Lado Gudiashvili (1896 - 1980) is one of those artists to whom Buffon's words apply fully, although, perhaps, the stylistic unity of his work may not be apparent to the viewer at first glance, especially in a comparison of his paintings and drawings. However, the moment one begins to look deeply into the work of this major and distinctive artist and to appreciate the essence of his art, the profound internal link between what seem to be the most dissimilar of his works, such as lyrical, decorative pieces and grotesque satire, is clearly felt. The task of the art critic is to lay bare and explain this link, to translate into words the aesthetic content of a piece of creative work. This job, never easy, is particularly complicated in Gudiashvili's case, as we are dealing with an artist who perceived the world image natively, in form and colour, and not in verbally expressed concepts, translated into the language of visual art. His creative style is neither premeditated nor rationally constructed, but it took shape spontaneously and naturally, pouring from the artist's heart like a Georgian folk song. It was pointless, therefore, to ask Gudiashvili about his style - his answers were rare and brief, for in life he was taciturn and preferred to make no comment at all on his own art, evidently agreeing with Balzac that you should not believe a novelist's comments on his own work any more than you should take the word of a Gascon. It was his lifelong companion, Nina Gudiashvili, to whom he entrusted the task of speaking about his paintings and drawings; she is the subject of many of them and is the greatest expert on her husband's work. Her eye-witness accounts, explanations and judgments are exceptionally valuable, but all the same, the critic himself must uncover the secrets of the artist's work, relying mainly on his own artistic taste, intuition and comprehension.

Before turning to this task, however, we must briefly mention some facts from the artist's biography without which many aspects of his work are inexplicable.

Born in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) in 1896, Lado Gudiashvili started drawing at an early age, at the same time learning music and dancing; this will show itself in due course in his art. At the age of fourteen he went to art college, and then found a job as a teacher of art in a Tiflis grammar school. However, the young artist concentrated his energy mainly on his own creative work, and had his first one-man exhibition as early as 1915, immediately making a name for himself in Georgian intellectual and artistic circles.

During the next few years he worked actively in various art forms - painting, drawing and mural painting, became friends with a group of talented Georgian poets and took part in passionate debates about the future development of national art. The fact that at a 1919 exhibition of Georgian art more than twenty of his oil paintings and over fifty of his drawings and water-colours were shown, attests to the intensity with which he worked.

Gudiashvili's participation at this time in an archaeological expedition studying various monuments of ancient Georgian architecture had special significance for his artistic development; he made many copies of frescoes in churches, and when his copies were exhibited in Tiflis in 1919 they delighted the public. In this way Lado Gudiashvili was introduced directly to the remarkable artistic inheritance of his country.

But however devoted the young artist was to the spirit of his native culture, however he valued its classical inheritance, he realized already that the further development of Georgian art was connected not only with the preservation of its traditions and fidelity to its unique national qualities, but also with the necessity to absorb, assimilate and transform the experience of European culture. For an artist at the beginning of the twentieth century this meant, above all, turning to contemporary French art. And so at the end of 1919 Lado Gudiashvili, together with two other talented artists, David Kakabadze and Shalva Kikodze, went to Paris.

He lived and worked in France for six years. It is noteworthy, however, that even there he depicted Georgia. His paintings, when they were first exhibited in the Salon d'Automne of 1920, attracted general attention, since the talent of the young Georgian was so unusual to Parisians. The press reviewed his work in highly complimentary terms. For example, a contemporary French art critic wrote: "The Georgian Lado Gudiashvili has studied in Paris and is as familiar with all our artistic movements as he is with all our recipes, but he still remains completely Georgian" (L'Echo de Boulevard, 11 February 1925). "Paris, the world's artistic capital," wrote another critic, "has influenced Lado Gudiashvili, but has not overshadowed his powerful individuality" (Le Petit Journal, 3 October 1924). As if summing up the reviews, the critic André Salmon wrote in his preface to the catalogue of Gudiashvili's oneman show at the Galerie Joseph Billiet held in 1925: "Is not Gudiashvili the herald of an art which the young nation, previously oppressed, will create in the future? I believe that a great future awaits my friend from Tiflis."

These words turned out to be prophetic. In 1925 a book was published in Paris, written by the famous art critic Maurice Raynal and devoted to Gudiashvili's work - a significant expression of the professional recognition which the artist had won. This is also testified to by his artistic connections and friendships with such great painters as Picasso, Modigliani, Derain, Léger and Utrillo, and with such writers as Aragon and Breton.

