John Hovannes, a memorial exhibition of sculpture

November 4-24, 1973 at the Art Students League of New York, 215 West 57th Street, New York City 10019

A Remarkable Man

Perhaps Mr. Hovannes knew so much about sculpture, perhaps he loved this art so much, that the gods denied him – if one accepts a Karmic point of view – saying, this time around he will not be given personal reward but will be obliged to pass on a little of what he knows to others.

I shall never forget meeting him about ten years ago. I was scrambling around looking for tools in the basement of the Art Students League when he came over and asked me where I was from. I said I was half Chilean. Giving me a blast of his black eyes, he said, “Chile is good looking.”

Five months later, after I had struggled to copy in clay five or so models, he took me aside and said: “Now, a little more imagination, a little more composition: You carve!” I mearly fainted at the mere thought of such an undertaking, feeling wholly unprepared, yet that is the way he had with nearly all his students, setting them tasks beyond their horizons and opening their minds to new thought.

I am amazed at how much he tried to stretch one’s thinking, how many aspects of sculpture he brought to conscious attention, from considerations of light and shade, concavity and convexity, rhythm of form – always with concrete illustrations brilliantly devised, the analytical distillation of years of personal study – to the technical aspects of casting or carving in which he had found many new and more efficient ways of doing things. For he was also a gifted mechanic and a master craftsman.

All was conveyed with his personal style. He made demonstrations in clay using anecdote, parody, and jokes, never negligently but always to emphasize a particular point. He was an actor who evoked the Middle East when he performed. At first I could hardly believe that one could think that way; never a thought without an apposite illustration. And such fun in the telling.

For instance: Nostradin Hodja, having sold his wares at the market, deciced to treat himself to the rare luxury of a piece of liver. To the butcher he confided that, unfortunately, he did not know how to cook it. The friendly man gave him written instructions which, resting under a tree on his way home, Nostradin Hodja began to read. So absorbed was he in the study that he forgot to protect the meat. A crow flew down, snatched it off the stick on his shoulder and made off with it in the sky. “Ah, ha,” said Nostradin, turning around triumphantly, “You may have the meat but I have the recipe.”

At times he was ferocious. He lived his moods openly from gloom, even bitterness, to the greatest love and enjoyement of life. If one day he was black the whole world was black; there could be no art in our time. Any self-satisfaction we might have felt was instantly consumed in the while heat of his suffering.

On the other hand, there were days when he regaled u swith his stories, imitating Turkish pashas surprised by the antics of their jesters. While eating a Turkish delicacy, prepared by himself in the makeshift kitchen of his studio, we waited for the delicious shock of a broad joke or the subtle insight of a Middle-Eastern parable.

Yet indeed he had suffered and did suffer. He was afflicted with diabetes that had gone undiagnosed for several years during which time he had experienced almost constant dizziness as well as fainting spells akin to states in epilepsy which put a stop to his own work and forced him more and more into teaching. Towards the end he could hardly walk for the pain in his legs and on wintry days because of the cold every breath was difficult. In his studio where I worked with two other students, for every half-an-hour’s exertion he had to take an hour’s rest, drifting off into a half sleep. Yet what great efforts he made on our behalf even then, strenuous physical efforts, helping us to build work tables, about which we knew nothing, because maybe we had shown some true eagerness to learn. “We are here to learn,” he always said. It was that striving he cared about most – not production nor completion of any one work – but striving to learn.

He wanted to see new thought, better thought in sculpture. Maybe that is why the work of his students hardly ever resembled his own. By stressing investigation and experiment he brought out more individuality in them.

Although he did not have an easy life in terms of success and material reward, it was immensely rich spiritually. From having been a robust young man, loving Oriental spices, kegs of olives, and cognac, he became more and more ascetic, burning on in thought with powers of contemplation and understanding of people. He displayed his love and his pain openly as a true witness.

He said one day that life was like ones image in a mirror. One thought one was going one way but in fact one was going in exactly the opposite direction, like the image in the mirror.

He made me feel he was living like a flame.

Elizabeth de Cuevas-Carmichael