The Brooklyn Rail

While Armenian art is often framed through its medieval achievements—underscored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2018–19 exhibition Armenia!—its twentieth-century production remains underexamined. This is true for multiple reasons: it is particularly overshadowed by the 1915–16 genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, the resulting diaspora, and the Soviet and post-Soviet regimes that dispersed communities, deepening cultural fragmentation. Emigration waves both before and after these events, along with persistent political instability further hindered the consolidation of a twentieth-century Armenian art history. Drawing on the museum’s Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, the current exhibition at the Zimmerli Art Museum, curated by Lilit Sargsyan, Armen Yesayants, and Julia Tulovsky, proposes a selection of works from the 1960s through the early 1990s that navigates the porous boundaries between “official” and “unofficial” art.

Nonconformist (or “unofficial”) art, meaning work produced outside the state system, is too often conflated with Russia and Eastern Europe during the Soviet era. Yet Norton Dodge deliberately extended his scope to the USSR’s peripheries, including the Baltics and the South Caucasus, as evidenced by a 2022 exhibition on Georgian art at the Zimmerli Art Museum. Dodge, an American economist, began traveling to the Soviet Union in the post-Stalin era and ultimately amassed more than 25,000 works from across the republics. Much of this collecting happened when exporting was viewed as smuggling and foreign nationals doing business faced real dangers—most starkly illustrated by the 1989 disappearance in Moscow of French-Armenian dealer and Dodge advisor Garig Basmadjian. In Soviet Armenia, where a commercial gallery system did not exist, acquisitions were typically made directly from artists or through informal networks. Dodge was among the few, alongside Armenian Sergei Djavadian and Germans Friedemann Stöckert and Peter Ludwig, to collect contemporary Armenian art.

As a Soviet republic from 1920 to 1991, Armenia had an official art system that was expected to conform to socialist realism, the doctrine instituted in the 1930s to advance communist ideology through accessible, partisan, and narrative forms. Armenia’s peripheral position—geographically distant from Moscow—and its deep national feelings generated distinctive attitudes parallel to socialist realism’s disciplines, as evidenced by the founding, in 1972 in Yerevan, of the Museum of Modern Art, the first and only institution of the sort in the USSR. While the label “dissent” accords with the nonconformist framework that shaped Dodge’s collecting, the exhibition complicates such binary categories. Rather than rehearse the heroic opposition between official and unofficial that long underwrote the marketing of Soviet nonconformist art, the curators propose a “topography” of dissent: a field of heterogeneous practices that oscillate between political ambiguity and deliberately apolitical refusals—arguably the most incisive resistance within a culture saturated by the political instrumentalization of art and everyday life.

Some works convey an existential anxiety, as does Ruben Adalyan’s 1981 headless nude from the series “Melancholy” or Hagop Hagopyan’s austere monochrome canvases that evoke the desolate tones of the Armenian landscape. These stand in contrast to the lush colorism of Martiros Saryan’s and Minas Avetisyan’s idealized Armenia. Hagopyan’s No to the Neutron Bomb! (1977) was initially conceived as a critique of the Soviet order—garments emptied of bodies evoke a faceless crowd lurching forward like the living dead, shaped by a totalizing society in which the individual is obliterated in favor of collectivism. He then reframed the painting, through its title, as an antiwar statement, a theme officially endorsed by the Soviet state that enabled the work’s public exhibition in a Cold War context. Both the painting and artist exemplify the ambiguities of dissent in the Armenian context: despite his deliberate refusal to conform to socialist realism’s political optimism, Hagopyan would be named a “people’s artist.”

Within the Soviet framework, Armenian national identity was further complicated by a dispersed community across Yerevan, Tbilisi, and Moscow and by waves of repatriation in the 1940s–60s that intensified cultural hybridization, blurring the already complex cultural geography of a nation situated at the peripheries of both Western and Eastern worlds. Figures such as Armine Galentz, born in Syria and trained in Lebanon, epitomize this synthesis: her art reflects a return to Armenian motifs coupled with stylistic languages shaped by the Western avant-garde.

A recurrent mode of dissent in twentieth-century Armenian art was a deliberate refusal of overt politics in a culture that rendered nearly everything political. Gayaneh Khachatryan’s Requiem. Bloody Moon (1975) exemplifies this stance. Its dreamlike, surreal imagery—akin to the eclectic, folkloric world of another Tbilisi-born Armenian, the filmmaker Sergei Parajanov—conjures a floating world of fairytale figures whose reverie can tip into haunted vision. A parallel nonconformist current centered on the formalism long distrusted as a Western, bourgeois import antithetical to socialist messaging. In Armenia, this impulse took on renewed force as abstraction, sporadic in the 1960s and ’70s, more directional in the 1980s. The legacy of the Armenian artist and genocide survivor Arshile Gorky (born Vosdanig Adoian) proved decisive, encouraging a lyrical, expressionist abstraction rather than the geometric Constructivism of early Soviet avant-gardes. Works by Seyran Khatlamajyan and Vigen Tadevosyan reflect this inheritance and, in turn, serve as conduits for a younger generation.

The exhibition’s chronology culminates with the 3rd Floor group, often cited as Armenia’s first contemporary art movement. Emerging amid perestroika, the group initially repurposed semiofficial spaces for exhibiting. Its founding show—organized by Arman Grigoryan with Kiki and critic Nazareth Karoyan—occupied the third-floor conference hall of Yerevan’s Artists’ Union building. Less a program of overt political protest than a reclamation of autonomy, 3rd Floor embodied a form of dissidence intrinsic to the perestroika moment: the dissolution of both inherited Soviet and Armenian cultural orthodoxies in favor of plural, experimental practices and a generational switch. Echoing the late-Soviet ideological and stylistic postmodern eclecticism, the group presented a Pop-inflected current (exemplified by Grigoryan, Karine Matsakyan, or as earlier, by Edward Enfiajyan) and a commitment to abstraction (represented by Kiki, Armén Rotch, and Vahan Rumelyan, among others) and other styles. Both stylistic tendencies privileged individual freedom over programmatic politics, articulating distinct formal refusals of Soviet reality. The shared impulse of 3rd Floor was to break with the past and imagine new worlds—an impulse that could also take heterodox spiritual form, as in Achot Achot’s provocative interest in apocryphal Christianity that challenged both Soviet atheism and dogmatic strands of the Armenian Church.

One hopes that the exhibition, by decentering both Western and Soviet narratives, catalyzes sustained scholarship on Armenian art (the promised website update—with biographical entries for each artist—will be a welcome first step in addressing this gap) as a tool against cultural erasure.