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Martiros Saryan |
By Vera Razdolskaya |
| Parkstone Press, Bournemouth, England, 1998, pp 176, 114 color illustrations, $40, hardcover. |
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| Artists have always flocked to Italy and France to paint; Armenia has never been a hot spot on the Grand Tour. But to the Russian-trained artist Martiros Saryan, son of Armenian settlers, it gave purpose to his life and work, drawing him back from abstraction. In Parkstone's recent release, Vera Razdolskaya paints a complete portrait of the man and his work. An examination of an intense colorist like Saryan would not be complete without plenty of color illustrations, and the book, part of Parkstone's "Great Painters" series, provides 114 color illustrations as well as 42 black-and-white photographs, many of the artist and his family and friends. Razdolskaya, a doctor of art history and professor at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in St Petersburg, Russia, writes that Saryan was a dominant figure in Twentieth Century Russian art who later in life became devoted to his homeland, Armenia. Not only did he live there for the last half of his life, but Saryan, a Russian-trained artist, helped to reconstruct Armenian culture for future generations organizing museums and art colleges. Early on, Saryan was caught up in the Symbolist movement, garnering much attention to himself. Then he honed his skills as a colorist, growing more abstract until 1923, when he turned to his homeland for inspiration. Not only did he paint landscapes of the countryside, but he executed portraits and during World War II turned to political subject matter. Razdolskaya, a leading specialist on Western European art, has produced an informative book on one of the artists who ushered in the Twentieth Century with innovation.
- By Amy D'Orio
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