Gevork Bashindjagyan (1857 - 1925)
Biography
Gevork Bashindjagyan was born on 16th September 1857, in Signakhi, a small town in eastern Georgia. Among the canvases by Yelena Akhvlediani, a Georgian painter, there is one depicting Signakhi as it was more than a hundred years ago. The picture shows an old fortress wall and a cluster of balconied houses with a splash of terracotta in the centre a small church with a slender bell-tower. The image of the town emerges from numerous drawings by Bashindjagyan himself. In 1957, a large group of artists, poets and journalists from all over the Soviet Union came to Signakhi to mark the centenary of Bashindjagyan's birth. "The serpentine road ascends steadily," wrote one of them, "and I keep wondering what made people build that town so high in the mountains. They must have sought safety up there and
perhaps they just loved their dwellings to be almost level with the highest peaks of the Caucasus.... It is a place of undisturbed tranquillity. The mountain air is cool and heady. "
The tender memories of the serene valley amid majestic mountains stayed with Bashindjagyan forever. Having become a recognized artist, he often revisited the valley of his childhood and painted it at sunrise and sunset, flooded with light at high noon and sombred by low-flying clouds.
Zachary Bashindjagyan, Gevork's father, was one of the best-educated men in Signakhi, although the life-style of his family did not differ much from the simple ways of other townsfolk. A warm-hearted outgoing man, he was endowed with extraordinary linguistic talents. Apart from his native Armenian, he was fluent in Russian, Georgian, and Persian, and was frequently engaged as a guide and interpreter by merchants travelling from Georgia across Armenia to Persia. Gayane Kulidjanova, his wife, taught her own children and those of her neighbours to read and write. All the members of Gevork's large family were avid readers and ardent lovers of poetry. His father was an amateur poet himself and took great pleasure in reciting his verse to his children. He wrote down his best poems in a thick notebook and Gevork illustrated them with scenes from fairy-tales and folk legends. The father's notebook was for many years reverently preserved by the son. Zachary Bashindjagyan died in 1872 during a trip to Persia. Gevork was fifteen at the time and studying at the local school. The family's eldest son, he had to help his mother earn a living and raise his brothers and sisters. He did all kinds of odd jobs and even painted shop signs for twenty kopecks apiece. Life was hard, but without bright moments like being given a box of watercolours for Christmas. And then there came a stroke of luck: Gevork's drawings were commended by none other than the Trustee of the Caucasian Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts. That decided his future. Soon the boy went to Tiflis, as Tbilisi was then called, and enrolled in an art school set up by the Society.
Tiflis in those days was a multinational, multilingual, bustling and colourful city, a melting pot for the numerous nationalities and ethnic groups of the Caucasus and Transcaucasia. It was also an important centre of trade and culture, where the East faced the West and where age-old customs and traditions coexisted with all kinds of new ideas and innovations. An ancient city with a wealth of medieval architecture, Tiflis was far ahead of many other big
cities of the Russian Empire in introducing such novelties as the stock exchange, the telephone, the elevator, and the horsecar which was soon superseded by the trolley car. In the 1870s and 1880s it became a city of glaring contrasts between the sumptuous life of the rich and the hand-to-mouth existence of the poor.
With its motley population, Tiflis at the end of the 19th century was a city of two vigorously interacting cultures — Georgian and Armenian. There were quite a few Russians and a sprinkling of Poles among its predominantly Georgian and Armenian intelligentsia. The city boasted a society of fine arts and a music lovers' society, and attracted large and growing numbers of young aspiring artists, musicians, and writers from all over the Caucasus and from other parts. In 1873, the two societies merged into the above-mentioned Caucasian Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts which did a great job in encouraging and fostering young talent.
With little interest on the part of the local rich and meagre financial aid from the state, the Society largely existed on donations coming from democratically-minded intellectuals. While studying at the Arts School, Bashindjagyan frequented the Caucasian Museum which exhibited fairly good collection of paintings. These included two canvases, View of St Petersburg and Aul Gunib by the famous Russian marine painter Aivazovsky who had donated them to the city of Tiflis after a very successful exhibition of his work there back in 1868. "Aivazovsky's paintings made an extremely strong and lasting impression on me," recalled Bashindjagyan many years later in his autobiography.5 We do not know if the youth was received in the homes of Tiflis's Armenian elite; if he was he may have seen some superb portraits by Hakop Hovnatanyan 6 and some excellent urban scenes by Stepanos Nersi-syan, the two top Armenian artists of the mid-19th century.
