Galentz Haroutioune
Gurün (Turkey), 1908-Yerevan (Armenia), 1966
Galentz went to primary school in Aleppo. From 1927, he frequented the studio of the ceramist Onnig Avedissian, where he acquired some notions about drawing. When he arrived in Beirut, the only painters he met were Dobelle, Cyr and Michelet. The only horizon that laid before him was their exhaustion in the face of reality. Michelet assured his training and influenced his first pictures – of interiors, women reading or sewing, and landscapes. Michelet’s influence was so flagrant that he could not see the possibility of painting in any other way. When he taught painting to his wife, for example, she learned Michelet by way of Galentz.
After his years in Aleppo, Galentz’s relationship with Beirut – where he settled in 1930 – should be questioned. Cyr was exploring painting’s possibilities at the same time, but abandoned this questioning for his need to produce and sell his watercolors, and with his new facility of technique, he gradually forgot the complications of Paris. Galentz was the talented but insecure and troubled young Armenian painter who embarked his wife, Arminé, on the same boat of painting, a ship of fortune rather than of need. He had discovered painting as a reinterpretation of photography. There was no question of putting him in place, of rediscovering his motivation, or of asking about the modalities of transmission or acquisition of a pictorial culture. His painting could not escape a set of influences, but by assimilating them all at once, he found a a free ground. The constraints of figuration and resemblance were far less important, in this matter, than the needs of the canvas itself and the realisation of his independence.
In 1946, Galentz returned to Armenia and had a career as the “Painter Emeritus of the Socialist Republic of Armenia”. What did remain of his work in Beirut? A large mosaic at the entrance of the Regent Hotel, on Martyr’s Square (destroyed during the Civil War), portraits, landscapes, a modernist approach to dissonant colors and various commissions from Francophone communities.
How can one put his paintings from 1946 to his death in Yerevan in 1966 into perspective? Was it about the return to Armenia as a mythic place, where painting could finally be united with desire ? He had learned to use fresh paint and to make it blander too well. He could not accomplish more than he had in Beirut. Like Galentz, Aouad also learned painting from a retoucher employed by an Armenian photographer on Gouraud Street in Beirut.
Galentz started this way with Michelet in 1927, at a time when photography did not have the status of a craft and was not in competition with painting. Galentz saw one and the other, quite simply, as one whole business to practice.