Ivan Aivazovsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Ivan Aivazovsky was born Hovhannes Aivazian in Feodosia, a Black Sea port city on the Crimean peninsula, the son of an Armenian merchant family that had traveled a long, winding road through Galicia, Moldavia, and Bukovina before settling there in the early 1800s. Over nearly six decades of work, he produced around 6,000 paintings, the overwhelming majority of them seascapes. When the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov wanted a phrase to describe something beautiful beyond words, he reached for Aivazovsky's name. In Uncle Vanya, first performed in 1897, Chekhov coined the phrase "worthy of Aivazovsky's brush," and it entered the Russian language as the standard expression for the ineffably lovely.

  Yet the man behind that phrase was, in Chekhov's own account, surprisingly hard to categorize. After meeting Aivazovsky in person in 1888, Chekhov wrote to his wife that the painter looked like "an insignificant Armenian and a bishop," and was at once a general, a bishop, an artist, an Armenian, a naive old peasant, and an Othello. A single identity was never quite sufficient. Born into an Armenian family, trained in Saint Petersburg, celebrated in Rome and Paris and London, appointed official painter of the Russian Navy, and eventually drawn into the politics of who owns the cultural legacy of the sea - Aivazovsky's life was shaped by forces larger than any one nation's claim on him.

  How did a boy from a Crimean port become the most decorated marine artist of the nineteenth century? Why did he stay in that same port almost his entire life, even as Russia's art world moved on without him? And what did his canvases have to say about the violence he witnessed in his final years? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Crimean Boy

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  The church that recorded Aivazovsky's birth was St. Sargis Armenian Apostolic Church in Feodosia, and the name written in its baptismal records was Hovhannes, son of Gevorg Aivazian. His father, Konstantin, had been born around 1765 in the Polish region of Galicia, part of an Armenian family that had emigrated there from Western Armenia in the eighteenth century. Family conflicts sent Konstantin drifting south and east through Moldavia and Bukovina before he landed in Feodosia in the early 1800s, where he Slavicized the family name by appending the suffix "-sky." His wife, Ripsime, was a Feodosia Armenian. Together they had five children; Ivan's elder brother Gabriel would go on to become a prominent historian and an Armenian Catholic archbishop.

  The young Hovhannes received his earliest education at the parish school of St. Sargis, the same church where he had been baptized. A local architect named Jacob Koch noticed the boy's gift for drawing and gave him lessons. In 1830, when Aivazovsky was still a teenager, the governor of Taurida province, Alexander Kaznacheyev, took the family to Simferopol, where the boy attended the city's Russian gymnasium. Three years later, in 1833, he arrived in Saint Petersburg to study at the Imperial Academy of Arts, enrolling in the landscape class of Maxim Vorobiev.

  The Academy rewarded him quickly. He received a silver medal in 1835 and was appointed assistant to a French painter. In September 1836, he met Alexander Pushkin during the national poet's visit to the Academy. By 1837, Aivazovsky had joined Alexander Sauerweid's battle-painting class, participated in Baltic Fleet exercises in the Gulf of Finland, and graduated with a gold medal, two full years ahead of schedule. He was twenty years old. He returned to Feodosia for two years and in 1839 took part in military exercises along the Crimean shores, where he met three admirals who would shape his career: Mikhail Lazarev, Pavel Nakhimov, and Vladimir Kornilov.

• 3. Europe and the Making of a Style

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  In 1840 the Imperial Academy sent Aivazovsky to study in Europe, and the journey immediately became personal as well as professional. His first stop after Berlin and Vienna was Venice, where he visited San Lazzaro degli Armeni, the Mekhitarist monastery where his brother Gabriel was then living. There he spent time studying Armenian manuscripts and becoming familiar with Armenian art. He then moved south through Florence and Amalfi and Sorrento before settling in Naples and Rome for the period running from 1840 to 1842.

  Italy changed his eye. He later described the Italian museums as his "second academy," and his work attracted enough attention that Pope Gregory XVI awarded him a gold medal. At an international exhibition at the Louvre, he was the sole representative from Russia. The Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture in France gave him another gold medal. He swept through Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain, returned via Marseille to Naples, and then in 1843 covered Portugal, Spain, and Malta before heading back through Paris and Amsterdam to reach Russia in 1844.

