The Armenian Frida Kahlo: On Mariam Aslamazyan’s 110th Anniversary

As is known, in the Western European painting of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (Post-Impressionism and Fauvism – Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse) to which Mariam Aslamazyan gravitated so strongly, a synthesis with Oriental artistic traditions and an emphasis on the pristine exotics was evinced. Bright, colorful decorativeness, flatness, and ornamentalism are not simply expressed in the transmission of ethnographic attributes, but also in the ornamentally ordered pictorial plane as a consequence of a special thinking, monumentality in the easel format, the predominance of pure decorative color and contrasting juxtaposition. It should be recognized that the artist, formed in the era of the total domination of Socialist Realism and the persecution of the “formalists,” was not just brave and self-sufficient, but infinitely faithful to her creative credo and the tenets of pure art, to carry them through her entire creative path. These tenets, as already was mentioned, Aslamazyan took from her teachers, and also were absorbed in the Moscow halls of the New Western Art of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. She drew on the rich traditions of painting of her native Armenia, and especially on the works of its patriarch Martiros Saryan.

Sometimes she conveys her native Armenian and also Russian motifs with an emphasis on ethnographic exotics. Her painted ceramics – a special field in the artist’s creations – can be attributed to the same range of works to which she first turned in 1958 and definitively became fond of. Decorative ceramics attained an unprecedented popularity in Armenia and other Soviet republics in the 1960s, in connection with the fashion for “ethno-modern.” As A. Sarabyanov correctly noted, “the living sense of modernity in conjunction with the national tradition is typical for Mariam Aslamazyan’s ceramics.”

Mariam Aslamazyan is a multi-genre artist. Virtually all major genres of painting – portrait, landscape, still life, thematic picture – have a certain place in her rich artistic legacy. Landscape is certainly the main genre in Armenian painting. Practically all studies on Mariam Aslamazyan’s work note the special role of Armenian nature as the main inspirer of the artist in her rich landscape painting.

The importance of still life in Mariam Aslamazyan’s painting legacy is not ignored by the researchers. And yet we must admit that this subject is inexhaustible and has not been fully covered yet. The artist’s aesthetic vision and worldview is being manifested in the still lifes with the greatest completeness and freedom: still life as a “small” genre gives her great opportunities for free form creation. Mariam Aslamazyan is rightfully considered the leading master of her time in the field of decorative and planar still life. Her depictions are not just a set of objects, located on the plane of the picture artistically and far from mimetic reproduction of nature. There are juicy fruits and bright flowers, gifts of the sunny Armenian land, copper ethnographic utensils, carpets with magic ornaments – symbols of national life or exotic Far Eastern masks (how can we not remember Saryan!). This is a special microcosm, built strictly tectonically by the artist in a harmonious wholeness. Here, each element is not just a “fruit,” a “vegetable,” a “plant,” a “drapery,” a “dish,” a “mask,” etc., but valuable parts of the universe with their own form and color. And the artist completely freely operates these forms as with abstract units, collecting them into an indivisible construction.

Perhaps the crown of Mariam Aslamazyan’s still life genre and the quintessence of what has been said can be considered her “Peppers: Flame” – a sensual, “scorching” picture, striking with simplicity and at the same time, with the utmost veracity. Collected in a planar carpet and ornamental composition, Aslamazyan’s peppers cease to be “vegetables,” but rather turn into certain hieroglyphs.

The artist’s orientalist, in some ways, even “masculine” look is being seen in her beautiful female models in a vivid ornamental entourage. Looking at them, of course, we remember Gauguin’s Tahitian women. The artist admitted that she loves to draw women, which perhaps explains her courage and fineness. But I especially want to mention the images of the famous artist Lavinia Bazhbeuk-Melikyan, her self-portraits and joint portraits with her sister Yeranuhi Aslamazyan. Through these portraits she seems to comprehend herself and her colleagues as free creators – strong-willed, talented and infinitely beautiful, and their unchanged silver necklaces, national costumes and ethnographic attributes accentuate the identity of the model even more. It is not accidental that she was often called the Armenian Frida Kahlo.

To paraphrase the well-known definition of Russian female avant-garde artists, we would add to the image of Mariam Aslamazyan the “Amazon of the Sixties” – one of the brightest stars in their magnificent galaxy. It was the boom of the sixties that gave an all-time first of national consciousness against which “national modernism” was formed, and the role of women in these processes was great. But Mariam Aslamazian, even taking into account her social activity as an emancipated Soviet woman, was able to remain faithful to the aesthetic understanding of reality.