Gayane (1974) constitute his greatest achievement in this area.

In the 1970s, the artist took up mural painting. Between 1970 and 1974, Minas executed fourteen murals in various buildings in Gyumri and Yerevan and other regions. Dominated by shades of ocher, scarlet, and blue—the characteristic hues of the Minas palette—the murals depict various events from Armenian history as well as aspects of daily life.

In 1972, a fire broke out in Avetisyan’s studio in Yerevan, destroying many of his works. His studio was located across the street from the Armenian KGB headquarters—a fact that has prompted speculation as to the cause of the fire. The incident left the artist deeply shaken, but his friends, especially art critic Henrik Igityan, provided vital emotional support.

On February 16, 1975, Minas was hit by a car on one of the main streets of Yerevan; eight days later, at age forty-seven, he died of injuries he had sustained. A criminal case into the incident was launched; it concluded without a guilty plea—strongly suggesting that Minas’s death was no accident. From that point on, the artist achieved legendary status, associated with liberalism, artistic honesty, and noble spiritual values. Minas’s famous motto—“Lenin is not Apollo for me to paint him”—was apparently enough to kill him.

The artist received several posthumous accolades. In 1975, he was awarded the State Prize of Armenia and, in 1980, the Martiros Saryan Prize.

The Minas Avetisyan Museum, a branch of the National Gallery of Armenia, opened in Jajur on July 21, 1982. Six years later, it was destroyed in Armenia’s devastating earthquake of December 7, 1988. Rebuilt, it reopened seventeen years later to the day: December 7, 2005.

Minas’s works may be found in various museums—the National Gallery of Armenia (Yerevan), the Yerevan Museum of Modern Art, the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the State Museum of Oriental Art (Moscow), and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (New Brunswick, NJ)—as well as the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, the governing body of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

Haykush Sahakyan