Disquiet Muses: The Armenian “Predicament” of Women’s Art

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Imagine walking into a national gallery, any national gallery, and realizing that out of roughly 1,500 works on view, nearly 90% were by women. Would you be scandalized? Perturbed, perhaps? Mildly annoyed? At the very least, it would be an attention-grabbing scenario that would provoke debate and consternation. Such a situation would probably only be possible in a Sacha Baron Cohen parallel-universe comedy, where a corporate CEO wakes up one day in a world dominated by women. In our own reality, the longstanding norm is the reverse: male artists dominate the institutional landscape without serious challenge. Aside from a small slice of the public with some awareness of feminist critique, this is not a condition that troubles most people. Certainly not in Armenia, where women themselves have been so strangely at peace with their lack of representation across most institutional platforms.

This might read like an insensitive jab from a male writer that fails to account for the pervasive conditions that have entrenched patriarchal paradigms so deeply they become internalized and rehearsed by the very social contingents oppressed by them. But the palpable reality does, at least outwardly, form a picture of complacency and general lack of protest toward the continuing erasure, suppression and neglect of women’s contribution to the development of Armenian culture. The overarching question is: why?

Some 15 years ago, while conducting research in the archives of the National Gallery, I befriended one of the senior collection keepers at the museum. A respected figure in art historical circles, this distinguished woman had authored a number of foundational studies on some of the most prominent Armenian artists. Her opinion mattered. During one of our many conversations, we turned to the subject of women modernists, and more specifically a highly idiosyncratic mid-century painter whose work I had recently discovered and been completely captivated by. On hearing the name, my august colleague’s face broke into a Miranda Priestly-esque sneer as she let out a devastatingly curt dismissal: “An absolutely terrible painter. The relatives wanted to give us her entire work, but we could barely choose anything worth keeping.”

Though astonished at such a cavalier dismissal of a major, even groundbreaking woman artist by a senior female art historian, I put it down to a Soviet-era generational prism that favored conservatively academic iterations of “high art” over anarchic gestures directed at canonical traditions. It would take me years to realize that this attitude was not an exception but a symptom of systemic bias so normalized it cast no shadow whatsoever on the accepted order of our testosterone-laden art canon.

It was only in 2026 that the “absolutely terrible painter” finally received her first posthumous exhibition in Armenia. As the show patently revealed, Knarik Vardanyan (1914–1996) was neither a bad nor a mediocre artist, but a painter who struggled to carve out her distinct place in Armenian art against the odds. Unlike many of her modernist contemporaries of the 1960s–1980s, her talent was not of the garden variety: it was fearlessly experimental and adventurous, rapturous in its libidinous energy, intellectually daring and unapologetically individualistic. Vardanyan exemplified the politically incorrect mold. Her style comprised a bewildering concoction spanning almost the entire spectrum of modernist aesthetics — something like an unholy scion of Giacomo Balla, Kandinsky, Picasso and Fernand Léger.

It shouldn’t have worked in theory, and one can clearly see the artist struggling in the early years of her career with the task of absorbing the various stylistic devices of Western modernism. But her efforts paid off in the late 1960s with a series of remarkably confident paintings, applying a nerve-like scheme of vigorous black outlines and scorchingly deep primary colors to a body of subjects that strayed as far as possible from the dictates of official socialist culture. As her confidence grew, Vardanyan strayed so far from accepted norms that her paintings entered the realm of abstraction under the guise of space-age and industrial themes; a radical act in a milieu obsessed with nationalist difference and nostalgia. Looking back, it’s something of a miracle that the artist continued to exhibit her dramatically outré paintings of street drillers, tractor drivers, military marches, sports, rocket launches, planets and factory machines. There were, of course, more palatable images of flowers and landscapes in her repertoire, but Vardanyan’s reputation rested largely on her decidedly “unfeminine” interest in representing power, movement and the larger forces governing life and the universe.

