Vahan Amadonui The Prince Of Art
Vahan P. Amadouni (Aka Prince Vahan Amaduni) was a Russian-Armenian art painter, born in Armenia on June 21, 1933. He was educated there before venturing abroad.
His ability to draw attracted the attention of his uncle in Pennsylvania, so Amadouni immigrated to the United States thanks to his uncle's patronage.He entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and studied there for seven years; during this time, he won the Thouron Prize for the best composition in 1955 and the William Emlen Cresson Prize in 1956. He then participated in a major juried show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and won both a Purchase Award and an Honourable Mention.
After graduating, he moved to Northern California, where he had a one-man show, “Discovery III,” at the Bolles Gallery and in 1962 at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco.
Upon his return to Europe, Amadouni had an exhibition at the Trastevere Gallery in Rome, where the work was purchased by the Galerie de France in Paris. Back abroad in 1973, his one-man show at the Alex Manoogian Art Gallery in Beirut, Lebanon, was a critical and financial success, selling out on opening night.
After returning from the Middle East, he received a New York State Change Scholarship. In 1974, he was commissioned to paint and decorate the main altar of the Church of Our Lady of Pompei in New York City. In 1979, he devoted his time to a private sponsor and continued preparations for a solo show at Gregg Juarez Gallery, Los Angeles, in the summer of 1983.
Amadouni's works have been offered at auction several times, and the prices achieved range from US$200 to US$6,767, depending on the size and medium of the artwork. Since 2013, this artist's record price at auction has been $6,767 for Untitled, sold at Sotheby's London in 2019.
Vahan Amadonui died on June 28, 1998, in Los Angeles, California.
Critical Comments
"Amadouni is one of the most singularly powerful brush wielders to arrive in this region since World War II. Despite his youth, he has welded international elements into an art of such maturity that a dominant person seems virtually assured for him."
Dean Wallace, San Francisco Chronicle
"He's a first-class artist, and set against the right sort of background and with the right sort of light, some of his paintings make an excellent effect."
San Francisco News
"Amadouni makes a problem of light on an all-black surface of varying texture, and he often contrives surfaces of great richness."
ART NEWS Summer 1960
"Amadouni has strong affinities with Pierre Soulages and the late Franz Kline, but he is independent of either and is quite as powerful and individual as they. All three of these artists presuppose that great towering engineered forms of the modern environment could scarcely have existed without it, although all three go far beyond any mere suggestion of an external atmosphere in their work. Amadouni is a newcomer in San Francisco and a very welcome one."
Alfred Frankenstein, San Fran
cisco Chronicle
