The established Saryan speaks of Saryan the student: “The study I painted in Vasnetsov’s class turned out quite well. Vasnetsov praised me and advised me to work regularly in his studio. But I did not.” “At other times, captivated by the body of a fair-skinned model and seeing how badly a student was painting, Korovin would take up the palette and brushes, exclaiming enthusiastically, ‘Milk, milk!…’ His brush struck the canvas with vigour; short strokes fell close beside one another. The colours came alive. …For the student, continuing his work became impossible.” “Levitan walked about, looking and making remarks. Coming up to me, he offered this advice: you cannot paint a still life with ochres; with ochres you can paint flesh. The observation was correct. I too understood that I could not continue working this way, yet for some reason the remark wounded my pride. I never set foot in Levitan’s studio again.”
“Levitan was a major master of Russian landscape painting.” “I decided that Serov and Korovin should be my teachers.” “The Moscow School of Painting was a splendid school.” “Korovin was a wonderful Russian Impressionist.” The wonderful French Impressionists had discovered a world of light and sun for the painting of the whole world, yet whenever one turned to reality, their techniques proved powerless to reveal one’s own feelings. Tumanyan’s keys open only Tumanyan’s world; the cadence of the Bible will rock only biblical content; the sole heir to Dostoevsky’s poetics is Dostoevsky’s own self. Schools of painting will teach you to paint, but they will never make you an artist; higher schools of literature will perfect your versification, but they will never teach you to record the rises and falls of your own heart. The student could not continue Korovin’s work, not because his hand was weak—all schools make the hands of gifted pupils firm and confident—but because it is impossible to forget yourself and become Korovin. In crying “Milk, milk!” Korovin reveals his attitude towards the very same model who, to the student, is by no means milk. To any camera she would be neither milk nor warm honey, but a model very much resembling herself: that is the unfeeling attitude of the camera’s cold eye. To each artist painting her she would be, besides her likeness to herself, his indifferent eye, his loving eye, his scornful, hating, compassionate, adoring, mocking, irritating, forgiving eye. My art is itself my perception of the world: “The observation was correct, but I never set foot in Levitan’s studio again.”
“Levitan was a major master of Russian landscape painting… A young painter had much to learn from him.” But Levitan was a master of the Russian landscape, while Saryan, restless on the threshold of art, was drawn to the homeland of his forebears.
“The greyish colours were far too poor to convey these riches on canvas. The school had given me literacy, but I needed a language of my own.” This is theory’s collision with reality, the impulse to discover the self. At these unavoidable encounters, the weak-willed retreat behind their own levitan and remain yet another unnecessary, out-of-place levitan; artists by vocation forge new weapons—Saryan says that much had to be acquired, and much relinquished—and become Saryan. How do they become him? They forge new weapons. But these are generalities. You want, very much want, to know the foothills of that ascent towards becoming Saryan. Neither the “Notes,” with their detailed explorations in the valleys of childhood, nor the introduction’s effort to draw a strained parallel between “Heaven Was in Labour” and Saryan’s art reveals those foothills; nor will future Saryan studies reveal them. “I always hit around it; I never hit the apple,” says Sherwood Anderson. “The luckiest, at best, hit close to the apple.” Art is an unending process of expressing oneself and, through that expression, coming to know oneself. Saryan seeks himself in the valleys of childhood, in nature, in his great love of art, in the precedence he gives art. These are noble things. Yet they do not unlock the secret of becoming Saryan.
“The Sphinx is one of the most inspired monuments ever created by humanity,” says Saryan. “It is difficult to imagine how and why this mysterious creature was born. Of course, scientifically, within an argument, it is an understandable creature. But in direct contemplation, in the immediate impression it makes, it draws one into a kind of dizziness, a mystery. Faith, the life of Egypt, a stage of history, the level of cultural development, and so on and so forth—all this is understandable. But psychologically! You cannot fully put yourself in the place of the Egyptian who lived when the Sphinx was being made, or who was himself its inspired creator.” So, even if you are Saryan, you cannot put yourself in the place of Saryan at the moment of creation to understand why a thing was painted this way rather than that. One must attain creative ecstasy, Saryan says: if it did not come in self-forgetfulness, if the elusive thing that makes art art did not come, afterwards no amount of force will help. “One thing is certain,” Saryan adds about the Sphinx. “This enormous creature exists on the earth and gazes unblinkingly towards the rising sun.” In other words, the inscrutable is not to be scrutinised; a thousand times, speaking of Saryan, people will ask why Saryan is great and answer: the inscrutable is not to be scrutinised.
Merely to find a foothold for the next step, let us venture a tentative supposition: perhaps Saryan is great because he is an artist to the very depths of his soul. “From the history of the past we inherit the artist’s pride.” He loves Constantinople because there he first found his own heat, melting lines and details, with the blue shadows of narrow streets and limp, glowing red dogs. “Tempera went well onto the cardboard and very quickly captured impressions—bright and colourful, saturated with warm tones”—and you feel the joy of an artist by blood. He loves Egypt because, a monumentalist by inclination, he sees a symphony of simple lines both in ancient Egyptian art and in the palm tree, the desert and the camel’s gait. He did not love Tehran because it was dusty during his stay, painting was impossible, and Tehran had become entangled in the earthen walls separating the harem from the world, in the folds of pantaloons and chadors. In the same way, Saryan’s deep love of his homeland is a love of art: Armenia is a great part of his art. Saryan’s patriotism is an arduous pilgrimage through world art towards Zvartnots and towards himself. Saryan has only one great friend—art—and lives in harmonious accord with it; he has only one enemy—the enemy of art, from the sugary fussiness of so-called Muslim art to the schoolmasters who mocked Andreas Ter-Marukyan, the first Armenian sculptor of modern times, on Yerevan’s English Boulevard. He hates his people’s executioner chiefly because he came, destroyed the magnificent synthetic art of Asia Minor, and put nothing in its place, synthetic or otherwise. And you see bitterness contract in the throat of this lyrical man and lyrical painter when the conversation turns to the ruined masterpiece of Ani and the mud-plastered village of Kharkov huddled beneath its walls. An abyss of six hundred years opened between this people’s impoverished present and its profoundly artistic past. A man afflicted with breathlessness leaned over this edge of the abyss, trying to haul out an entire sinking culture: in one lifetime he was doing the work of a hundred men over a hundred years. That man was Toros Toramanyan.
The unfading charm of masterpieces lies in their profound humanity. The philosopher Diogenes, searching for a human being with a lamp in broad daylight in a crowded marketplace—“A human being, a human being, give me a human being!”—will forever embody art’s aspiration: in the bad, a longing for the good; in the good, a longing for the perfect; through perfection, the impossibility of becoming divine. Art is love of humanity. Saryan’s art is his search for humanity. Saryan’s patriotism is the most logical extension of his love of humanity: he sought humanity and found a homeland; he searches the substance of his homeland and finds humanity. From the heights of an eighty-year life, the love of an entire nation, worldwide fame and the distinction of a Lenin Prize laureate, he cannot speak indulgently of that dead, winged illusion, “Art has no homeland.” Perhaps art has no homeland, but without a homeland art cannot be created. More than that: the arts create homelands. Russias gather, pile up and solidify around Tolstoys, while Peters the Great circle around Russias to keep them from scattering like raw clay. The leaders of the revolution were deeply imbued with this awareness; in Saryan’s book, Alexander Myasnikyan, who after Sovietisation considered his most important task to be bringing together the Armenian artistic forces scattered across the Caucasus, Russia and the world, to knead and fire the Armenian Soviet Republic. Myasnikyan did not miss his mark: Armenia, whose very existence had still been doubtful to the world yesterday, demonstrated through its painters at the Venetian exhibition the full-blooded presence of a strong, sinewy Armenia in this difficult world.
If we remain faithful to the myth, God moulded an Adam of clay who was incomplete, breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and Adam became perfect. Moulding a human being from clay belongs to the part of God’s composite image that is nature; bringing him to life with breath belongs to the part that is the artist. It can also be recast this way: God moulded a human being from clay, breathed his creative breath into his nostrils, and the clay became a human being. Yet this human being’s hand was no hand, his head no head, his heart no heart. The artist came and perfected God’s incomplete creation. What art has woven into the human being is incomparably more complex and difficult, deeper and more alive than what is granted from above. God bestows homelands of clay; the arts endow these clay homelands with nerve and feeling, accent and colour. Such is the primacy of the arts, and the artist’s pride, growing to gigantic proportions, must rise upon this indestructible pedestal.
“It turns out that art itself is a reality and possesses eternal value: it expresses eternity,” says Saryan. To create a high culture means to endow one’s homeland, if not with eternity, then at least with strength in its striving for eternity. This conviction gives rise to the eighty-year-old artist’s passion in a book that, by all logic, ought to have been a leisurely, languid account of laurels won, but is instead an incandescent statement: at one end, against admitting the artist to the building and enjoyment of the world merely “with the right of a consultative voice”; at the other, a demand for true art. The whole book is woven on the warp of this demand. “True art is the objectification of a true artist’s soul, its symbol-image” (Isahakyan); “Although Saryan depicts the East, he is not an Orientalist: he regards the East with a son’s feeling” (M. Voloshin)—Saryan quotes articles written about him, although the same thought appears more than once, more firmly formulated, in his own account. The master does this to emphasise still more clearly the only path of true art. Of his work “The Farmer,” which has not survived, Saryan writes: “Looking at scenes of peasant labour in the manner of an intellectual and describing them on paper or setting them down on canvas cannot produce the desired result.” Moreover, the book tells us on another occasion, it may have an effect entirely contrary to the one you intended. Here is how.
Shaken by the massacres of Armenians, Yeghishe Tadevosyan painted “The Midday Meal” and “Sermon to the Fanatics” and received a prize. “A year later, someone named Nahapetyan submitted a canvas on the same subject, but of poor quality. It was clear that the artist had not inwardly lived through the subject, but had taken his cue from Tadevosyan and invented it. …In one of Moscow’s tabloid newspapers, a Black Hundred journalist attacked Nahapetyan and, taking advantage of the occasion, wrote insulting things about the Armenian people as a whole.” A familiar, familiar story! In this way you can inspire disgust for collective-farm construction, Ara the Beautiful, the Armenian people, Stepan Shahumyan, the sunrise, the epic “Daredevils of Sasun,” Sevan, patriotism, repatriation, art, the word, the letter, parties, revolutions—for all, all sacred things—by offering your own emptiness, accompanied by the sound of lofty names, in place of art that soars. Your art is your attitude towards the world; your works of art are the vertebrae and ribs, the wing and flight of your philosophy. You cannot abuse the mere fact that you are talented to perform mental exercises today about General Andranik, tomorrow about a fawn, the day after about a Georgian woman, and then about storing fodder or the development of Armenia’s industry. Art is not “about” something: art is the offering to the world of your own self, filled with longing for the good. That is the central pillar of the “Notes.”
“Grakan Tert”, 6 January 1967.