Yervand Kochar

Born in Tiflis (later renamed Tbilisi) in the Armenian diaspora, Yervand Kochar achieved prominence in interwar Paris and again in the 1960s, with his Yerevan studio acting as a locus of the city’s unofficial art community.

Between 1906 and 1918, Kochar studied at the Nersisyan School in Tiflis (Nersisyan Armenian Theological Seminary), concurrently attending classes in painting and sculpture at the Caucasus Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts. Born and raised in Tiflis’s Havlabar district, known as the Armenian Quarter, he absorbed the vibrancy of city life, the fusion of cultures, and the aesthetic qualities of local interiors and street life. The artist’s early impressions of life in Tiflis clearly informed his artistic vision and his choice of themes in the urban milieu.

In 1918, Kochar left Tiflis for Moscow, where he spent a year studying at the now-legendary VKhUTEMAS (Higher Art and Technical Studios), an important center of Russian avant-garde experimentation, oriented toward constructivist design and modernist architecture. His instructors included Pyotr Konchalovsky. The latter belonged to the avant-garde group Jack of Diamonds, many of whose members, including Konchalovsky, were followers of Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. Kochar’s year of study under Konchalovsky had a significant influence on the young painter’s formation, as seen in his early work’s embrace of Cézanne and cubism.

In 1919 and 1920, he was featured in the exhibitions of the Society of Georgian Artists. In 1921, the government of Soviet Georgia awarded him the title of professor of painting at VKhUTEMAS. Also in 1921, Kochar became a professor of painting in Tiflis. On the heels of his time in Moscow, his native city now felt provincial and somewhat stifling. Perhaps not surprisingly, his Moscow sojourn inspired a desire for further travel—this time, to Europe. In 1922, Kochar ended his Tiflis teaching stint and left for Venice; he remained there until the summer of 1923, at which point he moved to the world’s art capital, Paris, staying until 1936.

Kochar thrived in Paris. He quickly immersed himself in the city’s avant-garde culture and artistically came into his own. There, he invented a new form of plastic expression known as Painting in Space, which incorporated time as the fourth dimension. To create a Painting in Space, the artist vertically mounted metal sheets of painting at various angles, fastening them together on a rotating motor. This resulted in an object that combined sculpture and painting and could be viewed from all sides, while the rotation aspect added a fourth dimension: time. Painting in Space embodied the avant-garde quest of synthesizing four dimensions and the breakthrough of the plastic arts from plane to space, and from space to time. It was hailed by various art critics, including Waldemar George and Maurice Raynal, as a leading avant-garde achievement. [1]

He created his first Painting in Space in 1928. That year, the Galerie Van Leer in Paris organized a solo Kochar exhibition entitled Painting in Space. In 1936, Kochar was among the artists who signed the “Dimensionist Manifesto,” which heralded the advent of contemporary art centered on the notion of space-time; other signatories included leading avant-garde figures such as Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, and Vasily Kandinsky.

Along with the Van Leer exhibition, during his Paris sojourn, Kochar had several other solo exhibitions and participated in important international shows, including the Salon des Indépendants. He attracted the interest of prominent art critics, and articles on his work appeared in journals such as Revue du Vrai et du Beau and La Revue moderne. Waldemar George considered Kochar “one of the pioneers of modern art, who in a few years completely transformed conceptions about modern art and turned the world upside down. [2]

In 1936, amid an atmosphere of impending war, Kochar—who had not seen his family in over a decade—left Paris and returned to his homeland: Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia. He brought with him a sculptural portrait of Joseph Stalin he had created in Paris. Rendered in plaster, the portrait (that he was forced to destroy shortly thereafter) included Stalin’s facial features, but rendered them in a surrealist-absurdist vein. The year 1936 also witnessed the first of the infamous Moscow Show Trials. The next few decades were difficult ones for Kochar, who, amid the years of the Great Terror—among the most brutal periods of Stalin’s reign—and beyond, endured prison, persecution, and creative isolation.

The years of the Khrushchev Thaw saw a vast improvement in Kochar’s fortunes. Amid this era of cultural and political liberalization, Armenian artists of the 1960s who sought to break free from the shackles of socialist realism revered Kochar for his earlier experimental works such as Painting in Space. During the 1960s–70s, his studio in downtown Yerevan became a pilgrimage site for the progressive artistic intelligentsia, and he himself was seen as an embodiment of the blossoming of democratic culture.

 During his Yerevan period, Kochar created new versions of his motor-rotated Paintings in Space. He also created other important works: Ekstaz [Ecstasy] (1960) and Paterazmi arhavirqnery [Horrors of War] (1962, Kochar Museum, Yerevan), which is often compared to Picasso’s Guernica (1937). Kochar’s genius for sculpture also came to light at this time, as seen in his equestrian monument to David of Sassoun (1959), the titular hero of the Armenian epic poem, which is located in Yerevan’s railway station and became a symbol of the city, as well as such signature works as Melankholia [Melancholy] (1959, Kochar Museum, Yerevan) and Kibernetikayi musan [Muse of Cybernetics] (1972, Mergelyan Scientific Research Institute of Mathematical Machines, Yerevan). In these years, Kochar’s work was widely exhibited, and writings on his work by Armenian and Russian art critics including Poghos Haytayan, Henrik Igityan, and Alexander Kamensky appeared in the form of articles, catalogues, and monographs.

The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection features one work by Kochar from his Yerevan period: a sketch for a cover design of a 1964 issue of the journal Gitutyn ev tekhnika [Science and Technology] (D02902). The sketch exemplifies the style of geometric abstraction and constructivism on which Kochar’s art was nurtured. Its rotating circles also recall the simultanéiste works of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. The gears, bearings, and other mechanical parts of the abstract mechanism speak to Kochar’s interest in scientific technicism. The artist had another connection to the journal as well, having published an article on “New Wax Paints” in 1964, related to his revival of this ancient technique.

In 1956, Kochar was awarded the title of Honored Artist of the Armenian SSR, and in 1976, he was recognized as People’s Artist of the USSR. In 1984, the Yervand Kochar Museum was founded on the site of the artist’s studio in Yerevan. It, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, are the only institutions to preserve examples of Painting in Space.

His works may be found in various museums: the Yervand Kochar Museum (Yerevan, Armenia), the National Gallery of Armenia (Yerevan, Armenia), the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian (Lisbon, Portugal), the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia), the State Museum of Oriental Art (Moscow, Russia), and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (New Brunswick, NJ, US).

Karine Kochar

Translated from Russian by Ilya Bernstein

Notes :

1. de Keploc’h, Yves. “Les oeuvres de Ervand Kotchar au ‘Sacre du Printemps,’” in Revue du vrai et du beau, December 10, 1926.

2. Mole, Pierre. “Au Sacre du Printemps l’Exposition d’Ervand Kotchar,” in Les artistes d’aujourd’hui, December 15, 1926: 8.