On 17th July 1817, it was written in the register of birth at the local Armenian Church that “Hovhanness, Gevorg Aivazians son was born. The young Hovhanness revealed unique abilities for drawing and music, and he was capable at playing the violin. In particular, he became absorbed in copying etchings from a book about the struggle of the Greeks against the Ottoman Empire.
As a young boy, Aivazovsky received his primary education in an Armenian parish school.
Then he finished the Simferopol grammar school. With the help of the mayor of Feodosiya he started out for St. Petersburg and entered the Academy of Arts. There he was taught by the well-known landscape painter, Maxim Vorobyev; in battle class he was taught by A Zauerveid; and for a short period of time he was taught by the maritime artist, F. Tanner, who had been invited from France.
The masterliness of Aivazovsky developed very quickly. The works exhibited during the years of his studies aroused everybodys interest, including that of Pushkin, who spoke very approvingly about them. Pushkin had met Aivazovsky at one of the Academic exhibition, and he had made a deep impression on the young painter. In 1837, having finished a course of studies and having been awarded a golden medal for a first class honours degree, Aivazovsky obtained the right to go abroad, with a grant from the Academy. However, at first the young painter was sent to the Crimea to paint scenes of seafront cities. Sailing on capital ships, Aivazovsky became acquainted with the admirals, M. Lazarev, F. Litke, V. Kornilov, P. Nakhimov, and P. Panfilov, and acquired a deep belief in the power of the the Russian fleet, and consequently became an unsurpassed singer of its victories. The commission of the Academy was successfully carried out.
In 1840, Aivazovsky left for Italy. There he became acquainted with the shining figures of Russian literature, art and science – Nikolay Gogol, Alexander Ivanov, Botkin, Panaev. Simultaneously, the circle of his Armenian acquaintances widened.
From Venice, the young artist started out for Florence, then to Amalfi and Sorrento where he stayed in the house, which much earlier belonged to Torquato Tasso. Aivazovsky worked in Italy with great inspiration and created about fifty large paintings. They were exhibited in Naples and Rome, and generated a boom, which brought fame to the young painter. The critics wrote that nobody up until his time had depicted light, air and water so vividly and authentically. Chaos, by Aivazovsky, was honoured by being included in the permanent exposition of the Vatican Museum. Pope Gregory XVI gave the painter a gold medal. The English artist William Turner, renowned for his seascapes, devoted verses to Aivazovsky in which he called him a genius.
Aivazovsky also had great successs in Vinic and then in Paris, London, and Amsterdam. As the only representative of Russian art at the time, he took part in the International Exhibition organized in the Louvre, and he was the first foreign artist to become a knight of the Legion of Honour.
So, having left Russia to develop his talents, Aivazovsky returned to his motherland as a famous painter and a member of several academies. In St. Petersburg, the twenty-eight year-old master was honoured with several regalia; later, he was appointed artist to the Senior Naval Headquarters.
Immeasurable fame, easy circumstances and a royal palace did not attract the young academician. He decided to leave St. Petersburg forever and to make his home in his native city. This decision, which surprised everybody and which is very important for understanding the inner world of the painter and his strivings, had its own motives.
In Feodosia, the painter built a studio-house on the shore. Here, in a small provincial town, surrounded by his relatives and isolated from any cultural center. Aivazovsky created his own individual world, his small Motherland, with an atmosphere appropriate only to it, and which exists according to the laws which he himself, its master, established.
Following the dictates of his heart Aivazovsky created his own artistic language which was light and pure, as if the sea itself spoke it. This language gradually changed, the palette of the painter became lighter, and he instinctively approached plein air painting. However, his perception of the world never changed. He did not set new artistic tasks for himself; he did not take a pattern by his contemporaries and he had no interest in new developments. He for ever remained devoted to his imaginative visions and youthful fervour or, to be more exact, to the artistic lessons of the sea which he had already been given in childhood.
“The Sea is my life, said Aivazovsky, who passionately and, indeed, deified and worshipped this object of his indefatigable love. Having tremendous energy and application, he created about six thousand paintings over many decades. His creative work is like a sea encyclopedia. This encyclopedia lets us see in great detail all the states of the watery element (calm, gentle commotion, and storm, and gale, which makes impression that world is about to ruin). Here you can see the sea in any time of a day from beautiful sunrise to bewitching lunar night. And at any time of year you can count many colours of the sea waves, from transparent, almost colourless through all conceivable variants of light blue, blue, sky-blue up to rich blackness.
However, Aivazovsky thought that it was impossible to reproduce the sea as it is, and that is why he never painted directly from Nature, but relied only on his own imagination. The painter who saw his own life reflected in the water element did not depict a genuine sea, but created his own sea on the canvasses; he told his own tale of the sea, imposing on it his own feelings, moods and dreams. The fabulousness of his art was very explicitly noted by the great psychologist Dostoevsky in his article, The Exhibitions of 1860-1861 at the Academy of Art.
Thus for Aivazovsky, he had entered the realm of Modern Art, but he obeyed his own canons on the perception of the artistic world.