Through sheer force of will, Vardanyan managed to push her way into the ranks, receiving moderate recognition for her work, which was exhibited, published and purchased by the government for various state galleries. Nevertheless, following her death, her name and oeuvre largely disappeared from view. Compared with the quasi-mythological status built around her male contemporaries, posthumously glorified as either rebels against the Soviet system or beacons of “national modernism”, Vardanyan has been accorded barely a footnote in narratives of 20th century Armenian art. This is entirely consistent with the patriarchal logic of the art establishment that Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker outlined in their epochal study Old Mistresses—women’s art is harnessed as the negative, “feminine” polarity against which the “virile” art of men is offset and celebrated. 

In the Armenian context, art by women has largely been codified according to a broader societal scheme that was on occasion more liberal than in the West, yet still clearly demarcated by standards of moral propriety, domesticity, patrimonial duty and subservience to the male ego. This is art that is not erased as such, but made visible only as an appendage, an ornamental auxiliary called upon to soften the edges of the grand narrative, to add sensuousness and, dare I say, decorative flair. Which is presumably why the only Armenian woman artist to have entered wider public consciousness is the Tbilisi-based painter Gayane Khachaturyan (1942–2009). A kind of Armenian Leonora Carrington, Khachaturyan came to prominence in the 1960s with her symbolist, metaphysical canvases depicting personal dreamworlds far removed from the realities of the day, a mystical realm of ahistorical escapades where humans and nature coexist in bucolic symbiosis. But even in her case, the political resonances of her decidedly queer, exclusively female vision were completely silenced, misread and misrepresented by a coterie of admiring male critics and collectors like Telman Zurabyan, who christened her a master of “transformative beauty and elegance.” Except she was not—not in the literal sense. In Armenian, just as in English, the word “master”, varpet, is semantically reserved for men and carries no feminine suffix.

This is the structural reality that Pollock and Parker, alongside trailblazing feminist art historians like Linda Nochlin and Lucy Lippard, have repeatedly outlined: that “power is not only a matter of coercive forces. It operates through exclusions from access to those institutions and practices through which dominance is exercised. One of these is language, by which we mean not just speech or grammar, but the discursive systems through which the world we live in is represented by and to us.” 

The inclusion of women in the canon of Armenian art history has consistently enacted this power dynamic by allocating them mostly provisional roles used to reinforce the genealogical, linear model of patriarchal succession, from Hakob Hovnatanyan to Hovhannes Aivazovsky, Vardges Surenyants and Saryan to Alexander Bazhbeuk-Melikyan, Minas Avetisyan, Hakob Hakobyan and Arman Grigoryan, rather than challenge it in any way. At no point has normative Armenian art history accorded women an instrumental role in shaping artistic trajectories, relegating them instead to the sidelines as either a reactive fan club of male figureheads (Aytsemnik Urartu, Mariam Aslamazyan, Armine Galentz, Vehik Ter-Grigoryan, Nana Gyulikhevkhyan) or anomalous curiosities deployed to diversify the landscape of national art when needed (Zabelle Boyajian, Gohar Fermanyan, Vera Vard-Patrikyan, Knarik Vardanyan, Ada Gabrielyan, Gayane Khachaturyan, Ruzan Kyurkchyan and so on). 

The most blatant expression of these gendered attitudes, however, is the way women have been written out of the early formative processes of medieval and early modern Armenian art. Still dominant popular studies, such as Nona Stepanyan’s Art of Armenia, do not address a single female artist until the establishment of Soviet Armenia, thereby firmly linking the empowerment of women’s creativity to the formation of the nation-state and communist emancipation. This omission not only veils the presence and substantial contribution of women to Armenian cultural modernity, but distorts the very contours of our art historical legacies. We are still confronted with an enormous dearth of resources and initiatives related to the research, dissemination and critical re-evaluation of women artists: no historical survey exhibitions, no feminist art histories, no publication series, no conferences, no online databases.

