Art and IDENTITY, part 2

East was often divided not through geopolitical perspective, but from the cultural one: seen as homogeneously Islamic, it was represented by the Western gaze as radically traditional, wild, and regressive. This was especially exaggerated amid the ongoing cholera pandemic, which created tension between people, mostly marginalizing travelers or immigrants.

In this period, the disease became associated with outsiders within the society, as immigrants and travelers often carried cholera from infected locales.

But this context and ongoing events did not define Sarian`s world: he was seeing something different in the East, often referring to its historical past which was the source of its ideologies and civilizations. His point of interest wasn`t the East created by the Western gaze, but the East which gave birth to diversities in cultures that were now seen as opposed to one another.

In 1913, a Russian magazine “Apollon” published an article about Sarian by Maximillian Voloshin. The artist himself saw it as one of the best articles written about him and his so-called “orientalism”, noting that Sarian was of Eastern roots, so his depiction of the East is nothing more than an act of spiritual homecoming.

Sarian often notes that he sees himself as a “national painter”, which contradicts the comparison of him to “orientalists,” given by art critics. This only shows the difference in approaches. Sarian was identifying himself through his “oriental” origin, while for critics the point of identification was his school and cultural identity which was seen as “Western” or “Russian”.

With the interest in his roots and desire for finding new artistic gestures, Sarian happened to align with the fate of modern Armenia more than any other artist in its history.

As a result of the Balkan wars of 1912-1913, military conflicts depriving the Ottoman Empire of nearly all its remaining territory in Europe, and the threat of losing more territories, the Young Turks, which previously led their country towards westernization and reforms, switched from their more liberal, progressivist ideology towards nationalistic. This led to the oppression of ethnic and national minorities in the Ottoman Empire. Safeguarding its territorial wholeness from the possible provincial independence movement and the interference by European powers, the government of the Ottoman Empire started to systematically abuse its various ethnic and religious groups including Assyrians, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, Bulgarians, Christian Arabs, and Armenians. This flow of events led to 1915, a year when the forced starvation of Christians on Mount Lebanon started – this event was known as the “Great Famine of Mount Lebanon” (1915–1918).

In the same year, Ottoman Armenians were forcibly deported, with their properties confiscated. The context of the chaos caused by the arising WWI was instigating the roughness of these events, which were officially limited to “deportations”, but actually ended with massacres and ethnic cleansing.

Similar massacres of Armenians (1915–1923), Greeks (1914–1922), and Assyrians (1914–1924) started being referred to as “Genocides”. The term, combining the Greek word genos | γένο, meaning "family, tribe, race", and the Latin word cide | cīdium, "killing", was coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in late 1944.

The news of the massacres spread among the Armenians all over the world. Sarian was among many intellectuals and cultural workers who arrived in Eastern Armenia, offering voluntary help to the refugees.

This is what Sarian wrote in his notes. In his archival sketches, one special sketch from 1915 was found, depicting the woman described and her sons. But in the sketch, they are all alive and walk hugging each other.
Sarian`s friends had sent him to Tbilisi to heal a “deep mental disorder” as Sarian mentions in his letters. He kept silent for a while, not doing anything. But this pause ended with a work depicting red flowers all over the canvas. The artist doesn't hide his method of dealing with reality: it's an escape to Nature that acts as a dialogue with the higher forces, channeling something which is far more stable and persistent than politics, power structures, and greed. Nature for him is the circulation of life, the infinity he was seeking to bring back from the old cultures.

This reveals Sarian`s positivistic views toward life, which he was refusing to see as dark or ugly. These views were often criticized by his contemporaries, and especially the audience, who was accusing him of ignorance of the events, shown in his bright colors and his escape to nature.

“There is no death” was the ending of this thought, which deprived of the context, would seem idealistic. But due to Sarian’s high interest in ancient civilizations, it was more than a legit quote from a person who saw himself as a continuation of the historical legacies.

One of Sarian`s most controversial and large-scale works is titled “Egyptian masks.” It was created in 1915 and it is a great example of how Sarian dissolved the symbolistic approach, bringing it to his new artistic practices.

The format of the composition resembles an Armenian rug “գորգ”. The whole composition rests on the static of the three masks, gazing towards the viewer, while the lower part looks messy and unstable with fruits scattered all over the space, thrown out of the vase. The carefully curated chaos of the elements fills the composition with a sense of disturbance. Masks are looking at the viewer, senselessly. The presence of the Egyptian statue of Osiris, the God of the Underworld symbolizing death and resurrection, goes back to the thought that Sarian was depicting the events which took place in 1915 in his own symbolic way. The composition was using the masks in their most common sense. The death masks were for the soul to be able to recognize the body, so it can return to it.

The idea he visualized wasn't understood, as it received many criticisms.

While before the 1915 events, Sarian`s interest in the cultural codes of Armenia was triggered by personal motives, after these, he completely dissolved his creative identity in his nationality, serving the national interests and needs.

Sarian`s focus was not on the loss of Armenians, but the gain. This gain was the First Armenian Republic, which was established in 1918, finally giving many Armenians opportunities to have a Homeland that now also became a country.

Unfortunately, the First Republic of Armenia didn't have a long life. The First Republic, along with the Republic of Mountainous Armenia which repelled the Soviet invasion until July 1921, ceased to exist as an independent state, superseded by the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic that became part of the Soviet Union in 1922.

He continues on his artistic route, also making his contribution to Armenian cultural development in general. He organizes the Museum of Archaeology, Ethnography, and Fine Arts, and involves himself in the creation of the Yerevan Art College and Artist Union.

Sarian used his deep research knowledge of the East, its anatomy of gestures, shapes, and colors to build a new visual idea of a mountainous country, which many were seeing as the Caucasus or East, but which is often represented as a space for crossroads of cultures through his works.

He perfectly understood the importance of this outlook, which could push together the interrupted and diverse cultural legacy of the Armenian nation into a scrupulously curated identity that could fit the new country.

Though the mountain was always historically linked to Armenians as a nation, noting that this old civilization developed its existence near it, many saw using this symbol and connecting it to modern-day Armenia as a daring act, since the mountain was not within its borders geopolitically.

Sarian`s ideas of unity between human and natural visual forms were aimed to celebrate the joy of continuity and circulation of life, which he thought were the main ideas of every ancient culture.