MICHAEL KIMMELMAN ESSAY
YEREVAN, Armenia - Some 20,000 Armenians turned up for the opening of the Cafesjian Center for the Arts recently. They jammed the new sculpture park and the terraced gardens and galleries, including the first exhibition ever in Armenia of the Armenian-born American great, Arshile Gorky.
The center, a mad work of architectural megalomania and historical recovery, is one of the strangest but most memorable museum buildings to open in ages. Imagine an Art Deco version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon , its decorations coded with Armenian symbolism.
Built into a gigantic hill in the commercial heart of this capital city, the place was originally conceived in Soviet times to be topped by a monument to the Soviet revolution. That it has been turned into a contemporaryart center by a rich American is a twist of history whose symbolism is lost on no one here.
There’s no endowment, no professional board, so it may very well soon fail miserably, as so much has in this country where widespread corruption, lethargy and years of isolation have led to an unemployment rate around 40 percent, a crumbling infrastructure and almost no middle class.
But for the time being, at least, it is doing what precious few museums, and even fewer vanity enterprises like it can dream of doing - namely, offering a whole nation a kind of uplift.
Young Armenians at the opening rode the center’s escalator , which rises via several grand, plaza-size landings inside to a little jazz lounge .
These days Armenian newspaper headlines dwell on the Turkish border opening, which the United States quietly presses for to gain an oil pipeline that can sidestep Russia and Iran. In return Turkey wants to table once and for all any talk about having committed genocide in the killing of more than a million Armenians nearly a century ago. Admitting to genocide has legal ramifications in terms of restitution.
Paralyzed for decades by that event and surrounded by mostly hostile neighbors, Armenia has had until now almost no place to see modern and contemporary art from outside the country. As the center’s opening proved, thousands of young Armenians are hungry for what’s beyond their borders and are open to change.
The center began during the 1930s, when a local architect, Alexander Tamanyan, conceived the Cascade, as it’s called, a towering white travertine ziggurat of artificial waterfalls and gardens tumbling down a promontory that links the historic residential and business centers of the city. The plan was largely forgotten until the late 1970s, after which construction began. Then came the earthquake in 1988 and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Enter Gerard L. Cafesjian, the 84-year-old Brooklyn-born Armenian- American patron of the center. Armenian officials agreed he could erect a building on top of the Cascade in which to show his collection if he would complete the Cascade. What had been imagined as a $20 million undertaking soon topped $40 million, with no end in sight.
The building on top was put on hold, the focus instead turned toward completing the Cascade and the sculpture park at the foot of it.
According to Raffi Hovannisian, Armenia’s former foreign minister, the country now depends for some one-third of its economy on money sent by Armenians abroad. The global collapse has been devastating.
Even Dennis Doyle, who sits on the board of Mr. Cafesjian’s family foundation, wondered aloud about the center’s future. Mr. Cafesjian promises to pay for it. But that means it all depends on him in the end. The Armenian government is no safety net.
The Cascade, with an art museum and artificial waterfalls, climbs a hill in Yerevan, Armenia. Below, a work by Dale Chihuly. / PHOTOGRAPHS BY JUSTYNA MIELNIKIEWICZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