Nevertheless, one does notice a shift in attitudes and priorities in recent years. The new rehang at the National Gallery of Armenia in 2025 made some strategic additions to its representation of Armenian art’s evolution. Notably, three important women artists were included in the halls dedicated to the pre-Soviet era, which had previously been entirely devoid of female practitioners. More women artists also appeared in the rooms featuring subsequent decades, sometimes given dominant positions within the overall exposition (Gohar Fermanyan, Mariam Aslamazyan and Lavinia Bazhbeuk-Melikyan). 

This rehang, however, does not meaningfully address the gender imbalance, due in part to the absence of works by many women artists in the collection, nor does it attempt to deconstruct the patriarchal epistemology behind the institution’s objectives. Unlike most comparable institutions in the West, the Gallery, along with every other museum in Armenia, has yet to implement any targeted policies aimed at rectifying the neglected histories of women artists through acquisitions or exhibition programs. In fact, during the past six years, which have seen the appointment of the first female director since the museum’s inception, the National Gallery has held just four solo exhibitions devoted to women artists, which may, astonishingly, represent a notable improvement on its previous track record.

One of these projects is a survey of the largely forgotten Méliné Kotchar (1899–1967), best remembered now as the second wife of avant-garde legend Yervand Kotchar. For much of her life, and then posthumously, Méliné Kotchar (Ohanian) remained a footnote in the grand narrative of her illustrious husband. When she met him in Paris at the end of the 1920s, Kotchar was already an established figure, shooting through the ranks of the European art scene with his surrealist compositions and theoretically innovative three-dimensional paintings. He was also reeling from the tragic loss of his wife and child in 1928, and Méliné, then taking her first steps as a student of Fernand Léger, was completely entranced by this powerful confluence of grief, charisma and intellectual brilliance. They married in 1930, becoming the celebrated couple of Paris’s diasporic circles. Their union was cut short when, in 1936, Kotchar decided to move to Soviet Armenia, with Méliné to join him once he had settled. They were never fated to meet again. Méliné spent the rest of her life pining for her absent husband while trying to make her own way as an artist. 

Her work reflected the broader postwar turn toward figurative and humanist subject matter. Clearly indebted to Picasso, Léger and her husband, Méliné’s serene and delicate paintings bring the extreme formalist experiments of these figureheads down a few notches, giving them an almost primitivist quality. Her thematic focus remained consistently narrow, largely post-Cubist still lives and images of young women holding flowers, doves or gazing dreamily into the distance. The schematically drawn female faces in her paintings feel like self-portraits: frozen in a moment of suspended time, hoping and waiting. That these works are entirely devoid of the pain and bitterness Méliné must have felt following her abandonment by Kotchar is a small miracle in itself. In some sense, her art remained the sole channel of communication with her husband, an interior dialogue that ended only when Méliné took her own life in 1967, following her failed attempt to lure Kotchar back to Paris with a solo show she organized of his work in Paris in 1966.

Curated by Haykush Sahakyan and Arpine Saribekyan, the exhibition at the National Gallery’s Giotto House Museum branch presents Méliné and Kotchar as a creative couple—a framing that is somewhat unfair given that they were together for only six years. Inevitably, her work is presented and read here as an appendage of the famous master’s oeuvre, as though Kotchar had willed Méliné into being, like an Eve shaped from Adam’s rib. She remains a ghostly presence who acquires material contours only when superimposed upon Kotchar. 

Was Méliné’s work fundamentally a weak echo of her husband’s genius? Or did she, as a professional artist living and working in postwar Paris, grapple with the conundrums of her immediate reality, quietly carving her own path through modernism, animated by a soulful belief in the goodness of the human spirit? The exhibition does not try to answer this question, constrained as it is by the limited number of available works, a dearth of archival material and a reluctance to confront the inherent injustices within the romanticized mythology of “creative couples.” Despite its noble intentions, the exhibition ultimately sets Méliné up for yet another fall, casting her once more as a Pygmalionesque shadow projected by the overpowering grandeur of a genius husband.

