Arrival and Recovery in Yerevan.
The journey to Yerevan from Georgia was beautiful and as beauty is what I look for in travel I was pleased to see so much of it in this small capital city. Even on my unsteady walk to the local shop – I passed dazzling gardens, perfumed blossoms on low hanging trees, creative murals. I couldn’t wait to get out and explore further.
My plan was to get to the National Gallery before leaving. It happened on my last day. Before then I had seen the art that was in the streets – sculptures like Melancholy by the famous Armenian artist Yervand Kochar – and cheeky statues like one of a postman outside a small post office in the town. Art abounds in Yerevan. The gallery itself is an impressive building and overlooks public works of fountains and beautifully landscaped gardens. It has five floors filled with paintings … and, as I usually do, I took the elevator to the top floor and worked down.
What with all the walking between exhibits and taking the stairs down, viewing a large gallery is quite a work-out. It’s also good exercise for the imagination. I don’t know if I was influenced by a short TV film I saw as a teenager called, ‘Escape Route’ (it was part of the ‘Night Gallery’ series by Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame,) but I like to imagine being inside a painting or to see the scene from the painter’s view. In Armenia – a painting called, ‘Summer House in Zaolsha’ by Marc Chagall – took me to rural Belarus and I spent a pleasant few moments smelling the scented air.
The Small Large Gallery.
The gallery doesn’t hold the same allure as others in capital cities – The Louvre in Paris or the Museo de Prado in Madrid for instance – but Armenia is a small and little visited country. As someone who is not comfortable with crowds and has no wish to visit somewhere that you ‘have’ to visit, I was happy enough. I’ve had my Mona Lisa moment – a glimpse through the coats and hats of other tourists. In contrast I went to see the little known second most famous smile in art, that of the Portrait of an Unknown Sailor (Ritratto di Ignoto Marinaio) by Antonello da Messina – which is housed in a little art gallery in Cefalu, Sicily. I was able to spend some minutes alone with him so we could share smiles.
In this National Gallery – there are works by artists well-known in the west as well as a fair number of Russian and Soviet artists. They are mixed together, I couldn’t see any obvious way of ordering them, except by date – but I always delight in the haphazardness of it all. I also wondered what their lives were like. How easy was it to be an artist under Stalin, or to paint during a bombing campaign or siege? Being creative when your life is crumbling around you – shows how important the creative outlet is. I remember being so moved by the story of Matisse not being able to hold a brush anymore – so he moved on to cut-outs so he could continue in his art, or much more recently the way Tracey Emin is continuing to make art despite bowel and bladder problems which make my illness seem like a walk in the gallery. (See this recent article in the Guardian here.)
Beauty as Restoration.
After my difficulties I was looking for that sense of peace that creativity brings. The opposite of destruction, which is why I try to avoid museums and even art works which depict acts of violence – unless they are to show that war and its legacy is wrong. In Armenia I did go to the genocide exhibition and looked at some of the horrors depicted there – so this for me was an opposite, a chance to celebrate the good in humankind.
I have to admit – at the end of my visit, I had the ending of Mussorgsky’s, ‘Pictures at an exhibition’ sounding in my head. Where he really feels he is an emperor riding through the great gate of Kiev – a gate which was never built. The cityscape of Yerevan does exist and will remain with me as I remember recovery in a beautiful gallery in a creative land.
