William Saroyan: The Artist | Armenian Studies Program | California State University, Fresno

Few admires of the writings of William Saroyan (1908-1981) know that he was also an artist. Early in his career he had been known to draw as he spoke to friends. The artist Manuel Tolegian (1911-1986) told me in October 1981, some month's after the writer's death: "Saroyan would make random drawings, 'doodling,' when I was talking to him." Tolegian and Saroyan were both from Fresno and became friends in their twenties; they first met in 1933. At the time Manuel Tolegian was living in New York and from 1930 to 1941 he shared an artist's studio with another Californian, painter Jackson Pollack. During those years with Pollack, Tolegian also for a time experimented with abstraction and Saroyan, who had visited his studio more than once was familiar with the work of both artists. The relationship with artist was very close for Saroyan used Tolegian in 1940-1941 as the offstage harmonica player in his Pulitzer prize winning Broadway production of The Time of Your Life. The artistic and personal relationship was so close that in 1951, Saroyan and Tolegian collaborated on a book on art, which remains unpublished.

Varaz Samuelian, the artist-sculptor of Fresno, also informed me in 1981 that Saroyan had began painting 22 or 24 years before, that is back into the 1950s. The earliest paintings I have seen are dated no earlier than 1955. In those years, Saroyan discussed his art in a short illustrated essay titled "My Drawings," for the Evergreen Review (Spring 1959). Varaz admired Saroyan's ability to speak about art, to understand it: "He Spoke very interesting things." Saroyan was faithful to his artist friends and spoke out for them whenever he could. It is this intrinsic interest in art that impelled him in196? to the catalogue "Who Is Varaz?," for a New York exhibit of Varaz's paintings that he help organize.

Saroyan's interest in painting and drawing may have been inspired by his cousin, Archie Minasian, five years his junior, who was certainly his closest friend and a write and artist himself. For an exhibit of Archie Minasian's paintings in 1971 Saroyan wrote a short catalogue entitled "An Introduction to the Paintings of Archie Minasian." The paintings were abstract, and Minasian (a house painter by profession) was, like Saroyan, unschooled in art. In the catalogue Saroyan says: "The non-real people and things that Paul Klee was drawing and painting, were they not in fact a language? and was not this language worthy of careful study rather than ridicule?" Saroyan continues, "To this day there are excellent people who look at a gallery of paintings by Paul Klee or Juan Miro and say to one another, 'He's crazy, whoever he is. He's pulling our leg. He doesn't know how to paint, so he paints that way, I can do better. God help us, even you can do better.' And the man gives his wife of forty years a powerful shove, as if to say, 'Why don't you paint crazy pictures like Paul Klee and be famous? We need the money, don't we?'"

Saroyan's own paintings were abstract, though he occasionally did a realistic profile drawing or a portrait sketch, like those illustrating his book Places Where I've Done Time of 1972. His affinity to artists like Pollack and Gorky, who he knew during his Broadway years, 1939-1943. Among the 26 very fluid Saroyan line drawings in his 1963 book Not Dying, An Autobiographical Interlude, there are many which suggest the biomorphs of Gorky. Saroyan went out of his way some years after Gorky's death to visit Vartoush Mouradian, the artist's sister, in Chicago.

In 1958 in Paris Saroyan turned to art again because, he says, "I began to make drawings again last year because my son was making them. I have been drawing all my life. My drawings seek a kind of perfection, a kind of sudden unmistakable flawlessness, a word in a language, a whole language itself. Most of the drawings are made so swiftly as to seem to have been instantaneous. Not every one is successful of course. How could every one possibly be." ("My Drawings," p. 149)

Saroyan painted as he wrote: rapidly and profusely. He painted regularly, but in spurts. During the inventory of his Paris apartment in 1982, I recorded 700 paintings, plus hundreds of drawings on the fly leaves of books in his personal library. For instance, during a very prolific September 1979, he painted no fewer than 400 large and medium sized watercolors. Twice in that month he painted 31 watercolors a day in series of six or ten or twelve, all in a few minutes. He himself commented on this swiftness in "My Drawings": "The sheet of paper is the frame....Within the frame is the drawing, entire, framing itself, but it was drawn, it did come to pass over a period of three seconds, ten, twenty, or thirty, but hardly ever more than that. The line is the important thing here, the clear thin unmistakable line moving about freely and becoming something -- not another thing or an approximation of another thing, not a picture -- itself, only."

