Birth of Jak Ihmalyan (June 30, 1922)

Jak Ihmalyan was a Turkish Armenian painter, political activist, and university teacher who lived most of his life outside Turkey due to political repression. 

He was born in Istanbul on June 30, 1922. He developed his connection to art at a young age, influenced by his father Garbis, who was also a painter. He started his studies of painting in 1936. After completing a private Catholic secondary school in 1936, he enrolled at Lycée Saint-Joseph and later graduated from Haydarpaşa high school. In 1942-1944, he studied at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts. 

He had joined the Turkish Communist Party at the age of seventeen (1939) and, due to his political views, he was imprisoned in 1944-1946. In 1949, he went to Beirut via Syria without obtaining a passport and worked as an art teacher in local Armenian schools. In collaboration with French painter Simone Baltaxé (1925-2009), they created a panel on the theme of peoples’ friendship for the airport of Beirut. 

Ihmalyan moved to Poland in 1956 and worked in the cartoon studio of the Warsaw Radio Committee. After a two-year sojourn in China (1959-1961), where he worked at the Turkish section of the state radio broadcasting, he moved to the Soviet Union in 1961. He was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Turkish Studies at the Institute of Oriental Languages of Moscow State University and also had a workshop.  

He organized various exhibitions in Moscow, Vilnius, and Tartu between 1968 and 1978. His style drew inspiration from both the bold colors of Western modernist movements and the refined elegance of Eastern artistic traditions, particularly Armenian miniatures and the calligraphic simplicity of Far Eastern art, depicting workers, circus laborers, and street people. He became a member of the Union of Soviet Painters in 1974. 

He passed away in Moscow on April 1, 1978, and was cremated in Yerevan. After his death, exhibitions of his works were held in Ankara, Moscow, Baku, Tbiisi, Yerevan, Vagharshapat, Istanbul, and Paris. Some of his works are in museums of Turkey, Russia, and Armenia, and in private collections in Turkey, Armenia, and France.