Hagop Kevorkian

Who was Hagop Kevorkian?

Hagop Kevorkian was an Armenian-American archeologist, connoisseur of art, and collector, originally from Kayseri, who graduated from the American Robert College in Istanbul, settled in New York in the late 19th century, and helped America acquire a taste for Eastern artifacts.

He carried out excavations in Iran, at Sultanabad from 1903 and at the medieval city of Rayy from c. 1907, and assembled an outstanding collection of Oriental art, especially Islamic and Persian. He organized the exhibition of Islamic ceramics in London in 1911. The works excavated under his supervision were shown in New York in 1914. Major sales of Islamic pieces from his collection, including lacquer doors and tile panels from Isfahan, books and paintings, carpets and ceramics, were held in the 1920s at the Anderson Gallery, New York. In 1929 he acquired at auction the Mughal album of calligraphy and painting that became known as the Kevorkian Album.

The Brooklyn Art Museum's Kevorkian Gallery displays the Assyrian reliefs he donated to the institution. At the University of Pennsylvania a visiting lectureship attests to the joint excavations he undertook in Turkey during the 1930s. In New York, after Kevorkian's death, his foundation established the Kevorkian Chair of Iranian Studies at Columbia University.