What story does Armenia tell through its national gallery?
Visiting a town’s central market, main church, whatever gallery it might have, and any port, quickly reveals how its inhabitants shop, think about themselves, and who they’re most connected to. That’s as true of a big city like Moscow — where the central Okhotny Ryad shopping centre shows you immediately what lifestyle many Russians aspire to — as it is of a small one like, say, Italy’s Siena. It’s especially true of a capital city.
When I wandered around Yerevan’s National Gallery of Armenia, I asked myself what story it was telling. I pondered what the curators wanted to show about the passages of Armenian history, the art fashions from abroad that the country admired, and how the country’s artists had used its light, people, and topography to distinguish the country from its neighbours. I visited on a Sunday morning a little after the museum opened, and before the staff in their white lab coats had sat down to watch visitors. The gallery was empty enough to remind me of the time I had the National Museum of Fine Arts of Asuncion, Paraguay, opened just for me.
The gallery starts on the seventh floor with a small room of sculpture and applied art from antiquity, and several large rooms on Flemish and Renaissance painting from the 16th and 17th centuries. Think of images like the Interior of Antwerp Cathedral, 1638 by Peeter Neefs the Elder, and Sebastiano Ricci’s Adoration of the Shepherds, 1723. These made me wonder about the connections that the gallery wanted to make between Armenia and the great eras of Western painting. Showing foreign art is partly about giving a domestic audience the chance to see it, but it also seemed that to start one’s national art story in the same way as the main galleries in Western Europe, was to suggest a shared history —of common links in the modern era.
The next floor down was room after room on the influence of Russian culture. Paintings such as Levitsky’s Pavel I, 1770s; Shishkin’s In the Forest, 1864,; Kuindzhi’s Sunset in the Forest, 1878, shown; and Nesterov’s Three Elders, suggested a deep absorption of Russia’s depiction of itself, its imperial hierarchy, and how it had explored the Eurasian land mass. In Russian art it is hard to escape the sense of an imperial court often lost in the wild, enormous, hard-to-navigate lands to Moscow’s east and south. And while I was surprised by the quality of the imagery that had come from Russia, I could see little of Armenia and the Caucasus in it.
I was particularly struck by two Vasily Veraschagin paintings — The Return of Napoleon from the Petrovsky Palace to the Kremlin, which shows a key moment in Russian history; and Hindu Temple in Udaipur, India, 1874–1876, shown, which is one of many of Veraschagin’s depictions of Russia’s exploration of its imperial borders— as they unfold Russia’s 19th century history and how it came to affect its southern neighbours. Parts of modern day Armenia were first absorbed into the Russian Empire in the early 1800s, as Russia signed treaties with Persia and gained its treasured foothold in the Caucasus.
It’s hard to think of another way to show Russia’s apparent domination of Armenia than through its art. Shown in Moscow and St Petersburg, Veraschagin depicts Russian explorers spreading their civilisation. Seen in Yerevan, it’s about the start of another phase in which Armenia had to tolerate the ambitions of a powerful neighbour. To show it at the beginning of the national art story struck me as ceding a whole phase of one’s history to Russia’s imperial constructions. Given that the Western and Russian art is shown in the gallery long before the Armenian, I thought that I was being shown a story in which Armenia got its say only after the more powerful had had theirs.
The answer to the question of why the National Gallery of Armenia shows its art in the order it does, seems to be in how the gallery was founded. Its collection was started in 1921, between the establishment of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1920 and its official absorption into the USSR in 1922. Between 1924 and 1930 the gallery received a large collection of work from Moscow’s House of Armenian Culture, followed by paintings from the art galleries in St Petersburg. In short, the gallery was founded by Soviets and on the basis of Russian collecting.
Armenia starts to tell its own story on the fifth and fourth floors. And I could quickly see the themes that my Armenian friends have wanted to tell me about: Arshak Fetvadjian’s depictions of the ruins of Ani; Gevorg Bashinjagyan’s view of Ararat, 1912; Panos Terlemezian’s Tatev Monastery, 1929, shown; and Martitos Saryan’s portrait of Marshal Ivan Bagramyan, a commander in the Soviet army during WW2. It was only here that I felt I was being told a curated story and not a chronological one, that I was being invited to differentiate Armenia from the story of Western art or the dominance of Russia. I could start to see how Armenia understands itself as something more than its current borders; that its adoption of Christianity in 301 AD — long before the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD and Rome’s official adoption of the religion — gives Armenians a mental timeline that precedes the Renaissance and places the country in the first chapters of Western civilisation; that it contributed to, and didn’t just receive from, the Soviet Union; and that the country’s topography gives a sense of transcendent isolation to many of its churches.
Perhaps colour is the final part of the story that Armenia wanted to show through its national gallery: a country with a palette of orange, pink, sandstone, straw, and rocky brown. I’ve been drawn to the pastel colours of the stone used for Yerevan’s municipal buildings, and how the landscape outside the capital seems to hold warmth in the absence of trees during winter — just like Saryan’s, Armenia, 1923, shown, in fact.
