Painting did not bring him happiness. He had a girl called Margerita. No one knows what sort of girl she was. Niko loved her and painted her portrait. Margerita’s face is done according to the conventions of the great naives, by which everything is too big and out of proportion. Oversized lips, bulging eyeballs, enormous ears. Niko gave this portrait to Margerita. The girl shrieked in indignation. Enraged, full of hatred, she left him. His talent condemned him to solitude.
From then on he lived in lonely abandonment.
Over and over again he painted his feasts, with that table against a mountainous landscape. He was fifty-four when he died, in Tbilisi, in some room, of unknown causes, hungry, maybe mad.
VACHTANG INASHVILI showed me his place of work: a great hall filled to the ceiling with barrels. The barrels lie on wooden horses, huge, heavy, still.
In the barrels cognac is maturing.
Not everyone knows how cognac comes into being. To make cognac, you need four things: wine, sun, oak, and time. And in addition to these, as in every art, you must have taste. The rest is as follows.
In the fall, after the vintage, a grape alcohol is made. This alcohol is poured into barrels. The barrels must be of oak. The entire secret of cognac is hidden in the rings of the oak tree. The oak grows and gathers sun into itself. The sun settles into the rings of the oak as amber settles at the bottom of the sea. It is a long process, lasting decades. A barrel made from a young oak would not produce good cognac. The oak grows; its trunk begins to turn silver. The oak swells; its wood gathers strength, color, and fragrance. Not every oak will give good cognac. The best cognac is given by solitary oaks, which grow in quiet places, on dry ground. Such oaks have basked in the sun. There is as much sun in them as there is honey in a honeycomb. Wet ground is acidic, and then the oak will be too bitter. One senses that immediately in a cognac. A tree that was wounded when it was young will also not give a good cognac. In a wounded trunk the juices do not circulate properly, and the wood no longer has that taste.
Then the coopers make the barrels. Such a cooper has to know what he is doing. If he cuts the wood badly, it will not yield its aroma. It will yield color, but the aroma it will withhold. The oak is a lazy tree, and with cognac the oak must work. A cooper should have the touch of a violin maker. A good barrel can last one hundred years. And there are barrels that are two hundred years old and more. Not every barrel is a success. There are barrels without taste, and then others that give cognac like gold. After several years one knows which barrels are which.
Into the barrels one pours the grape alcohol. Five hundred, a thousand liters, it depends. One lays the barrel on a wooden horse and leaves it like that. One does not need to do anything more; one must wait. The right time will come for everything. The alcohol now enters the oak, and then the wood yields everything it has. It yields sun; it yields fragrance; it yields color. The wood squeezes the juices out of itself; it works.
That is why it needs calm.
There must be a cross breeze, because the wood breathes. And the air must be dry. Humidity will spoil the color, will give a heavy color, without light. Wine likes humidity, but cognac will not tolerate it. Cognac is more capricious. One gets the first cognac after three years. Three years, three stars. The starred cognacs are the youngest, of poorest quality. The best cognacs are those that have been given a name, without stars. Those are the cognacs that matured over ten, twenty, up to one hundred years. But in fact a cognac’s age is even greater. One must add the age of the oak tree from which the barrel was made. At this time, oaks are being worked on that shot up during the French Revolution.
One can tell by the taste whether a cognac is young or old. A young cognac is sharp, fast, impulsive. Its taste will be sour, harsh. An old one, on the other hand, enters gently, softly. Only later does it begin to radiate. There is a lot of warmth in an old cognac, a lot of sun. It will go to one’s head calmly, without hurry.
And it will do what it is supposed to do.
ARMENIA
Vanik Santrian leads me around various back alleys of Yerevan, because that is what I’ve asked him to do: take us off the beaten path. In this way we happen upon the backyard of Benik Petrusyan. This backyard, enclosed on four sides by the walls of apartment buildings, is the site of a permanent exhibition of Benik’s works. Benik is twenty-eight years old, has graduated from the Academy of Yerevan, and is a sculptor. Slight of build, shy, he lives in his cramped studio, whose door opens on this backyard showroom. In the studio hang magnificent Armenian stone crosses, called hachkars, which Armenians once carved in cliffs. You encounter these hachkars all over Armenia, for they were the symbols of Armenian existence, or else boundary markers, and also, sometimes, signposts. You can find old hachkars in the most inaccessible places, sometimes high up on the tops of sheer cliffs, and today it is impossible to imagine how their sculptors, most often monks, managed to climb up there.
Benik treated us to wine. We were sitting on a plank bed, among stones that he had been working on for several years. He turned on a tape player so that we could hear patarks. Patarks are a kind of Armenian psalm, haunting, beautiful. Benik had a new French recording of patarks sung in Paris by an Armenian choir. You can also hear patarks in Armenia if you go outside of Yerevan, to Echmiadzin, which is the Vatican of the Armenian Church.
Benik sculpts in stone and also practices chekanka, a kind of metallic bas-relief. He has a remarkable talent. The subject of his sculpture and of the chekankas is always love — more precisely, the amorous embrace. But there is little joy in these gestures: only lovers who in a moment must part forever hold each other in this way. One of Benik’s cycles is the parting of Adam and Eve.
His sculptures seldom find their way to exhibitions. Most often they stand, as they do now, in his backyard, under trees or leaning against a wall, or lying directly on the ground. Benik sculpts for the residents of the four buildings that enclose his backyard. He sculpts for the superintendent and the mailman. For the garbagemen who come to clean up the piles of refuse. For the children who wash these sculptures for the fun of it or in the hope that they will get a piece of candy. For the bill collector from the electrical company. And also for the policeman, should he come around here on some business.
In the same neighborhood where Benik lives, Amayak Bdeyan has his studio. Bdeyan makes enormous amphoras, vases, and water jugs, which he exhibits in the squares of Yerevan. It is a monumental ceramics, just right for showing on the lawns of Yerevan’s wide avenues. Bdeyan likes bright, cheerful colors, but the texture of his forms is rough, lumpy. He covers the tips of these bumpy protuberances with a light, luminous enamel, so that the vases and water jugs glitter from afar. Bdeyan’s amphoras can be seen all over the city. Bdeyan is a professor at the Armenian Institute of Art and has founded a movement that aims to turn Yerevan not only into a work of architecture but also into an artistic showplace. The municipal authorities bestow their full support upon these ambitions. Thus, Bdeyan has designed the interior of the Dramatic Theater in Yerevan — one of the most interesting achievements of contemporary interior art. The interior of the Café Araks is also his work, as is the splendid interior of the Ararat restaurant. Ararat is situated underground and is an example of modern design executed with taste and restraint. There are already many such places in Yerevan. Armenia’s capital is becoming, piece by piece, a museum of the latest art.