In the immense heritage of Aivazovsky, views of the stormy sea hold a very prominent position. As a rule, whilst depicting a boisterous sea, the painter also depicted people helping one another in the fight against it. “A man never gives in, a man will win – this motto of the painter reflected peoples optimism and life-endurance. The basis of Aivazovskys romanticism was twofold. It was firstly in his conviction that Man – a mote of the universe – had a great belief in Nature and in Life, and secondly and particularly, it lay in his undiminished belief in his nation, which struggled obdurately for its independence during the political storms of the 19th century. We cannot forget that allegory plays an important part in the painters work.
The charming and light atmosphere of the canvasses of Aivazovsky help one to perceive the dreaminess and emotionality of his art. The painter sees Man as a part of Nature. In his pictures, Man is depicted either against the background of a calm, placid sea, walking alone along the shore, or sitting in a boat looking dreamily at the light. It is not difficult to see self-portrait features in these fictitious, romantic characters of his pictures.
Light, as an idea, plays an important part in Aivazovskys creative work. An attentive observer feels that depicting the sea, clouds and atmosphere, the painter, in fact, depicts light, Light in his art is a symbol of life, hope and belief, a symbol of eternity. This is nothing other than a re-evaluation in his own fashion, of the idea of creative light, the light of cognition, which has a timeless and lasting tradition in Armenian culture, and which experienced a brilliant resurgence in the art of the later Armenian Masters.
This tradition was taken by Aivazovsky from mediaeval chants which praised the sunrise, and which he knew very well and heard constantly in Armenian churches. It is not accidental that, in speaking about his paintings he said. “The paintings in which the principal power is the light of the sun should be considered the best. In the later canvasses by Aivazovsky, the light emanates from an indiscernible source, tearing the darkness like a powerful aigrette.
One day, in conversation with Martiros Sarian, Ilya Edinburg asked if Aivazovskys nationality was reflected in his creative work. Sarian said, “No matter what awful storm we see in his picture, in the upper part of the canvas, through the accumulation of thunder-clouds, a ray of light always breaks through, and though it is thin and weak, it announces deliverance. It is the belief in this Light that the nation of Aivazovsky carried through the ages. It is this light which contains the meaning of all the storms depicted by Aivazovsky.
The completely original system of the picturesque seeing is appropriate for Aivazovsky. It removes his art out of the scopes of the canons, accepted in that time. You can see this feature in sometime extreme reserve, even abstract of the colour decisions of his pictures.
The passionate, penetrating and poetic work of Aivazovsky, brought into Russian painting fresh breath. The painter became one of the most acknowledged representatives of the Russian art throughout the world. He was the second person, after Orest Kiprensky, to be allowed the honour of presenting a self-portrait for the Pitti Palace Gallery in Florence.
However, in Russia from the 1870s onwards, the art of Aivazovsky sustained more and more criticism. V. Stasov accepted only the early period of his work. Alexandre Benois in his “The History of Russian Art of the 19th Century wrote that although Aivazovsky was considered to be a pupil of Maxim Vorobyov, he stood apart from the general developments of the Russian landscape school. Such conclusions were not made simply because Aivazovsky worked alone, far from the centers of art, and that he showed his pictures principally at one-man, personal exhibitions.
The truth of the matter is that poetics and the world perception of Aivazovsky did not altogether coincide with the tendencies in the development of Russian Culture. In the first half of the 19th century, Russian art possessed a bright and clearly expressed national character. With the Peredvizhniki – that is the Wanderers – in Russian Art. There appeared a democratic realism, and the of great and realistic literature came forth. As for Aivazovsky, he still repeated his “tales of the sea, which were natural and normal for him. However, according to his own admission, these tales seemed fictitious and unnatural to the younger generation. New works, landscapes with their palettes close to nature – the result of imagination – could hardly give the author a place among Russian realists. This, no doubt, does not negate the close connections of the prominent maritime master with Russian art, and, moreover, his role in it. Stasov said, Aivazovsky accomplished his work, and he directed others towards a new way.
Anyhow, this critique was of sufficient significance that afterwards Russian research on art did not contain any significant material about Aivazovsky for a long time. The arguments around his art were rounded off by a well-known saying of Ivan Kramskoy, who knew the painter better than most, and who had painted his portrait on several occasions: Aivazovsky. No matter what one says, is a star of the first magnitude, and not only in our country, but in the history of art in general.”
Aivazovsky became a famous Russian painter and, having arranged more than one hundred exhibitions in many European and American cities, brought great fame to Russian art.
In Armenia, Aivazovsky was and is considered to be an Armenian painter as naturally as he is considered within Russia to be a Russian painter. The creative individuality and world perception of this great maritime master, with the help of his own national roots, were already connected during his lifetime with Armenian culture. It is necessary to say here that the national basis of art is most felt in formal and stylized principles, and in the expressiveness of the language. The artistic language of Aivazovsky, as well as of all Armenian painters of the 19th century, Stepan Nersesian, Gevorg Bashinjaghian, Panos Therlemezian, Vartkes Sureniants, and Stepan Agajanian, etc., was formed under the influence of the European and Russian academic schools. Armenian culture in general developed during the past century mainly out of Armenia in the cities with substantial Armenian populations – Tiflis, Constantinople, Cairo, Paris, Moscow, and Baku. As for native Armenia, its precarious political situation did not promote the appearance of centers of culture; none of the Armenian painters worked in their Motherland.
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