Exhibition Pirosmani

 

31 December, 2008 – 31 May, 2009

 

Vilnius Picture Gallery
Address: Didžioji g. 4, LT-01128, Vilnius. Tel./faksas (8-5) 2120841, tel. (8-5) 2124258

 

 

NIKO PIROSMANASHVILI (PIROSMANI) 1862–1918

 

Dr. Irina Arsenishvili,

Chief Collections Manager of the Art Collections of the Georgian National Museum

 

The distinctive work of Niko Pirosmanashvili (Pirosmani) is a noteworthy and original part of centuries-old Georgian art. The painter lived and created his pictures at the turn of the 20th century, when man’s artistic notions of 20th-century art took shape in Europe and Georgia. For modern viewers who find themselves in front of Pirosmani’s paintings, his art is personal, arousing deep emotions and delight. What explains the Pirosmani phenomenon?

 

Niko Pirosmani was distinguished from his contemporaries by an exceptional talent for figurative and synthetic perception of the universe. His artistic world included the diversity of real-life human beings, nature, animals, and objects. For the painter, life and art, art and man, are indivisible. Mythologism is a characteristic feature of Pirosmani’s thought. The mythological cognition of the world by the painter is direct, naive, and understandable. The artistic world represented by Pirosmani is a living reality; it consists of living beings whose fate is experienced in an emotional and intimate manner. It is abstracted from the empirical course of events, everyday life, and has its own dimension and inner order.

 

In Pirosmani’s paintings everything is perceptible, palpable, and visually convincing. Reality and objects acquire a new meaning, express the special idea of the perfect, synthetic and spiritual nature of the universe, which, in turn, implies intuitive cognition of the world. The human beings, animals, and objects depicted by the painter exist in a living world and this is the mode of their artistic perception and expression.

 

The subjects of Pirosmani’s painting are the eternal themes of mankind and Christianity: harvests, Easter, church feasts, weddings, historical personages, the Georgian landscape, people’s customs, and the animal kingdom. Social types of Tbilisi and his native Kakheti occupy a significant place.

 

The painter’s attitude toward the universe, man, and every creature is imbued with love and the feeling of importance. The history of Pirosmani’s life is known from oral traditions and is enriched by legends, which grew out of his personality and lifestyle.

 

Niko Pirosmanashvili (1862–1918) was born to a peasant family in the village of Mirzaani in Kakheti, one of the regions of Georgia. Niko, orphaned early, was brought up by the Kalantarov family, wealthy vineyard owners.

 

In 1872, Pirosmani moved to Tbilisi together with the Kalantarov family. He spent nearly all of his life in Tbilisi. He received no professional education. Painting was the purpose and vocation of his life. To earn his bread, Pirosmani worked now in Tbilisi taverns (dukhans), now at the railway. He even tried his hand at commerce, but was not successful. The painter’s life was hard and tragic. Pirosmani’s circle consisted mainly of the representatives of the low social strata of the Tbilisi of that period – petty merchants and tavern owners. Often he painted signboards and pictures for the owners of taverns, drinking houses, and workshops in return for his daily bread, drink, and paints. The painter was homeless. From time to time, he rented a small room in a cellar or under a staircase and often spent the night where he happened to be working. Oral traditions have preserved an image of Pirosmani’s personality, notable for its profound spiritual character, original thought and inner independence. He believed in a creator’s reliance on himself, his creations were distinct from those of everyone else. Pirosmani regarded himself a painter and differed from his milieu by his appearance as well:  he dressed in the “European” manner, wore a jacket, sometimes a coat, and a wide-brimmed hat of soft felt.

 

In the Tbilisi of Pirosmani’s period, the exotic Caucasian life of the old city, oriental traditions, and the strong influence of European culture and art co-existed. “Tiflis … is to a certain extent Janus, with one face looking towards Asia, and with the other towards Europe“, an anonymous author wrote.

 

Worldwide recognition of Pirosmani began in 1912. The credit for “discovering” him goes to members of the Georgian, Russian, and European avant-garde – the poet Ilya Zdanevich (Ilyazd), his brother, painter Kirill Zdanevich, and painter Mikhail Le-Dantiu, who lived in Georgia. The Zdanevich brothers made a great contribution to the popularization and collection of the painter’s legacy. In 1913, Ilya Zdanevich showed Pirosmani’s paintings for the first time at the avant-garde “Mishen“ (Target) exhibit in Moscow, and afterwards published articles about his work. In 1916, he organized an exhibition of Pirosmani’s paintings in his house in Tbilisi.

 

Pirosmani’s painting was tantamount to the discovery of a wonder, for it proved especially important and contemporary with respect to problems of general artistic development. His work, independent of the traditions of professional painting, spoke to the aspirations of his time and the tasks of avant-garde art.

 

At the turn of the 20th century, the work of the self-educated painter, “naivist” Henri Rousseau, developed in France. Avant-gardists of the early 20th century (Maurice de Vlaminck, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, Pablo Picasso, and others), in protest against “academic art”, declared H. Rousseau’s painting a bridge to the remote past. By the 1910s, the great interest in “naive” and primitive art became characteristic of Russian and Georgian culture as well. For Russian neoprimitivists, such as Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Aleksander Shevchenko, Mikhail Le-Dantiu, Vasilii Chekrygin, and others, the painter’s pictures were an example of the highly artistic realization of primitive art toward which they aspired. “For them, Pirosmanashvili’s work was the star guiding the way, but in their efforts to approach him, they became convinced that there was a difference between Pirosmanashvili and themselves which remained impossible to overcome” (Dmitrii Sarabianov).