  The stylistic map he carried home was eclectic. His early teachers Vorobiev and Shchedrin left clear marks. Among the old masters, Salvator Rosa, Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael, and Claude Lorrain all fed into his developing approach. Karl Bryullov, whose The Last Day of Pompeii was one of the most celebrated Russian canvases of the era, played what one scholar described as an important part in stimulating Aivazovsky's creative development. His finest paintings from the 1840s and 1850s combined epic scale with vivid color, and critics came to consider his Ninth Wave the defining work of this period, a painting that one art historian described as marking the transition between the fantastic color of his earlier works and a more truthful vision in the later years.

  By the 1870s his palette had shifted toward delicate colors, and in the final two decades of his life he worked in a series of silver-toned seascapes. He rarely painted from nature; a scholar named Rosa Newmarch noted that he never painted from life, always from memory, far from any coastline. His artistic memory was described as legendary, allowing him to reproduce what he had seen only briefly, without preliminary sketches.

• 4. Painter of the Russian Navy

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  Upon returning from Europe in 1844, Aivazovsky received the title of academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts and was appointed the official artist of the Russian Navy, tasked with painting seascapes, coastal scenes, and naval battles. The appointment set the pattern for the rest of his professional life. He attended military maneuvers as a matter of routine, traveling with the Black Sea Fleet in 1845 and 1846 and joining the Baltic Fleet at Petergof near the imperial palace. In 1847 the Academy gave him the title of professor of seascape painting and elevated him to the rank of nobility.

  The relationship with the Navy gave him access few civilian artists could claim. In 1851, he sailed to Sevastopol with Emperor Nicholas I to witness military maneuvers. When the Crimean War broke out in 1853 and Sevastopol came under Ottoman siege, Aivazovsky was evacuated to Kharkiv. He then returned voluntarily to the besieged fortress to paint battle scenes, and his work was exhibited in Sevastopol while the fighting continued around it.

  Between 1856 and 1857, working in Paris, he became the first Russian and the first non-French artist to receive the Legion of Honour. He collected distinctions from multiple governments: the Order of the Medjidie from the Ottoman Empire in 1857, the Greek Order of the Redeemer in 1859, the Russian Order of St. Vladimir in 1865, and the Turkish Order of Osmanieh in 1874. The state also paid him directly; in 1865 the Imperial Academy of Arts awarded him a salary. His estates in eastern Crimea were substantial as well. His earliest major estate at Shakh-Mamai, bestowed by the Emperor in 1848 along with a personal noble title, initially covered around 2,500 diasiatins and by the end of his life had grown to some 6,000, complete with a dairy farm and a steam-powered mill. Chekhov, who visited, described the property as an extravagant, fairy-tale estate of the kind one might find in Persia.

• 5. Feodosia and the Art He Built There

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  Aivazovsky settled permanently in Feodosia in 1845, building a house and studio in his hometown and largely withdrawing from the social world of Moscow and Saint Petersburg. He held 55 solo exhibitions over his career, an unprecedented number, in cities from Rome to New York, but Feodosia remained the base from which he launched them all. The solitude, scholars noted, cost him something. By the mid-nineteenth century, Russian art was moving decisively from Romanticism toward a distinctive Realism, while Aivazovsky continued in the Romantic mode and absorbed heavy criticism as a result. Critics like Vladimir Stasov only accepted his early work, and Alexandre Benois wrote in his History of Russian Painting in the 19th Century that despite being Vorobiev's student, Aivazovsky stood apart from the general development of the Russian landscape school.

  Aivazovsky's response was to build in Feodosia rather than to leave it. In 1871 he initiated construction of an archaeological museum in the city. In 1880 he opened an art gallery in his own house; it became the third museum in the Russian Empire, after the Hermitage and the Tretyakov Gallery. He had begun funding archaeological excavations in the region as early as the 1850s, employing farmers to dig around Feodosia. In 1853, some 22 burial mounds were excavated on Mount Tepe-Oba, turning up golden necklaces, earrings, silver bracelets, clay statuettes, and coins from a Greek settlement dating to the 5th through 3rd centuries BC. The finest finds were sent to the Imperial Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.

