MARTIROS SARYAN (ARMENIAN 1880-1972)

Apple Orchard, 1937
oil on canvas
48.26 x 102 cm (19 x 40 1/8 in.)
signed in Armenian and Latin and dated lower left; signed in Armenian, dated and titled on verso

PROVENANCE
Cornette de Saint Cyr, Paris, December 19, 2011, lot 15
Acquired at the above by the present owner

EXPERTISE
Accompanied by a certificate of expertise by the Expert Centre of Cultural Values, no. 00732, dated August 9, 2010, signed by M. Stepanyan and Sh. Asoyan. (Copy of the Russian and an English translation are available upon request).

Accompanied by two letters by Shahen Khachatryan, director of the Saryan Museum in 1967-2005, one dated December 17, 2012. (Copy of the Russian and an English translation are available upon request).

LOT NOTES
This work, completed in 1937, shows a panoramic view of apple trees in the afternoon sun weighed down by supple fruit. The luminous and colorful image belies nothing of the severe challenges of its time - a discrepancy explained by Saryan's necessary shift to the Socialist Realism paradigm with its invariably optimistic "industrial landscapes." This isn't the first time that the artist turned to scenes from nature with a more conventional palette to support himself in difficult times: Shahen Khachatryan notes that Saryan painted a remarkably composition in Rostov (Blooming Trees, now in the collection of the Chelyabinsk Museum) some twenty years earlier, at the end of the Russian Civil War. Though Saryan later spoke of the anxiety he felt throughout the 1930s to maintain the integrity of his artistic method, today these works attest precisely to the artist's flexibility and mastery of color, form and brushwork in any style he undertook.

CONDITION
Unframed, the painting appears in good condition. Very fine and stable age-appropriate craquelure. Very minor wear to the lower left corner of the canvas. Inspection under UV shows scattered retouching to around 5% of the canvas, most notably to the upper left and right corners and the upper center edge.

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