Martiros Saryan

Yesterday I visted the Martiros Saryan museum in Yerevan. The museum was empty, but had very helpful guides. To save energy/money they keep most of the lights off until folks come in to view Saryan's pieces. He was born in 1880 to Armenians from Ani (in current day Turkey), who had moved to Crimea. He trained in Moscow and moved to Armenia after the genocide to bring artistic life to a disenchanted people.

The museum holds many of his self portraits includeing him as a young man with bushy black eyebrows and fluffy black hair and then many paintings of him his old age. Saryan was known for his landscapes many of them capturing Egypt and Persia. The Soviet establishment had mixed feeling about him. Though he was a member of the Academy of artists of the USSR his patriotism was questioned in 1948 in the Soveit Art Journal for having an "Armenianized version of French bourgeois formalism.'

The below picture - "Ararat and the Arch of Charents" was painted in 1958.

In honor of Saryan, the city has built a statue for him. Keeping in his tradition of lovely landsapes, the weekends bring local artists who display easle upon easle of their paintings around the Saryan statue.