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“There are very few painters like Minas Avetisyan in the world, believe me if I say that there are none at all. He is so powerful, so Armenian, old but at the same time completely new. Amazing…,” William Saroyan said of the artist.

Today, July 20, marks the 96th birthday anniversary of Minas Avetisyan, a renowned Armenian painter of the 20th century.

Born in 1928 in Armenia’s Jajur village, Minas Avetisyan, known simply as Minas, was a painter and set designer. From 1952 to 1954, he studied at the Institute of Theater and Art in Yerevan, and from 1954 to 1960, at the Ilya Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).

He benefited from the advice of famous Armenian painter Martiros Saryan, but developed a style of his own, with an intense use of color similar to that of Fauvism. The influence of Armenian medieval art is strongly apparent in his landscapes, self-portraits and scenes of peasant life. His work combines an uncommon and expressive richness of color with a dramatic monumentality of composition. In 1962, he had a one-man show in Yerevan, and another in Moscow in 1969. In 1972, a fire in his studio destroyed a large portion of his work.

Minas was one of those Armenian artists who put the color back into painting. "Put the color back into painting" - such an expression might seem strange, but if you go into the Matenadaran and look through the yellowed pages of the ancient manuscripts there, you will understand what is meant: there on the parchment, in all their splendor, shine the bright, sonorous colors - blue, yellow, green, red... Color plays an enormous role in the work of Avetisian. Some of his pictures are unequaled in contemporary Armenian painting in the intensity of their colors.