Armenian art in museums abroad

About this selection

Most of the paintings are by Hovhannes (Ivan) Aivazovsky (1817–1900), the marine painter born in Feodosia to an Armenian family, whose works are now held across Europe, Turkey, the Caucasus and the United States. One of them, Chaos (1841), hangs in the Mekhitarist monastery on San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice, which is itself a centre of Armenian learning.

The portraits by Hakob Hovnatanyan and Jan Klemens Minasowicz, and the paintings by Sarkis Katchadourian and Arsène Chabanian, show Armenian artists working in Persia, Poland and the Armenian diaspora.

The manuscripts are among the best-known Armenian illuminated books outside the country. The Gospels painted by T'oros Roslin in 1262 (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore) is a landmark of Cilician Armenian illumination. The Chester Beatty library in Dublin and the Wellcome Collection in London also hold Armenian Gospel books, one of them illuminated by Martiros Khizants'i in 1596.

A few items come from Europeana, the European digital library, including more Aivazovsky seascapes from the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation and a carpet sent from the Armenian SSR to Estonia in 1950.

A group of works from the Mekhitarist monastery on San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice shows Armenian history through Italian eyes: drawings by Giuliano Zasso (1833–1889) illustrating Movses Khorenatsi's history, and 18th-century paintings by Francesco Maggiotto and Francesco Zugno of St Mesrop Mashtots and St Gregory the Illuminator. They were published in the 2007 catalogue Հայոց պատմության էջեր (Pages of Armenian History), after being shown in Yerevan in 2005–2006.

Fourteen etchings and drypoints by Edgar Chahine (1874–1947), the Armenian printmaker who worked in Paris, come from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Albertina in Vienna.

The selection also includes ten paintings by Arshile Gorky (born Vostanik Adoian, c. 1904–1948), the Armenian-born pioneer of American abstract expressionism, from museums in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, St. Louis, Baltimore and Madrid.

Only works with a free or public-domain image are shown, so the selection is partial. Gorky died in 1948, so his work is in the public domain in Armenia and the EU, but some of it may still be protected in the United States; the licence note on each work says so. Works by Martiros Saryan (died 1972) are still under copyright and are not reproduced.