It’s a sad socio-cultural pattern that has rarely been exposed either by women artists themselves, or by the different generations of art historians. Propriety and the veneer of respectability have always ruled the day. The rather scandalous exception is undoubtedly Armine Galentz’s scathing and exasperated memoir Forgive Me Haroutiun, in which she details with often shocking explicitness, the psychological violence and pressure she suffered at the hands of her lauded husband, Haroutiun Galentz. In one passage, the painter details how her spouse, after achieving his long-awaited public acknowledgement and in the throes of a new love affair, demanded that she quit painting, presumably in order not to take away any of the spotlight. Already a respected artist in her own right, Armine firmly rebuked this demeaning proposal, going as far as separating their living quarters in order to affirm her independence. But she couldn’t quite win in the long run. Despite a prolific career that outlasted her husband’s by nearly four decades, Armine is still defined as a “pupil” and a follower of Haroutiun Galentz, seemingly condemned to act as a weaker reflection of his blinding stardom.

And so we return to the initial enquiry. What motivates this entrenched negligence toward the legacies of women artists, and the unwillingness to rehabilitate their names and reputations within art historical discourse and the public imagination? Clearly it is not simply a matter of resurrecting lost names or correcting socially conditioned sexist perceptions. The core problem, as theorists of art and semiotics such as Julia Kristeva, Laura Mulvey and Luce Irigaray have outlined, is the phallocentric architecture of literary and art history itself, wherein the masculine rationale of seeing, defining and categorizing becomes the sole means of articulating the world as a succession of fixed objects and constructs. In this equation, as John Berger famously defined it: “men act, women appear.” It is a system that positions the feminine as a negative, even abject realm of ambivalence and lack, one that cannot produce “knowledge,” but merely a condition of chaotic movement and permutability that defies the masculine desire for egocentric mastery of the world.

Applied to the Armenian sociocultural context, these theoretical frameworks illuminate a psychic space shaped by conditions of trauma, existential fear, internalized colonialism and inferiority complexes that have enshrined the paternal and phallic as the irrevocable preconditions of survival and continuity. Encased within the determinist logic of small-nation anxieties, the collective Armenian imaginary treats anything outside its fixed value systems and forms as an undermining threat to its perennially endangered existence. In this sense, culture becomes an ossified manifestation of paternal power and law, ensuring the transmission of national codes against the annihilating forces of time and external influence. The concrete expressions of this condition are everywhere: from the unchanging forms of Armenian churches to the bad-boy antics of political figures who perform their narcissistic machismo in pre-election shouting matches or by flexing their muscles on pull-up bars.

The “unstable” and “unknowable” energies of the feminine and maternal substratum can only be present in this ecosystem as a subjugated element fuelling the vertical power structures of the patriarchy. Think of the dancing women in Martiros Saryan’s iconic 1923 painting Armenia, which provides the kind of unwavering idiomatic and ideological cohesiveness for national collectivity that Armenian society deems a sacred foundation of its gestalt. Beside Saryan’s crystalline iconography, the analogous propositions by women artists—Knarik Vardanyan’s unnervingly primordial 1968 Mother Armenia, Ruzan Kyurkchyan’s wildly rhizomatic 1972 Armenia, or Arax Nerkararyan’s parodically subversive 1991 Mount Ararat—appear like deliberate vulgarizations of the established symbolic order. The challenge for Armenia’s institutional gatekeepers today is to find the will to overcome their anxieties toward these intractable and non-conforming female sensibilities, and to embrace them not only as a means of redressing historical biases, but as a way of transforming Armenian art into a dynamic, multifaceted discourse that continues to shape and inform the ongoing process of our cultural self-becoming.

Et Cetera

But, and Yet, Still…

[Art Speak]