Modern Art Museum
Donated canvases fill white galleries in a museum founded without state permission or funding.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Modern Art Museum in Yerevan follows painter Henrik Igityan's decision, in 1972, to build a museum for exactly the art the Soviet state banned - a project so unauthorized it had no ministry to apply to and no budget to draw on. It reaches back to a bulldozed open-air exhibition in Moscow a decade earlier, and traces how Igityan asked artists across Armenia and its diaspora to simply give him their paintings, no sale or contract, with Yerevan's mayor Grigor Hasratyan lending unofficial cover. Works by Minas Avetisyan and Jean Carzou arrived on these walls the same quiet, unofficial way.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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