Artist Haralampi Tachev in archives, documents, museums and private collections

01 December, 2014 – 01 June, 2016

Author: Prof. Milena Georgieva, Fine Arts Department

In 2015, the 140th anniversary of Haralampi Tachev, a completely forgotten artist, decorator and professor, one of the earliest Bulgarian modernists, will be marked. His vast oeuvre is impressively versatile and has contributed a lot to the development of fine arts in Bulgaria. Just a negligible part of it has been studied (I’d mention only three authors: Janet Miteva, V. Vasilchina and several publications by me in the late 1990s). The solo exhibition planned to be mounted in 2015 by the Museum of History in Sofia and a scientific publication, where the Institute is a co-organiser, seeks to fill this inadequate gap with a monograph about the artist.
His is the biggest ever archive of a Bulgarian artist, kept at the Central State Archives: 1,800 items in two inventories. A natural source of the retrospective and a monograph, this archive is invaluable and deserves a separate work on it. Apart from being the most important source of a study of the artist himself, it is a major base of sources of the history of Bulgarian art of the early twentieth century, combining by a fortunate coincidence a major Bulgarian artist with his activities in many of the most significant cultural artistic events.
The project seeks to extend the information of the artist as much as possible. The collections of paintings owned by the Museum of History in Sofia, keeping the best part of his lifework as well as the Central State Archives, the National Museum of History, the National Literary Museum, the National Museum of Military History, Plovdiv Art Gallery, etc., are now studied systematically; searching for his artworks in private collections will be included as well.
The project will deal only with his paintings, drawings and prints, seeking to compile a catalogue of his easel artworks, structured by genres. The study will answer some controversial and underdeveloped identification problems about the artist’s concrete participations in exhibitions staged by various groups as well as in prestigious art events abroad and will explore the course of his creative process.
The end result will also include a selection of documentary texts from the archives that present the work of H. Tachev in different fields of art, his relations with various institutions and particular persons, his aesthetic views, etc.

The implementation of this project will shed light on the already existing photo material in the archives of the Institute and will fill up the holdings of the archives. It applied nature is beyond doubt: its purpose is to serve as a guide to future projects and works on Bulgarian art of the first half of the twentieth century and especially, to various exhibitions of retrospective nature.
This individual planned project is carried out with the support of the Museum of History of Sofia and is meant to facilitate the curatorial project of the exhibition. The book is supposed to contain 100 or 120 pp.