Portrait of the composer Gara Garayev

The "Portrait of the composer Gara Garayev" (Azerbaijani: Bəstəkar Qara Qarayevin portreti)[1] is a painting by the Azerbaijani painter, People's Artist of the USSR, Tahir Salahov, in 1960, stored in Moscow, in the State Tretyakov Gallery.

[2] It depicts the famous Azerbaijani composer, People's Artist of the USSR, Hero of the Socialist Labour, Gara Garayev.

The portrait depicts the composer Gara Garayev sitting, grouped as for a tiger's jump, writes the art critic Ekaterina Degot.

He is not a “creator”, but a kind of a conscious “operator” of his own creation, like an operator of the Electronic Computing Machines (then a fashionable profession) or even like an oil rig repairman (who, we note, does not repair anything in Salahov's work, but rather strategically plans a renovation).

[3] According to Degot, for the Soviet Union of the first post-Stalinist years, such an image of people was a revolutionary idea, since it rehabilitated the intelligentsia with all its almost inevitable (then) cosmopolitanism embodied in every (then) clear symbol - the defiant white turtleneck of Gara Garayev (that Salahov himself forced him put it on).