Rudolf Khachatryan

A member of the 1960s generation of Armenian artists, Rudolf Khachatryan intertwined the classical and the modern. His creative journey began with academic drawing studies featuring chiaroscuro modeling, and his oeuvre would encompass a broad spectrum of forms and means of expression: traditional and modernist approaches to drawing and painting, three-dimensional objects, and experimentation with the plane and space.

Khachatryan had a difficult childhood, taking place against the backdrop of World War II and the postwar years. His artistic talents revealed themselves at the tender age of three. Although lacking any systematic general or art education, early on he began depicting motifs from the world around him in an accurate and precise manner. Khachatryan enrolled in art school in Yerevan in 1951, but was expelled only a few months later for disagreeing with its pedagogy.

The following year, however, marked the start of Khachatryan’s real education when he first visited the Yerevan studio of Yervand Kochar, a luminary of the Armenian and international avant-gardes and guru of the Armenian modernists. The encounter was nothing less than revelatory for the young artist, helping determine his future path. Kochar would go on to become Khachatryan’s mentor and lifelong friend.

Three years later, the eighteen-year-old Khachatryan took part in his first all-republican exhibition. In 1960, he joined the Artists’ Union of the      USSR, and, starting in the early 1960s, his work began to be acquired by the State Gallery of Armenia (now the National Gallery of Armenia) as well as by various art collectors.

Khachatryan’s artistic development was marked by a series of phases, each different from the next. The 1960s, when he was living and working in Yerevan, saw the artist absorbing an eclectic array of influences. On the one hand, he devoted himself to studying the world’s artistic heritage, above all the old masters of the Renaissance. On the other, he looked to his contemporary context, the modernist art of the twentieth century.

Khachatryan set himself unique artistic goals and was constantly searching, experimenting extensively. His activity of the 1960s is crucial for understanding the artist’s life and creative quest. The works he created during this period are distinguished by their use of open-form techniques, which lent ambiguity and depth to the images and meanings of his intentionally “unfinished” works of this decade.

The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection features two graphic works from this period: Untitled (1962, ZAM, D03436) and Kiss (1969, ZAM, D08573). Untitled depicts a seated female figure, seemingly in several states at once. The composition is built on the figure’s interaction with the background planes, including a dark, rectangular element and another silhouette. The drawing is executed with line and hatching. The line is loose, not definitively enclosing the form. The hatching creates tonal patches and surface rhythm, rather than detailed, volumetric modeling. The technique emphasizes the evolving nature of the image: the figure is not “finished” but is in the process of formation, transforming the work into a plastic reflection on movement and form. In its plastic approach, the work is close to modernist graphics with elements of cubism and surrealism, in which the body is treated not as a single, cohesive motif, but as a collection of interconnected planes, lines, and states.

Kiss features two human figures—one male and one female—rendered in a generalized and stylized manner. The bodies are broken up into geometric volumes and the forms assembled from dense, rounded masses. The contours are clear, the forms dense. The volume is modeled through tonal gradations characteristic of lithography. Space is minimally defined: the figures exist outside of a specific interior, as autonomous plastic forms. This feature connects the work to the modernist tradition, particularly the cubist reworking of the human body.

During Khachatryan’s Moscow phase, 1971–89, the artist focused on classical drawing. He produced still lifes as well as portraits of famous figures from his immediate circle (linguist Vyacheslav Ivanov, art historian Henrik Igityan, writer Inna Olevskaya, and Mikhail Gorbachev, among others) and self-portraits: works of exceptional draftsmanship and expressiveness, in which every detail is rendered with the utmost precision and which vividly convey their sitters’ individuality. Khachatryan frequently transformed his models in a theatrical manner, outfitting them in magnificent costumes and headgear from various historical periods (Laura, 1978; Caravan-bashi, 1982; Moko, 1982).

In the late 1970s, Khachatryan expanded his graphic repertoire, embracing the use of cardboard, sepia, and red chalk, in conjunction with pen and brush. In the early 1980s, the artist developed an original technique of drawing on levkas, whose technical qualities made it conducive to achieving the illusion of three-dimensionality; while the use of sepia and red chalk produced the effect of watercolor, endowing his graphic art with a novel quality—painterliness. As levkas is a form of gesso associated with icon painting, his use of this material imbues these works with a sense of deep spirituality.

The 1990s were a period of metamorphoses in Khachatryan’s work. During these years, he produced the series Open Forms, Reliefs, Shadow Theater, Minimalism, Dual Unity, Dual State, Images and Shadows, The Manifestation of an Image, Mythologemes, Conjunctions, and Metamorphoses (all 1989–90).

His self-titled Multidimensional object period (all late 1990s–early 2000s) encompasses the series Projections, Relief in Space, Multiplication of Images, Consonance, Transformations, Conjunctions, Sculpture, Painting in Space, and Open Form. Here, he created three-dimensional objects—much like Kochar’s “painting in space,” yet in his own manner, with his own imagery, but which, unlike his mentor’s, are monochrome. He also turned to the language of contemporary painting, using restless blotches and lines, overflowing paint, and a monochrome palette to create infinitely mutating forms and numerous permutations thereof.

Khachatryan’s intertwining of classical drawing with modernist experimentation culminated in what the artist termed his “multidimensional” works—a continuation of his interest in the “multidimensional object”—in which the artist cut plywood or copper plates into shapes resembling the human body, connected at right angles and moving or rotating about axles. These works embodied a sense of constant movement, endless transformation, the search for time, birth and death, light and darkness, creation and destruction: in a word, life without beginning or end.

During his career, Khachatryan was the recipient of various awards and accolades: a bronze medal at the International Exhibition in Vienna in 1959, first prize from the Ministry of Culture of Armenia in 1969 for his portrait of Armenian composer and founder of the Armenian school of composition Komitas (Soghomon Soghomonyan), Honored Artist of the Armenian SSR in 1977, Peoples’ Artist of the Armenian SSR in 1984, Order of Friendship (Russia) in 1997, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Arts in 2002, the Movses Khorenatsi Medal State Award of the Republic of Armenia in 2003, and the gold medal of the European Society “Franz Kafka,” also in 2003.

In 1988, the director Karen Mesyan made a documentary on the artist, titled Self-Portrait.

The artist’s works are held in the Yerevan Museum of Modern Art (Yerevan, Armenia), the National Gallery of Armenia (Yerevan, Armenia), the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia), the State Museum of Oriental Art (Moscow, Russia), the ART4 Museum (Moscow, Russia), the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (New Brunswick, NJ, USA), and private collections.

Lusine Naghdalyan

Translated from Russian by Ilya Bernstein