Born in 1899, Ervand Kotchar was educated in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia) and in Moscow, where he became familiar with the theories of the Russian avant-garde of the 1910s (Malevich, Tatlin, Gabo, Pevsner). In 1921, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar for Education, appointed him as a professor at the Tiflis Academy of Fine Arts. He also became a member of the city’s museum Acquisition Commission, the House of Art Committee, and the Caucasus Exhibition Jury.
Despite a promising start on the local art scene, his ambition to discover the Western avant-garde overshadowed this beginning. The following year, after obtaining his passport, Kotchar decided to travel to Europe. He visited Constantinople, Venice, Rome, and Florence before settling in Paris in 1923. Between 1923 and 1928, he began to make a name for himself by exhibiting at various Salons (the Indépendants, Surindépendants, Tuileries, and d’Automne), initially showcasing works inspired by synthetic and classical Cubism, and from 1925 onward, by Surrealism and Metaphysical art. In 1926, he held his first solo exhibition at the Sacre du Printemps gallery. Critics at the time noted the evolution of his style toward abstraction. Kotchar himself began questioning the vocation of painting, and its relationship to time and space. In a 1924 interview with La Revue Moderne des Arts et de la Vie, he remarked: “It seems […] evident that the fate of art is stasis; all attempts to escape it are and will always be in vain. A true artist will not attempt this escape but will seek to find a form of stasis containing all the possibilities of movement: in other words, he will strive to insert into the immobility of the subject the power of movement.”
This quote seems to indicate the direction of his artistic research, which became clearer in the latter half of the 1920s. In his view, painting should be considered not only as an autonomous discipline but above all as a living organism. Inspired by the progress of civilization (man, who with the invention of the airplane, had taken flight from Earth), around 1926, Kotchar embarked on a path toward liberating painting from the flat surface and from the three classical unities – of time, action, and place – which had governed it since Antiquity. He conceptualized Paintings in Space, which would form the essence of his work and his main contribution to the history of interwar avant-garde movements.
These are multi-dimensional paintings – complex and colorful multidimensional constructions meant to be viewed from multiple angles. The corpus consists of a “scaffolding” made of wood, metal, and/or plaster, covered with oil-painted human or anthropomorphic forms, to which the artist sometimes added fragments of other materials such as leather, glass, or wire. Their form is open. A key feature is the “sculpted and calculated absence of interior space,” meaning the voids and hollows in the scaffolding that enhance the object’s integration into space. Without using electricity or other motor forces, Kotchar sought through his Paintings in Space to create effects of multiple perspectives, offering a global perception of a body by representing it in several attitudes and under different lighting at once, thus introducing the notions of duration and movement (the fourth dimension).
The first presentation of Paintings in Space took place in 1928 at the Van Leer Gallery. Its catalogue was prefaced by Waldemar George, who had supported the artist since his earliest exhibitions and remained loyal to him throughout his career. That same year, Kotchar showed two more works at the Salon des Indépendants, during which one was destroyed by a visitor. Around 1925, Waldemar George introduced the artist to art dealer Léonce Rosenberg, who, in the latter half of the 1920s, became interested in his inventions and bought 17 works in 1929. That year, Kotchar was also among the artists Rosenberg asked to decorate his apartment on Rue de Longchamp in Paris. In 1930, alongside works by Léger, Metzinger, Viollier, and Severini, Rosenberg sent two Paintings in Space to London for a group exhibition at the Leicester Gallery and considered introducing Kotchar’s work to the American market. However, in the context of the 1930–31 economic crisis, the relationship between the artist and the dealer cooled.
At the same time, Kotchar was working on the “manifesto” of Painting in Space, completing a first draft in the early 1930s. He continued to exhibit (Galerie Vignon, 1934; Galerie Le Niveau, 1935; the Musicalist exhibitions in Prague, Brno, and Bratislava; the Salon de l’Art Mural) and to take part in Parisian artistic circles, notably the Thursday gatherings at La Closerie des Lilas organized by Robert Delaunay, who was also involved at the time in redefining modern painting. In the 1930s, Delaunay actively engaged in mural art, which he saw as both a political and aesthetic solution to the withdrawal of art dealers and collectors during the crisis. At one of these gatherings in 1934, Delaunay introduced Kotchar to Charles Sirato, theorist of “planism” poetry, who was highly interested in space-time theory and its implications in the arts – his research showing many similarities with Kotchar’s work and promising fruitful collaboration.
In 1936, Kotchar was the first to sign the Manifeste dimensioniste, alongside Jean Arp, Calder, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Kandinsky, and Francis Picabia. That same year, however, he decided to return to Soviet Armenia, hoping to promote Sirato’s text, his own ideas on Painting in Space, and modern art. He became a member of the Union of Artists of Armenia. However, he was quickly accused of anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary propaganda, as well as of practicing formalist art. He was imprisoned (between 1941 and 1943), narrowly escaping execution.
After the war, he taught painting and drawing at the Karl Marx Institute in Yerevan. His works from this period were motivated by different values, contributing to the preservation of national memory and the revival of the Armenian national spirit – in a style that sometimes approached socialist realism but was never fully embraced by the authorities of Soviet Armenia. In the 1950s, Sonia Delaunay even sent a petition to Armenian authorities requesting a trip for the artist to France, but he never obtained a passport.
In 1963, the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris acquired one of Kotchar’s works from his Paintings in Space series (1934). In 1966, the Galerie Percier in Paris held an exhibition titled “Kotchar and Painting in Space.” In 1969, his statue of Komitas was exhibited in Etchmiadzin. In 1970, he participated in the Louvre’s exhibition “Armenian Culture from Urartu to the Present.”
He died on January 22, 1979, in Yerevan.
Maria Tyl