Armenia's volatile position between empires, war zones, and its lack of any sovereignty from the 13th century onwards meant that the nation did not have the political and economic conditions for stable, institutional forms of cultural development. As a result, the “humanist” and “scientific” turn in Armenian art occurred later than in Europe, beginning with the spread of printing and easel painting in the mid-17th century.

At the time, the major centres of cultural life were located outside of historic Armenia, in cosmopolitan cities such as Tiflis, Isfahan, Venice, and Constantinople. Though centred around the church and religious subjects, the production of visual arts in the 18th century was profoundly transformed through contact with the European Enlightenment, active international trade, and uptake of new technologies. It is in this early modern period that the first professional studios by Armenian artists were established.

These “artisanal” networks became the progenitors of a new, transitional visual language that amalgamated elements of European realistic representation with local iconographies and aesthetics, as exemplified by the work of the Manas and Hovnatanian dynasties of painters. Evolving over a century, this legacy culminated in the emergence of first academically-trained Armenian artists like Hovhannes Aivazovsky and Hakob Hovnatanian, whose oeuvre consolidated the rise of modern, secular art in Armenian reality at the beginning of the 19th century.

Divided between the Ottoman and Russian Empires at the turn of 19th century, the Armenian communities strived to not only preserve their ethno-religious identity, but also regain some form of autonomy as a way of approaching modern nationhood. The visual arts served an important role in this regard, acting as a tool for recording, witnessing, and representing the past and future of the Armenian people. Hence, the second half of the 19th century saw a veritable wave of new Armenian artists who were trained in Russian and European art academies and were strongly engaged with these political issues. Primarily committed to the rhetoric of critical realism, their art aimed for a more accurate depiction of the Armenian and Eastern experience that countered colonial and orientalist archetypes.

By the end of the century, Armenian artists not only excelled in all of the mediums and genres of Western representational art but were also making an international mark as renowned painters, illustrators and set designers. In some fields, such as photography, local practitioners even achieved dominance across the Near East, making fundamental contributions to the development of this new art form.

Though dispersed around the world, Armenian artists sustained active ties between themselves and the Armenian intelligentsia, enabling a “networked” and de-centred model of national art, which was underpinned by collective cultural ambitions, political concerns, and the rediscovery of artistic traditions. As the age of the empires drew to its close in the first decades of the twentieth century, these efforts coalesced into more explicitly defined projects — exhibitions, societies, schools, and publications — that aimed to institutionalise modern Armenian art as a legitimate cultural phenomenon in its own right.

Inspired by the theoretical and formal possibilities of modernism, a number of emerging Armenian artists even made bold attempts at developing a distinctively “indigenous” language of visual arts, as evidenced by the innovative aesthetics of Martiros Sarian, Sargis Katchadourian, Melkon Kepaptchian, Georgy Yakulov, and others. The 1915 Armenian Genocide curtailed these efforts, leading to a dramatic fragmentation of the Armenian cultural landscape. Nevertheless, the narrative of modern Armenian art proved to be remarkably resilient, flourishing in multiple, diverging directions in later decades.