Preserve Artsakh: An Open Letter to the World Community

The end to active combat in the 2020 Nagorno Karabakh war is far from the end of the war on a key victim: the rich and irreplaceable cultural heritage of Artsakh, as the republic is known to Armenians.

Only two years ago, Armenian art, history, and culture were celebrated by some of the world’s most acclaimed cultural institutions. Armenia! at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a major international exhibition of Armenian medieval art. The wonders on display broke attendance records, earned critical praise, and demonstrated the major contributions of Armenians to world civilization. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival celebrated Armenian artistic and cultural traditions during its annual interactive exposition on the National Mall in Washington DC, drawing record numbers. That same year, the global consortium of French-speaking nations gathered in Armenia’s capital of Yerevan for the Summit of the Francophonie, hosting hundreds of world leaders, visitors and the international media. 

Now, just two short years later, the world looks away as Armenian art, architecture, and history are being destroyed. On September 27, 2020, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale military attack on the Republic of Artsakh. Turkey, which continues to deny its genocidal project of the annihilation of the Armenian people perpetrated in 1915-1922 in their historical homeland, has lent its full political and military support to Azerbaijan in this latest act of aggression.

Crossroad of History

Brian Allen

 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is less a museum than a university—it’s also a big, messy place, as we know from its many public fumbles. In the last year alone we have seen its notorious move from free entry to a new $25-per-head admission charge hitting tourists; a big deficit despite a $3 billion endowment; and a failed, obscenely expensive $800 million building plan. All of this said, with the British Museum and the Louvre its only possible equals, the Met is widely considered the greatest museum in the world, and its research, publication, and art gathering acumen is peerless. 

About the ‘Armenia!’ exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of New York

 Claude Mutafian

A distinguished art historian and well-known specialist of Byzantium, Mrs. Helen Evans has been working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for many years. Among the exhibitions she has organized, let us mention ‘The Glory of Byzantium (843-1261)’ in 1997 and ‘Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)’ in 2004. Such topics involved necessarily neighboring Armenia, and Mrs. Evans’ growing interest for Armenian art was finally materialized by the present widely publicized exhibition called ‘Armenia!’, where the curious exclamation mark may reflect some kind of admiration. More important is the absence of any mention of period in the title, contrary to the two abovementioned Byzantine exhibitions. At first glance, it suggests that the exhibition should cover the three millennia of Armenian history, or at least, if one decides to exclude Urartu, the period from 500 B.C. to our days. This is not the case: it begins at the dawn of the 4th century, with the Christianization of Armenia, and ignores totally one millennium of pagan Armenia. As an example, the absence of the name of the most famous of all Armenian kings, Tigranes the Great (1st century B.C.), in an exhibition called ‘Armenia!’ looks strange, if not unacceptable. It would have been fair to call the exhibition ‘Christian Armenia!’, and briefly explain on an introductory panel that Armenia did exist long before, and that Christianization opened a new artistic era. Such was the case of the exhibition properly called ‘Armenia Sacra’ in Paris (musée du Louvre, 2007).

The Prophets, Angels, & Churches of ‘Armenia!’

 Gini Alhadeff

One small display in an exhibition can grab you by the collar. In the case of “Armenia!” at the Metropolitan Museum, it was the image of a spherical wide-eyed crab in a ridged armor swallowing Alexander the Great, along with his ship and retinue, set against a wavy sea that might have been drawn by a child. It is attributed to Zak‘ariay of Gnunik and appears in an illuminated manuscript of the Alexander Romance (1538–1544), the legends surrounding the exploits of Alexander the Great, much loved by Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Armenians alike. Dr. Helen Evans, the Met’s curator of Byzantine Art, told me, “That crab is too good not to be recognized as the type of art we don’t expect from East Christians.” And it most definitely wasn’t, she added, “the stiff art of the Byzantines that Vasari disapproved of.” Giorgio Vasari, the Italian architect, painter, and historian, author of Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550) Western culture’s first art historian, who coined the use of the term “Renaissance,” unfairly saw in Byzantine abstractions, coming after Greek and Roman art, a decline in skills rather than an artistic choice.

Undoing Denials at the Venice Biennale’s Armenian Pavilion

Neery Melkonian

 

Neery Melkonian, a New York-based art curator and scholar, passed away on July 2, 2016, after battling cancer. She was a gifted scholar with a keen eye for different manifestations of Armenian contemporary art. In her memory, we reproduce the following essay, first published in the catalogue for Armenity, which accompanied the Armenian pavilion of the same name at the 2015 Venice Biennale. The Armenity exhibition won the Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the Biennale last year.