  He also built practical infrastructure for the city. He supplied Feodosia with drinking water from the natural springs at his Subash estate. In the 1890s he helped establish a commercial port in Feodosia and connect it to the Russian Empire's railway network. The railway station that opened in 1892 still stands as one of two stations within the city. The art gallery he founded in 1880 remains open today as the Aivazovsky National Art Gallery, holding 417 of his paintings, the world's largest collection.

• 6. Armenian Identity and the Violence of the 1890s

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  Aivazovsky's long-standing wish to visit his ancestral homeland was fulfilled in 1868, when he traveled to the Caucasus and reached the Russian part of Armenia for the first time. He painted Mount Ararat, the Ararat plain, and Lake Sevan. Though many non-native European artists had depicted Mount Ararat before, he became the first Armenian artist to paint the two-peaked biblical mountain. He returned to Armenian subjects in the 1880s with Valley of Mount Ararat in 1882, Ararat in 1887, and Descent of Noah from Ararat in 1889. The 1882 valley painting carries his signature in Armenian script: "Aivazian."

  His second marriage in 1882 deepened that connection. His wife Anna Burnazian was a young Armenian widow forty years his junior, and Aivazovsky said that by marrying her he became closer to his nation. He painted portraits of notable Armenians during this period, including his brother Archbishop Gabriel Aivazovsky in 1882, Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov in 1888, and Catholicos Mkrtich Khrimian in 1895.

  The Hamidian massacres of Armenian communities in the Ottoman Empire between 1894 and 1896 reached him in Feodosia and drew a forceful response. He painted The Armenian Massacres at Trebizond in 1895, The Expulsion of the Turkish Ship, and Lonely Ship and Night: Tragedy in the Sea of Marmara in 1897. He gathered the medals the Ottoman Sultan had bestowed on him and threw them into the sea. He summoned the Turkish consul in Feodosia and told him to inform his master that the medals had been discarded, handing the consul only the ribbons and inviting the Sultan to throw them into the seas Aivazovsky had painted. His 1892 canvases Relief Ship and Food Distribution commemorated American aid during the 1891-1892 Russian famine. The Tsar barred these paintings from being shown in Russia because of what he considered their anti-monarchist themes.

• 7. Auction Value and Cultural Ownership

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  Aivazovsky died on the 19th of April 1900 in Feodosia. At his request he was buried in the courtyard of St. Sargis Armenian Church, the same church where his birth had been recorded more than eight decades earlier. The Italian sculptor L. Biogiolli carved a white marble sarcophagus for him in 1901. On the tombstone, engraved in Classical Armenian, is a line from Movses Khorenatsi's History of Armenia: "Born as a mortal, left the immortal memory of himself."

  In death, the arguments over who Aivazovsky belonged to intensified. In 2017, the year of the 200th anniversary of his birth, an exhibition of 120 paintings and 55 etchings at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow drew around 55,000 visitors in its first two weeks, a record. Ukraine called for an international boycott because 38 of the works came from the Aivazovsky National Art Gallery in Feodosia, which Russia had annexed in 2014. In February 2023, the Metropolitan Museum of Art classified Aivazovsky as a Ukrainian artist, drawing protest from Russia. By early March 2023, the Met had updated his label to read "Armenian, born Russian Empire now Ukraine."

  Meanwhile the auction market has been steadily revaluing his canvases. In 2006 The Varangians on the Dnieper sold at Sotheby's for $3.2 million. In April 2012, his 1856 View of Constantinople and the Bosphorus sold at Sotheby's for a record $5.2 million, roughly tenfold what it had fetched at auction in 1995. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, works by Aivazovsky were reported looted from museums in Mariupol and Kherson; The Storm Subsides from the 1870s was among paintings taken from the Kherson Art Museum to Russian-controlled Simferopol. In a 2017 opinion poll, 27 percent of Russian respondents named Aivazovsky their favorite artist, placing him first ahead of Ivan Shishkin and Ilya Repin, and 93 percent said they recognized his name.