The story behind Armenian surrealism

Art has an impact on society by changing people's attitudes, instilling values, and translating experiences across space and time. According to studies, art has an impact on one's fundamental sense of self.

Painting, sculpture, music, literature, and other forms of art are frequently regarded as the repository of a society's collective memory. What fact-based historical records cannot preserve is how it felt to exist in a specific place at a specific time.

The Surrealist Movement's History

Surrealism is a cultural movement that emerged in Europe following World War I, in which artists depicted disturbing, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. According to its leader, André Breton, the group's goal was to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality," or surreality. It created artworks in the fields of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media.

Surrealists from Armenia

Léon Tutundjian

Léon Tutundjian was born in the Anatolian town of Amasya. His mother taught primary school, and his father taught physics and chemistry. He instilled in Léon a love of science that would later serve as a source of inspiration.

His father, an accomplished violinist, taught him to play the violin, which he has done his entire life. He began painting when he was 14 years old and later studied ceramics at the Istanbul School of Fine Arts. When he was 17, he fled the Armenian genocide and sought refuge in an Armenian monastery on the island of San Lazzaro in Venice, where he continued his studies. As his sense of artistic vocation grew, he began to fantasise about visiting Paris, the capital of the arts. He moved to the city in 1924 and found work as a ceramics worker.

1924-1925

It wasn't long before he met fellow Armenian artist Ervand Kotchar and, through him, Georgian David Kakabadzé, their elder. These two artists would have a significant impact on Tutundjian's work, both in terms of plastic expression and by demonstrating the potential of certain techniques (airbrush painting, stamping on silk, and three-dimensional wall sculpture).

Tutundjian's early works are extremely diverse. He experiments with figurative art, cubism, and collage. However, his "language" is becoming more distinct, making his works easily identifiable.

He frequently "drowns" his precise and rigorous drawings in a coloured Tachism, a mixture of various paper oxidations. Soon, airbrush backgrounds appear in his gouaches and watercolours, which, when combined with clouds of points, allow him to create a poetic, unreal, perhaps "surreal" universe.

From 1926 Onwards

In 1926, he began to experiment with geometric and organic abstraction. His drawings in Indian ink are numerous and always flawlessly executed; he experiments with lines, half-moons, and circles, and his works, once again, are unlike those of other artists.

"Geometry is never rigid or strict; rather, it appears sensitive and dreamlike." All of these lines, verticals, and circles are hand drawn without the use of a ruler or compass; the lines vibrate. (Gladys Fabre, Tutundjian, Editions du Regard, Paris, 1994)

Around 1928

He began creating his "reliefs," three-dimensional mural sculptures, in 1928.

On a shoestring budget, he created works on a grey or black wooden base from iron domes, rods, tubes, and cylinders.

Tutundjian employs a limited vocabulary of shapes, frequently modular, in a variety of sizes and positions; he takes advantage of the positive and negative of inverted domes or the full and hollow of cylinders." The rhythm of circular volumes versus lines... (Gladys Fabre, id.)

The monumentality of his "reliefs" is easily visible despite their small size.

Tutundjian's involvement in the formation of the Concrete Art movement, as well as his works, would allow him to be noticed by his most prominent contemporaries and gain him access to several avant-garde artistic events in Europe.

Helion wrote about his friend Tutundjian: "The exhibition at the Bonaparte Gallery made a violent impression on the small world of people tormented by new art." His works were unlike anything known here. "I think I can testify to the admiration that artists who have since become very famous had for him at the time." We think of Giacometti, Arp, Calder, Miro, Van Doesbourg, etc. And the similarities between the works of these artists and those of Tutundjian are sometimes striking.

From the 1930s to 1959

Tutundjian left the Abstraction-Creation movement in 1932 and devoted himself entirely to surrealist figuration. In stark contrast to his earlier work, his new paintings are mostly brightly coloured and "filled" with a wide range of iconography.

Based on his technical mastery, he frequently employs the process of representing the painting within the painting, as did Magritte and De Chirico at the same time.

The Second World War, with its attendant suffering and horrors, tested the hierarchy of concerns; Tutundjian, despite being stateless, was mobilised but was soon wounded. When he returned, he concentrated on ceramics to support his family until the war's end.

Tutundjian saw the evolution towards surrealism as a natural progression and a necessity to return to being "more human," in a kind of symbolic and metaphysical synthesis.

He also attempts to retrace his steps by incorporating geometric period and Armenian landscapes into his contemporary surrealist work.

But adhering with difficulty to the dogmatism of surrealism's "popes," such as Breton, he was unable to integrate into the movement and thus found himself marginalised.

This was to have a significant and negative impact on his "career."

1959-1968

In 1959, after abandoning surrealism, he returned to abstraction.

He produced many drawings, often "pasteurised," on canvases until his death in 1968, as well as some reliefs, reviving his nonconformism and early sensitivity.

Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky (born April 15, 1904, near Van, Turkey; died July 21, 1948, in Sherman, Connecticut) was an American painter of Armenian descent who helped shape Abstract Expressionism. Gorky was born in 1904 in a small village on the Ottoman Empire's eastern border, originally named Vosdanig Adoian. He was the most influential figure in the transition from European abstract surrealism to American abstract expressionism.

He was able to convey to the audience both the painful childhood memories of the Armenian Genocide as well as the pleasant and nostalgic feelings he had for his lost homeland. His work is also significant because it so directly reflects the cultural and historical milieu of New York in the 1940s, when avant-garde artists from both the United States and Europe converged, as well as the postwar period in general, when existentialist philosophy reigned supreme. This philosophy proclaimed the absurdity of life while also urging humans to take responsibility for creating their meaning, which Gorky did by creating beauty out of personal tragedy.

Many of Gorky's works reflect the artist's traumatic past as a genocide survivor and his childhood memories of Armenia's exquisite beauty. Through the process of painting itself, Gorky could begin to resolve his largely tragic life by transforming real people and real objects remembered or present, into new realities, abstracted and controlled.

Gorky established the practice of naming his abstract compositions with titles that directly refer to specific objects and locations, thereby fusing objective reality and subjective feeling in his works.

Gorky's work is historically significant because it is the most important link between prewar European modern styles and the rise of Abstract Expressionism in America during the 1940s.

Samvel Budaghyan

He was born in the Soviet Union and believes that his upbringing influenced him to become an artist due to the restrictive nature of art at the time. Yes, there was a sort of art in the Soviet world, but it was very restrictive, killing creativity rather than fostering an open mindset. It was hindering the free flow of his philosophical mind, as it was only encouraging art in the form of statues to commemorate great people in Soviet history.

Indeed, there were several great historic figures that he wanted to address in his art, but sculpting the exact features of those people wasn’t enough for him.

He wanted to honour people for their achievements and contributions. And that’s how he started to become interested in surrealism. Some of his works are devoted to great artists, like Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, he has a work that represents Napoleon the Great and a work that celebrates the great achievements of Nikol Pashinyan, the new Prime Minister of Armenia.