Sunday, April 8, 2007

Essay: Edmund Yaghjian

Sparta Crossing (NY), 1940s
Pencil on paper
5 3/4 x 8 in
$800

EDMUND YAGHJIAN by Wim Roefs 

[catalogue text for the exhibition "David & Edmund Yaghjian" at if ART Gallery, April - May, 2007]

It’s no surprise that the late Edmund Yaghjin spent a lot of time in his studio – or at least tried to. Yaghjian clearly enjoyed painting and drawing. Visiting the artist’s retrospective at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, it’s easy to sense the joy Yaghjian must have experienced painting his surroundings – the big-city and small-town environments he was part of and the people living and working there. In his paintings, even buildings and objects seem alive.

Yaghjian was unencumbered by prevailing artistic trends, which no doubt sustained his joy in painting. His 1930s work put him in the mainstream of American modernism, including the Ashcan School and other forms of social realism. But Yaghjian remained committed to depicting daily life even as the winds of modernism changed after World War II toward Abstract Expression and subsequent modes of non-representative art. 

Yaghjian would only turn to non-objective painting late and briefly. He probably didn’t do so because he felt the need to follow fashion. He might have done so for the same reasons he went back and forth between representational styles and approaches during his career: because he could, because he thought it would be interesting and because he thought he might enjoy the attempt. A person should “do the work he wants to do,” Yaghjian told an interviewer in the early 1970s. “The most important thing is not to be bored.”

In addition to a large body of paintings, Yaghjian produced numerous watercolors, drawings and studies. Twenty of those and a lithograph in the current show at if ART Gallery span four decades of his career. They include 1930s work, among them New York City scenes of Central Park and the Hudson River, including a study of tugboats, all reminiscent of work in the retrospective.

The 1940s are represented by scenes from New York state outside of the city. They include views of Sparta and Ossining, N.Y. Ossining, just north of the city, was the subject of a series of works well represented in the retrospective. 

By the 1950s, Yaghjian had moved to Columbia to head the University of South Carolina art department. Watercolors such Wheat Street and Street Scene, Columbia, SC, are representative of much of Yaghjian’s work then. The scenes are also in several paintings in the retrospective. The coal car, of which there’s a 1950s study in the current exhibition, already showed up in his Ossining paintings.

That Yaghjian, born in Armenia, painted what some would consider mundane subject matter is not surprising. That in Columbia this would include scenes of the city’s African-American scene, isn’t either. Yaghjian was, Robin Waites wrote in a study of her grandfather, “raised in a 19th century clapboard home in an Armenian community segregated from the larger population of Providence, Rhode Island (in a) family supported by the corner grocery store run by his father and frequented by immigrants who were just getting by; this scene was familiar, alive and universal.”

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