 

In the history of Georgia, this is the period when interest in the past of the country is especially strong – a great desire emerges to create modern art by reviving the traditions of national culture and art and to bring them close to European culture and art. For Georgian artists – writers, poets, painters – Pirosmani’s painting was a highly artistic embodiment of this desirable synthesis.

 

In succeeding years, the interest in Pirosmani intensified gradually. In 1916, Pirosmani was invited to a meeting of the Society of Georgian Painters. His photo and a reproduction of his painting were printed in the newspaper Tsnobis Purtseli. Georgian painters and the general public recognized Pirosmani. After some time, for unknown reasons, the same newspaper published a caricature of Pirosmani. This fatal act had a pernicious effect on the painter’s subtle inner self. Pirosmani isolated himself and his physical health deteriorated. On the instructions of the Society of Painters, admirers of his art visited him from time to time and tried to assist the painter, who lived in grinding poverty. Several young painters – David Kakabadze, Lado Gudiashvili, Mikhail Chiaureli (the future film director) visited Pirosmani in 1916. L. Gudiashvili was the last to see the painter in 1917. Pirosmani died in solitude in 1918. Even the location of his grave is unknown. “The painter’s fate itself is strange, as if he did not die but was lost. As if in order for his painting to remain anonymous, as if a relic of a great primitive. You see Pirosmani – and believe in Georgia”, Grigol Robakidze wrote.

 

There is a clear link between Pirosmani’s work and late medieval Georgian church painting and sculpture, and with memorial monuments and grave reliefs. The painter, organically linked with the roots of Georgian culture and art, was a living bearer of the “cultural memory” of his country. Visual impressions of contemporary Kakhetian and urban life, as well as ordinary photographs, undoubtedly had great importance for his painting.

 

The recognition of Pirosmani just as a primitive narrows and restricts the genuine idea of the painter. The fact that Pirosmani had no professional education and was self-taught does not lessen his skill. Moreover, this enabled him to rely completely on the great artistic talent granted him by God; it gave him creative freedom.

 

A significant and defining feature of Pirosmani’s painting is monumentality and typification. The sense of compositional laconism and genuine monumentality never fails him, it dictates to him what to emphasize and what to omit in a painting. His thought is monumental: the pronounced frontal view of Pirosmani’s feasts, the representative “ritual” nature of the figures imply existence beyond time, abstraction from time, which serves to create a typical character. It should not be surprising that in Pirosmani’s harvest scenes the monolithic, monumental images of Georgian women call to mind Madonnas by Piero della Francesca, whereas his animals remind the viewer of the bisons and deer of the Altamira and Lascaux caves. These seem unexplained coincidences, wonders of art. However, there is nothing supernatural in these coincidences. This proves once again that, regardless of differences in culture, time, and place, there are common human values.

 

Pirosmani’s great artistic mastery is obvious in his works. The majority are executed on black oilcloth, the painter’s own discovery. It is known that Pirosmani spent little time on painting pictures, often completing them in several hours or days. He painted quickly and spontaneously; he wielded the brush with virtuosity. Pirosmani created a dynamism of form by his manner of painting, his sketchiness. In his painting, form with respect to the real world always serves the expression of constant, natural features.

 

The peculiarity of the interpretation of space in Pirosmani’s painting is explained by his world view. If, in European painting, the construction of space occurred (from Giotto, and, scientifically, from Brunelleschi, Pirosmani constructs the object, the body, in space. Like the artists of the ancient world, classical period, and the so-called third-world cultures, he believes in the objective character of things. For Pirosmani, too, space has an applied character. This is the perspective of the object, not spatial perspective. Such a concept of space belongs to the sphere of unconscious creative intuition, unified artistic thought, which was a result of Pirosmani’s mythological perception.

 

The metaphorical thought characteristic of Pirosmani shows a profound inner world and acquires clear plastic expressiveness in the painter’s works. His famous painting, “The Actress Margarita“, is a scenic image in the painter’s fantasy. Margarita’s representative posture with a bunch of flowers in her hand depicts her in her professional role. The background of nature, of flowers and birds, and the free manner of their execution are an artistic metaphor of Margarita’s charming inner self, as is the case with the images of the women in “Ortachaly Beauties” with their “attributes” of flowers and birds. Pirosmani’s painting is an artistic form of his relationship with people, which is inseparable from life and reality.

 

A clue to the artistic idea behind Pirosmani’s works is the author’s inscriptions on and titles of his paintings. The content of the inscriptions defines the artistic structure of the painting. In every specific case, the interpretation of the general compositional structure, of time and space, of rhythm, form, and the figurative expressiveness of colour, are directly linked with the defining role of that aspect of the image which corresponds to the artistic idea. In the painting with the inscription, “Long Live the Company Bego May God Bless Everybody with Good Life“, the frontal unfolding of the painting, its symmetrical, closed character, and the specification and suspension of the movement in time create an artistically complete, laconic picture conveying the idea of wishing Bego a long life. In “White Tavern”, the excitement of the feast, the heightened feelings are given a proper formal solution: the horizontal format, dynamics, the free, “sketchy” character of the form, grotesque deformation, etc.

 

20th-century Georgian culture and art are imbued with Pirosmani’s work. His paintings, like the Georgian folk song Mravalzhamieri, express the national spiritual character. The inexhaustible interest in this self-educated painter, as in the Old Masters, attests to the eternal value of his work.