Virtual museum · 10 works
The Courtyard of the Sun
Martiros Saryan 1880–1972
Մարտիրոս Սարյան
Martiros Saryan was born in 1880 in Nakhichevan-on-Don, to an Armenian family, and studied in Moscow. In 1910 to 1913 he travelled to Constantinople, Egypt and Persia, and came back with a new way of painting: flat, burning planes of colour, contours drawn like a carpet's, and shadows that are blue or violet instead of brown.
He settled in Armenia in 1921 and spent the next half century painting its mountains, fruit and flowers. For many people his colours are simply what Armenia looks like.
The works in this courtyard come from his early, travelling years, before 1917.
Hanging the paintings…
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Your browser cannot show the 3D hall, so here are its works as a simple gallery.
A palm heavy with dates, a white wall, a few figures resting in its shade and the head of a camel. Everything is laid down in flat, saturated planes, the way a sign painter or a carpet weaver would see it.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
At noon a narrow street sinks into deep blue shade, except for one blazing orange strip of sunlight down the middle. Saryan paints the heat itself as a shape.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
The stray dogs of Constantinople were famous, and Saryan painted them squabbling in a blaze of yellow light. The dogs are orange, violet and blue; their shadows are cool blue.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
From his journey to Egypt: painted funerary masks become a still life, staring out from blocks of pure colour.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
A woman in a blue robe crosses yellow, sun-flattened ground past a great green plant, simplified almost to a sign. Saryan was interested in how little you need to make a person walk.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Bananas, pomegranates, lemons and quinces, heaped like a festival. Still lifes stayed with him all his life; even in these early ones the colour does all the talking.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
A ravine reduced to big, decisive shapes of green and blue. It is landscape as memory simplifies it: what you keep is the cool of the gorge, not the details.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
A musician with the tar, the long-necked lute of the Caucasus, sits at the edge of the picture; the centre belongs to painted vessels on a blue cloth. In 1915 Saryan was painting in the shadow of the Armenian Genocide; he went to Etchmiadzin that year to help the refugees.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Flowers were his lifelong subject. Here they burst from two painted vases like fireworks against pink and ochre, each bloom a separate flare of colour.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
A tiny early work from the years of the Blue Rose, the Symbolist group Saryan exhibited with in 1907. Dreamlike and soft, before the hard sun of his travels arrived.
Image: Wikimedia Commons