Saryan was distinguished by his ability to turn facts of life into a fairy tale. In the 1940s – 1960s, he would become the “face” and “avatar” of the entire Armenian painting in the USSR. But at the beginning of the 20th century, he was a modest young man from a suburb of Rostov-on-Don – New Nakhichevan – who studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Participant in the exhibition The Blue Rose (1907), he would transform his art in a new way after a trip to the Orient (to Turkey, Egypt, Persia). This is where the painter’s oriental roots will come into play. He would be able to convey the slow, melted from the heat rhythm of urban life like no other. The artist does not need impressionistic ease and mobility of the brushstroke. His painting becomes two-dimensional and decorative, and the colours, blue and orange, are symbols of heat. The composition itself is a geometrically correct perspective. At the same time, it is symmetrical: the orange triangle of the sunlit street corresponds to the similar triangle of the sky painted in deep ultramarine. There is something cinematographic in the canvas: some elements are clipped off to “frame” the space. It is obvious that, by the time Saryan started the painting, he had already been acquainted with the art of Henri Matisse, but his Orient is the fruit of his own worldview.
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow