«Հայ արվեստի ստեղծագործությունների սփյուռքը» - Լևոն ՉՈՒԳԱՍԶՅԱՆ

The article by Levon Chugaszyan, Doctor of Art History and Head of the UNESCO Chair of History and Theory of Armenian Art at Yerevan State University, is devoted to the problem of the dispersal of works of Armenian art throughout the world and to the tasks facing Armenian art history in studying, attributing, and bringing this heritage into scholarly circulation.

Introduction and Methodology

The author builds his argument on a comparison between the scale of the surviving Armenian artistic heritage and the extremely low level of its scholarly study. Quantitative benchmarks are provided: approximately 1,500–2,000 known miniaturists, to whom should be added the creators of khachkars, architects, jewelers, weaponsmiths, carpet makers, ceramicists, and artists of the last three hundred years who trained at European academies.

Key Thesis

The central thesis of the article is that the "diaspora" of Armenian works of art is a phenomenon that is simultaneously catastrophic and paradoxically productive:

The Genocide of 1915–1923 led to the destruction and plundering of an enormous number of monuments;
the dispersal of surviving works among museums and private collections around the world has nevertheless ensured better conditions for their preservation;
the involvement of specialists of various nationalities in the study of Armenian art has contributed to the recognition of its universal human significance.

Problem Areas

The author dwells in detail on several areas of crisis:

carpet weaving — the absence of a museum of Armenian carpets in Armenia itself, despite the existence of dozens of similar museums in Turkey and Azerbaijan, and the resistance of carpet dealers to the attribution of pieces as Armenian;
silverwork, in particular the Van school, which has remained outside the purview of Soviet art history;
institutional obstacles of the Soviet period — the absence of art history departments, ideological restraints on the study of religious and abstract art, and a shortage of personnel in the graduate program of the Institute of Arts of the Academy of Sciences.

The Fates of Artists and the Legacy of Emigration

A separate section is devoted to the biographies of Armenian artists of the post-Soviet era: the mass departure of masters from Armenia (103 members of the Union of Artists over twenty years), the dispersal of their heritage in the absence of heirs or their inability to systematize archives, the difficulties of gathering information about refugee artists in Central Asia and the post-Soviet space, compared with the relatively better situation regarding the diaspora in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the United States.

The Biographical Dictionary Project

Considerable attention is given to the description of the department's long-standing collaboration with the editorial board of the worldwide art dictionary "Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon" (later "Saur," now "De Gruyter"), begun in 1989: for 22 years, the Armenian side has been preparing biographical entries for inclusion in successive volumes of the publication, which covers artists, sculptors, and architects of all eras and peoples.

Conclusion

The key conclusion of the article is the necessity of systematically training scholarly personnel capable both of bringing into circulation the heritage preserved in Armenia and of mastering the foreign literature on Armenian art, since without international cooperation and institutional support, the task of fully studying the Armenian artistic heritage scattered throughout the world remains unattainable.