The Norton Dodge Collection of Dissident Armenian Art

The collections of the Armenian Museum of America reflect a wide range of visual arts: paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, and other related artworks reflecting the diverse interests of artists in Armenia and in the Armenian Diaspora. The works were created in Armenia, Australia, Central Asia, Norway, the Caribbean, Argentina, Beirut, Paris, and beyond, reflecting the presence of Armenian artists around the world. Many of these artworks were donated by proud owners to safeguard them or by the original artists to represent their art for future generations. The Museum has mounted many exhibitions showcasing these works, often drawing from several sources.

Other artworks are part of larger art collections compiled by knowledgeable devotees, often representing some specialized field of knowledge or personal passion. These larger art and artifact collections (e.g. books, rugs, stamps, paintings, coins, etc.) are donated to preserve and further the study of theses academic fields. The Norton Dodge Collection is one of this latter group.

Norton Townsend Dodge (1927-2011) was born in 1927 in Oklahoma City, the son of a physicist. His father Homer L. Dodge was the dean of the graduate school at the University of Oklahoma and Dodge grew up in an academic environment. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Cornell, followed by a master’s from Harvard University in Russian regional studies. He first visited the Soviet Union in the 1950s while researching his Harvard doctoral dissertation, “Trends in Labor Productivity in the Soviet Tractor Industry.”

Dodge was aware of the underground writers’ network in the USSR and wondered if there was a comparable hidden network in visual arts. While doing research in the Soviet Union on the role of women in the labor force he made discrete inquiries and soon made contact with the struggling art underground.

Although the Soviet Union conspicuously offered state support to artists (e.g. writers, painters, composers, poets) to encourage them, this support was confined to state approved artists who would receive stipends, recognition, and various benefits. Non-approved arts were deemed “dissident” and encompassed any non-approved artwork including political, religious, and Surrealist work that did not hew to the narrow, state-sanctioned confines of Socialist Realism. Creating non-conformist art (e.g., abstract expressionism, nudity, political satire, religious iconography, and other styles) could result in the artist being ostracized, exiled, imprisoned, or worse.

Dodge began attending underground “exhibitions” in artists’ apartments and purchasing artworks to support the neglected artists. He made numerous trips to the USSR, ostensibly for economic research, and smuggled the banned artworks out in his luggage, eventually amassing 17,000 works of “dissident art.” This was a unique collection that would have been impossible to create within the USSR at the time.

Dodge was forced to curtail his personal trips to the USSR after the studio fires and “accidental” deaths of dissident artists Minas Avedisyan in Yerevan in 1975 and of Evgeny Rukhin in Leningrad in 1976. He considered it too dangerous to continue collecting personally. When political conditions changed in the post-Perestroika era of the 1980s, Dodge resumed collecting by working through various underground dealers including Garig Basmadjian, who himself vanished in Moscow in 1991.

A man of wide interests, Dodge also focused on post-Soviet art and the changes once the restrictions of artistic “Socialist Realism” were abandoned. This included the art of the various non-Russian republics in the Baltics, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. His primary collection of 17,000 examples of Soviet “dissident art” (representing the period 1960-1977) was donated to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in 1991. 

The Dodge Collection at the Armenian Museum was acquired after 1991 and represents the second generation of Armenian modern art, post-war artists born between 1945 and the1960s. Norton Dodge died in 2011 and is considered one of the most important art collectors of the 20th century, saving an undocumented generation of Soviet artists from being forgotten.

The artists in the Armenian Museum's collection include Felix Eghiazarian (1947-2014), the most varied in styles practiced, who taught drawing at the Architectural Institute, and was the most prolific of those in the Armenian Museum’s collection; Armen Adilkhanian (1959- ) known for his collages of icons, miniatures, and classical imagery; Ashot Kazarian (1954- ), also known as “Ashot Ashot” and was an abstract artist; Sarkis Hamalbashian (1956- ), considered a leader of the second generation of modern artists with a multitude of influences in his art; Samuel Khachikian,who is interesting because there are several artist with this name and we have been unable to determine which one created the presented work; and Vardan Gabrielyan (1956- ), a cubist stylist with works in many major museums.   

Please click through to view the virtual exhibition of Dodge paintings as prepared by Curator Gary Lind-Sinanian. 

Please hover cursor over images as you click through for caption.