Alexander Bazhbeuk-Melikyan

Alexander Bazhbeuk-Melikyan (, , ; 11 September 1891 – 20 July 1966) was a Soviet Georgian artist, graphic designer and sculptor of Armenian origin.

Early life Bazhbeuk-Melikyans. Two generations, National Gallery of Armenia Alexander Alexandrovich Bazhbeuk-Melikyan was born in Tbilisi, Georgia. In 1903, he began his studies at the School of Art and Sculpture of the Caucasus Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts. Here he made the acquaintance of a fellow student, Lado Gudiashvili. In 1910, he travelled to Moscow to begin training in the studio of the artist V. N. Meshkov. The following year, he joined the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts.

In 1913, Bazhbeuk-Melikyan was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army, and spent the World War I years on the Odessa front.

In 1917, he returned to Tbilisi and began his own independent artistic career.

In 1919, he met his first wife, Nektar (née Khojamiryan), an architect with whom he had one daughter, Lavinia Bazhbeuk-Melikyan. From a later marriage to Lydia (née Meshkorudnikova), he had two more children: a son, Vazgen, and a daughter, Zuleika Bazhbeuk-Melikyan. Both daughters were to become artists in their own right.

Career Between 1922 and 1929 Bazhbeuk-Melikyan taught at the studio of Mose Toidze, following which he taught at the Georgian Academy of Arts till 1938.

In the 1920s, Bazhbeuk-Melikyan was an active participant in the Tbilisi avant-garde, collaborating with Futurists such as the poet Kara-Darvish, and Georgian painters such as David Kakabadze.

In 1935, Bazhbeuk-Melikyan became friends with the nationalist poets Yegishe Charents and Titian Tabidze, which led to the attention of the NKVD. When, in 1937, the newspaper Dawn of the East published an article naming him an enemy of the people, he was expelled from the Union of Artists of Georgia. Charents and Tabidze were both executed that same year, and Bazhbeuk-Melikyan lived in fear of arrest. That did not come to pass, and when he painted his Spanish guerrillas in support of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, he was rehabilitated. His works were executed with dynamic and impulsive strokes and infused with colour, following the colorists of the previous centuries.

The range of subjects Bazhbeuk-Melikyan painted remained fairly stable. He repeatedly varied his favorite motifs. However, over the years the nature of the emotional structure of his paintings has changed. Romantic mystery and ambiguity gradually gave way in the 1940s to a more immediate, impulsive style. The monochrome colour scheme which corresponded to his first perceptions was replaced by a bright multicoloured palette.

Between 1964 and 1966, although in poor health, he continued to work.

Bazhbeuk-Melikyan died on 20 July 1966 in Tbilisi.

Press

In 2003, twenty-one of his canvases were stolen from his daughter Lavinia's apartment.