Bashindjagyan finished the Arts School with flying colours. His graduation certificate described him as a highly promising student who would do well to continue his studies at the Academy of Fine in St Petersburg.7 The young man decided to try his luck and left for the Russian capital in 1878. We know nothing about the paintings he presented to the Academy's Admission Committee. In fact, only two of his early works have survived to this day. Both are portraits. Both are seldom mentioned by Bashindjagyan's biographers and art critics who regard them as wholly unrepresentative of the artist's
mature work. They are quite right in that respect, yet the two pictures do deserve attention as works marked by sensitivity and dedication which are sure signs of intellectual and spiritual — if not artistic — maturity. Both — Portrait of Liza Yarovaya and Portrait of a Man — were produced in the same year of 1878, shortly before Bashindjagyan's departure for St Petersburg. Perhaps the most striking thing about them is their total dissimilarity. The family legend has it that Liza Yarovaya was Gevork's first and youthfully romantic love. The young lady is painted against a sombre background of dark brown hues which are in sharp contrast with her delicate luminous face and lovely hair. With its repose and clarity of form, the portrait would be a real work of art, were it not too static and austere. It betrays the natural timidity of a beginner whose concepts of beauty and harmony with regard to portraiture stem from rigid classical canons. The portrait of a man is a more independent and realistic work into which Bashin-djagyan clearly injected much of his own temperament and personality. The rough-hewn, wrinkled face of a simple labourer is starkly vivid in natural lighting. The shrewd and guarded look in his eyes gives the portrait a quiet, commanding power. Portrait of Liza Yarovaya is romantic and striking, but lacks depth. Portrait of a Man is quite straightforward. The former reflects Bashindjagyan's desire to portray beauty. The latter mirrors his desire to portray unadorned life. For many years, haunting, elusive, mysterious beauty clashed with and counterpointed naked reality in his work until the two warring elements eventually merged into a harmonious and powerfully stimulating whole which is the goal of all true art.
Never again did Bashindjagyan try to grasp the beauty of a human face, except for a number of sketches pencilled with sure, rapid strokes, for he became engrossed in contemplating and portraying a beauty which is infinite and everlasting — the beauty of Nature. It is notable, however, that his landscapes are never absolutely deserted, each bearing some heart-warming sign of human presence. A mountaineer's abode of roughly hewn stone, pink in the setting sun, with a stack of hay on its flat roof. A lakeshore late at night, with rippling water reflecting the light of a fisherman's lantern. A wisp of smoke rising from a distant campfire.... "A tilled field never looks deserted...".8 Bashingjagyan's excitement in the beauty of nature suffuses his paintings with a luminosity in which human personalities only figure occasionally as tiny dots of colour.
In the autumn of 1879, Bashindjagyan successfully passed the exacting entrance examinations and became a student of the St Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. The huge, impressive building on the Kadet-skaya Embankment, which he had long known from postcards, was now his Alma Mater where he was going to spend the following three and a half years. His life in St Petersburg was even harder than back home. He was granted "...a monthly allowance of eight roubles which was barely enough to pay for bread".9 In 1882, he was forced to become an external student; although his tuition was no longer free, he hoped to make a living by selling his paintings. Bashindjagyan's tutor was Mikhail Klodt, a man of democratic convictions and one of the organizers of what is known as the Peredvizhniki Group or Itinerant Exhibitions Society. Established in 1870, it set itself the task of popularizing art and bringing artists in touch with the people. An excellent graphic artist himself, Professor Klodt demanded neat, careful drawing from his students and was intolerant of hasty or perfunetory work. He encouraged sketching, but said emphatically time and again that a sketch must never be executed in a superficial manner. According to Klodt, a sketch required as much effort and concentration as the picture for which it was intended.
In the 1880s, the Peredvizhniki movement developed into a firmly established school of art which was concerned, above all, with depicting the life of ordinary people and exerted a strong and growing influence on the younger generation.
In those years, the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg played an important role in making artistic education accessible to at least a handful of young people belonging to various ethnic minorities. Three Armenians — Agathon Hovnatanyan, Stepanos Nersi-syan, and Hovanes Katanyan — had graduated before Bashindjagyan. His fellow students included three more Armenians — A. Shamshinyan, G. Gab-rielyan, and E. Magdesyan, as well as Kiriak Kostan-di from the Ukraine, Gigo Gabashvili from Georgia, Janis Rozentals from Latvia, Ferdinand Ruszczyc from Poland, and Kristian Raud from Estonia. Having found an excellent teacher of drawing and composition in Klodt, Bashindjagyan soon discovered other masters he wished to emulate. One of these was Arkhip Kuinji, the idol of the young artists in the early 1880s. Mikhail Nesterov, Bashindjagyan's fellow student who later on also became an outstanding artist, thus describes the impact of Kuinji's work: "That was the first art exhibition I had ever
been to, and what an exhibition it was! The finest in many years! Kuinji's Night in the Ukraine held me awe-struck and spellbound."10 Bashindjagyan himself spoke of Kuinji as "an artist with a magic touch". Later on, Kuinji's inspiring influence encouraged him to create such magnificent landscapes as Lake Sevan at Sunrise (1894) and Daryal Canyon at Night (1899), in which he reproduced the effects of sunshine and the play of misty shadows as no one had thought to do before.
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