Each painting was labeled: "I go to the trouble of putting my initials upon the page at that point which I consider left and bottom, and I give each drawing its proper chronological number, excepting when I forget,. I put the date and place where, too. I do all that, because I am interested in time, in change, in growth, in decline, in whatever is there, or comes along, and has to do with me, or with the human experience in general, or in particular." Sometimes they bore expressive titles: "Who's Going to Stop Us?" "Where Am I Where Am I Going," "Greatness," "Armenian Dance."

Saroyan's medium was nearly any from of paper. He loved to use recycled paper: the back side of posters, shopping bags split open, discarded computer print-outs, butcher paper, restaurant menus, café napkins. He would never buy art paper, much to the dismay of his closest friends. One day in the spring of 1967, a group of his Armenian cronies in Fresno bought him a large and expensive pad of watercolor paper. Saroyan was so touched that he immediately set out to make pictures for them. These paintings are among his most beautiful.

In October1980 I suggested to Saroyan that he prepare an exhibit of his work to be shown in the Conley Art Gallery at California State University, Fresno in the following autumn. He was delighted by the idea, but alas was unable to see this first ever exhibit of his art. As part of the William Saroyan Festival, held in November 1982, Professor William Minschew, Director of the Conley Art Gallery, and myself prepared an exhibit of some 38 of his paintings. In the Festival Program, Minschew remarked: "The spotlights are turned on to another side of this man and the walls of this gallery give you imagery that, perhaps, is conjured from Pollock, Gorky, Tobey, and Miro, but in fact, are fascinations of imagination that could not find themselves within the typewriter. The loose, fluid touch of all that 'sealed-in precision' that is the writer's structure finds release often to expel one drawing after another like rewrites of the word. In drawings and paintings, duplication is not as critical as in paragraphs. Each drawing and painting is its own world and reward. Like the paper, we are touched by the spirit, the mind and the hand of William Saroyan."

Since this inaugural show, there have been three others: 1) "William Saroyan: Watercolors," thirteen water colors were shown at the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art in July 1986, 2) "William Saroyan (1908-1981) Aquarelles et dessins," incorrectly advertised as a "Première mondiale" was held in June and July 1992 at Galerie Garig Basmadjian in Paris, 3) "My Name Is Saroyan: Drawing Works by W. Saroyan," 40 paintings at the Bumpodo Gallery of Tokyo in December 1992. The Bochum exhibit is, therefore, the fifth devoted to the artistic expression of the Armenian-American writer. This a healthy development, for even now fourteen years after Saroyan's death, very little attention has been paid to his enormous artistic output. Perhaps this is normal for it took a long time to appreciate the art of other writers such as Antonin Artaud or Jean Cocteau.

One of the reasons for the lack of interest has been the relatively few works in private hands. The bulk of Saroyan's art was left to the William Saroyan Foundation at his death and is now kept with his literary papers by the San Francisco based Foundation. Much less is in private hands, mostly with relatives, old friends, and Saroyan collectors.

William Saroyan's paintings attract us through their fluidity and the sureness and rapidity of their execution. The Japanese critics found them influenced by Chinese ink painting and artists such as Mark Tobey and Jackson Pollack; others have compared them to the works of French artist Henri Michaud. Saroyan's paintings were never reworked. The drawings are characterized by thinness of the line, usually done with pen and ink. Many of the works are highly calligraphic and appear to have as primary motifs letters of some strange alphabet. Some look like isolated Arabic letters; the Japanese saw in them Roman numerals and Chinese characters. For Saroyan they may have represented fanciful variants of the 38 letters of the Armenian alphabet, which he could not read. A large painting in the 1981 Fresno exhibit was entitled "The Majesty of the Armenian Alphabet."

Painting was necessary for Saroyan who needed constantly to express himself artistically. Art was salvation. Art tricked the finality of man's death by its transcendent nature. Often after a day writing, he would relax or unwind by taking out his watercolors and quickly executing a few free movements of form and color. His colors were always delicate and refined and his works, when they succeeded, were very harmonious. But excessive analysis is not necessary: It is through the free association of color and form that Saroyan's paintings are to be enjoyed.

Dickran Kouymjian
Haig & Isabel Berberian Professor of Armenian Studies
Director, Sarkis & Meliné Kalfayan Center for Armenian Studies
California State University, Fresno