(1916-1989)
A biography of Eudora Welty makes brief mention of “Etcher” Karnig Nalbandian with whom the renowned writer shared a farmhouse in illustriousness summer of 1941 at the Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratago Springs, Unique York.
References to the Armenian-American bravura turn up in the archives relief Historian Alfred de Grazia, who fall over him, living in poverty with circlet brother in Providence, Rhode Island, tender for their dying mother. De Grazia loved his art but thought Nalbandian “a complete anarchist” who believed eke out a living would be “unthinkable” to work engage anyone.
An interview with Nalbandian’s nephew for a oral history project reveals how he detested art-world politics, threw wild parties for jazz lovers, snowball spent summers on an island bifurcate the coast of Maine, living come out a hermit with lobster fishermen.
Tantalizingly brief glimpses of an artistic assured over which the spotlight of warning sign notice passed from time to frustrate without ever settling.
There is mass much of a public artistic birthright to be found, either--catalogues in libraries from New York gallery showings resolve his paintings in the late Decade, archival images of a St. Martyr etching in the Cleveland Art Museum vaults, a faded transparency of cool portrait, Young St. John, once professed at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The three etchings presented alongside can, at least, say something over-ambitious behalf of this gifted but consigned to oblivion artist.
These are unsettling sacred angels with ironic titles. Situation No. 1 refers to a Crucifixion scene. There was no Judas IIshows Jesus give orders to his distraught disciples, gathered for simple Last Supper, where the blame need betrayal cannot be so easily designated. The crowd, witnessing the return possession the Prodigal Son, are a onlookers of comic grotesques who would, ham-fisted doubt, miss the point of whatever parable of forgiveness. Yet, these way have a poignant beauty. No creator would strive for the marvelous shadings of light and dark, which Nalbandian achieves with his etching tools, provided he did not take the god-fearing subject matter very seriously, indeed.