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STREET AT EVENING

STREET AT EVENING

34 by 47cm., 13½ by 18½in.

signed in Cyrillic l.r.

tempera on board

PROVENANCE

The Collection of Garik Basmadjian;
Thence by descent

EXHIBITED

Moscow, Eighth Exhibition of Paintings by the Union of Russian Artists, 1910;
St. Petersburg, Eighth Exhibition of Paintings by the Union of Russian Artists, 1911;
Moscow, Russian Landscape in the 19th and 20th centuries, Central House of Artists, October - December 1955;
Darmstadt, Martiros Sarian, Mathildenhohe, November - December 1986 (ill. Ex. Cat, p.89 plate 25);
Moscow, Exhibition of Fine Art of the 16th and 20th Centuries from the Collection of G.Basmadjan, State Tretyakov Gallery, 5 July - 7 August 1988 (ill. Ex. Cat.);
Leningrad, Exhibition of Fine Art of the 16th and 20th Centuries from the Collection of G.Basmadjan, The Hermitage, 25 August - 25 September 1988 (ill. Ex. Cat.);

LITERATURE

M.Saryan: Selected Works, Moscow: Sovetsky khudozhnik, 1983, plate 35;
M.Saryan, From My Life, Moscow: 1985, p.94, plate 32:

NOTE

Sarayan is one of Armenia's most important 20^th century painters. Street at Evening, a work of museum quality, is a superlative example of Sarayan's art remaining in private hands. The artist was schooled in Moscow, later exhibiting there alongside his most talented Russian peers, and it can be argued that he also occupies a significant position in the artistic renaissance in Moscow in the years preceding the Revolution.

His works are found in both major Russian and Armenian Museum collections. High standards in art education, access to latest trends from Europe and proximity to patronage all acted as a magnet for painters living in remote parts of the Russian empire, or neighbouring countries from the mid 19^th century onwards. Russian Art is rarely wholly European, not simply because of its indebtedness to Orthodoxy, but also for its albeit passive role as a cultural gateway to and from the East and South.

Whereas there was a trend in European art, following the example of Paul Gauguin, to escape to far flung places to eschew incipient modernity, some of the artists working in Moscow already crossed major cultural boundaries. Sarayan's southern sensibilities provided a rich source of inspiration which lend his landscapes a unique power. As Voloshin commented in 1913, "Although the art of Sarayan depicts the East, he is not an Orientalist and this accounts for his originality and importance. He bears some similarities to Romantic painters, yet his relationship to his subject matter is completely different to that of an Orientalist. He is himself a child of the East, uprooted from his country, attending a European school, living in a Northern city. [...] Therefore in his art you do not see the curiosity of the traveller or the collector's love of ethnographic novelty which you see in oriental art. p.p.55-56, A.A. Kamenski, Sh. G. Khachatrian, O Sarayanye, Erevan, 1980.

Saryan studied under Valentin Serov and Konstantin Korovin at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1904-9. His works from this period demonstrate a confident assimilation of Blue Rose symbolism, and were exhibited at the most important group shows, but they lack originality. The mature artist he was to become quickly evolved during a trip he made to the Middle East from 1910-12. The work he produced there, in a milieu in which he clearly felt at home, marked a radical departure from his student years, and sets the tone for his mature oeuvre as a whole. The offered lot was produced in this period of artistic originality and discovery.

In his memoirs he describes this path to maturity, from his stirrings of an almost mystical commune with and boyish reverence for nature, to the desire to conquer its real essence in the most direct way possible. Finally: "I was looking for simpler, more basic ways of representing form and using paint to recreate the essence of reality. In general my aim was to use the simplest means possible, not to pile detail upon detail, and to dispense with all half tones. [...]. Apart from this my goal was to understand the fundamental principles of realism." (p. ibid).

This new, original voice is one dominated by vibrant colour, not the primary colours much employed in Impressionist and fauve painting, but colours evocative of the East: the blue of lapis lazuli, mustard, orange, sandstone, whitewashed walls and the white cotton of headscarves and veils. The offered lot is one of a small group of works in tempera from 1910-11 which can be seen as some of the most powerful of his entire oeuvre. In these works colour is applied in blocks, brushstrokes are only either invisible or in some places broad, as if an accent. Simplicity is fundamental: form and colour interplay and mimic the play of sun and shade in nature.

His preferred medium in this period is tempera on card, which produced the vibrancy in colour he sought, yet could not quite achieve with the thicker, more opaque qualities of oil. His use of blue in particular is striking and lends him comparison with his Russian contemporary Nicholas Roerich. But it also links back to the work of the Russian symbolists, for whom the colour blue played a defining role.

The offered lot was painted in Constantinople and relates closely to Street at Midday (alternatively referred to in literature as Midday in Constantinople) in the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery. According to S. Khachaturian, director of The Sarayan Museum in Yerevan, "Street at Evening" is undoubtedly one of the best works by Saryan...This work can be seen as a continuation of "Midday in Constantinople", [...] painted the same day [...] "Street at Evening seems stronger". Ex cat Vystavka khudozhestvennykh proizvedenii XVI-XX vekov iz sobraniya G. Basmadjiana, Paris, 1988. In Constantinople the mid-day sun beats down from above spreading light like an upwards arrow into the centre of the canvas; in the offered lot it dramatically cuts the painting in two. We can see where day ends and night begins. In Mid-day, the street is populated with those going about their daily chores, seeking shelter in the shade; in Evening the street is empty except for a lone woman about to disappear from view. These works are radical and harmonious in equal measure and nowhere in his later paintings does he achieve this dynamic quite so successfully.