The works of two world-renowned French-Armenian artists, Karnig Zouloumian (Carzou) and Hovhannes Jean Semerdjian (Jansem), on May 15, 16, and 17 return to Glendale.
The exhibition is an Apple Art initiative, mounted in collaboration with the Armenian Arts Center gallery. Most of the pieces on view have never before been shown to audiences in Southern California. Together they span more than sixty years of work, from 1943 to 2008, and include originals on canvas, watercolor, and ink, alongside lithographs.
Carzou and Jansem differ sharply in style and are usually placed in two distant corners of the art world. Yet their lives ran along strikingly parallel lines; lines that, taken together, present them almost as halves of a single whole.
Both were born outside Armenia, into Western Armenian families: Carzou in Aleppo in 1907, then under the Ottoman Empire, and Jansem in 1920 in Sölöz, one of the villages of Izmir, in Kemalist Turkey.
Both also witnessed massacres at the hands of the Turks. Carzou saw the caravans of survivors, mothers and orphans who had escaped the Genocide, as they passed through Aleppo or settled there. Jansem witnessed the massacres of Greeks in Izmir and grew up hearing his mother’s accounts of the Armenian Genocide. Each, in his own time, gave voice to those wounds. Carzou spoke courageously about the Genocide in his celebrated 1979 reception speech at the Académie des Beaux-Arts (French Academy of Fine Arts), and returned to the theme when he painted the walls of the cathedral at Manosque, in southern France. Jansem, near the end of his life, donated thirty-one major works on the subject, collectively titled “Massacres,” to the Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide Memorial Museum.
Both Zouloumian and Semerdjian lived to ninety-three, and both worked without pause. Each left behind a vast painterly legacy: thousands of works in private hands, hundreds of solo exhibitions, illustrated books, extensive travels, museums bearing their names, and a lasting presence in major art centers around the world. On several occasions, they also appeared together in group exhibitions.
Their ties to Armenia and to Armenian artists never lapsed. Both opened their Paris studios to Armenian painters, sculptors, intellectuals, and academics. Carzou’s first visit to Soviet Armenia — the reception that greeted him, the unprecedented exhibition that followed, and his encounters with Martiros Saryan, Kochar, Igityan, Minas, and others — remained vivid in the memory of Armenians for years afterward. Jansem’s first visit was no less striking and gave rise to two of his most impressive canvases: Lake Sevan and Ararat. Both painters received high honors from Armenia’s state and cultural institutions.
In their work, Zouloumian and Semerdjian took up themes that move humanity at large, each through a different prism. Carzou turned to universal questions: a painter who lived through two world wars, his brush traced the consequences of reckless armament and industrialization; devastated cities, emptied villages, abandoned harbors (and how contemporary it all still feels), degeneration, and metamorphosis. Jansem’s vision is realist: barefoot children and women, figures from small markets, fishermen, all rendered in destitution, though a destitution shot through with the search for beauty. Alongside these come religious processions, bullfights, dancers, models, masquerades, and landscapes, all of them images of everyday life.
The best way to take all of this in is to come to the Armenian Arts Center on May 15, 16, or 17, and meet these works face-to-face. Hours: Friday 7 to 10 p.m., Saturday 2 to 9 p.m., Sunday 12 to 6 p.m.. Admission is free.
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