Despite all this - his major accomplishments in Paris, the extremely successful exhibitions of his works in other French towns, Bordeaux, Marseilles and Lyons, and later in London, Rome, Brussels, Berlin, Amsterdam and New York, the purchase of his works by galleries in France, Spain, Holland and Italy, and, finally, the tempting suggestions by art dealers to remain in France like Picasso - Gudiashvili returned to his native Georgia. He was one of those artists unable to work in a foreign country, however pleasant they find it. This fact clearly attests to the special strength and depth of Gudiashvili's national feeling, that sense of inseparability from the life of one's native land, its culture, people, scenery and language, which for many poets, musicians and painters is a prerequisite for truly creative work. That is why, having derived everything that he needed for the enrichment of Georgian art from the experience of twentieth-century European culture, Gudiashvili returned home eager to develop the art of his native Georgia. Now, we can state with confidence that he has fulfilled this task brilliantly. Of course, Gudiashvili was not the only person who promoted the development of Georgian art in the twentieth century, and he was not alone in trying to find a natural fusion of universal and uniquely national features in Georgian painting, drawing, murals, sculpture and theatrical art, but amongst those major artists who were able to do this, Gudiashvili ranks as one of the foremost.

He was awarded the title of People's Artist of the USSR, and the highest honour in the Soviet Union, the medal of a Hero of Socialist Labour. Books have been written about him not only by professional critics, but also by Academician Georgy Dzhibladze and by the eminent Georgian psychologist Vladimir Norakidze; books devoted to his work have been published in Tbilisi and Moscow, in France, Japan and Hungary. It can be stated without exaggeration that the work of Gudiashvili has become the pride of the Georgian people and a significant contribution to twentieth-century world culture.

His fame has indeed spread far beyond the borders of Georgia and even the former USSR. His magnificent studio in Tbilisi, now a kind of museum, is a must for any visitor to the city who has any connection with the world of art or any interest in it, and once visited, it can never be forgotten.

The question arises, just what gives Gudiashvili's work its poetic significance, its unique charm, its aesthetic importance?

Gudiashvili was an amazingly versatile artist: he produced easel paintings, frescoes and drawings; he worked in ink, water-colours, gouache and mixed media; he illustrated books, produced satirical drawings and stage scenery; he painted historical pictures and portraits, allegorical compositions and decorative panels, and dealt with mythological and political subjects; he turned from epic to lyrical themes, from tragedy to pamphlet; he exalted beauty and love, but did not shrink from depicting ugliness, the horrors of war, the baseness of violence. At times his imagery contains subtle psychological undertones; at others, it is overtly decorative, but still in all this Gudiashvili always remained true to himself - the spectator identifies his works immediately and unmis takably, for he has his own unique and inimitable style, which unites all the diverse elements of his art.

I must point out first of all that there was no element of plagiarism in Gudiashvili's work, neither the ability nor the need to reproduce and imitate something which already exists. He obviously did not often paint from models or from nature. We know but a few pictures of this kind done only in the 1920s, such as A Bridge in Paris (1920) or a series of townscapes (1926), whereas his later canvas Old Tbilisi (1962), a rare example of still life in his work, is conventional and in no way a representation of nature. He dealt with historical subjects only in exceptional cases and rarely painted portraits, and then either from imagination - like the portraits of artists and cultural figures of past centuries - or else from memory, as, for example, the likenesses of Pirosmani, Modigliani and Pasternak. If he painted from life then the model was transformed to such an extent that the portrait appeared as if it were done from imagination (for example, his numerous representations of his daughter Chukurtma). In greater measure than any other Georgian artist Lado Gudiashvili has a predilection for the fantastic, an urge to let his imagination roam freely and so create a novel world in which nature and people, historical events and even myths created in the past by folk fantasy, although relevant to his work, are unable to inhibit its internal freedom. This impulsive creative urge of the artist, stronger than any external influence, leads him rather to produce fantastic or semi-fantastic images and scenes, which could not possibly occur in real life, than to re-create empirical reality. The artist depicts these fantastic motifs, however, with the same seriousness and faith in their authenticity that is characteristic of a myth or a child's tale.

These similarities between Gudiashvili's creative ideas and the primitive forms of depicting reality can be seen not only in the importance which he attaches to the free flight of imagination, but also in the very subjects on which he turns that imagination.

This is proved by the fact that the theme of "Man and Animal" can justifiably be called the central theme in Gudiashvili's work. Perhaps it would be more correct to say "Woman and Animal", since he rarely portrays men in his work and then they usually play only a secondary role. His main subject is invariably Woman, and alongside her, Animal, either in harmonious unity with her or in sharp, tragic opposition to her. In the first, lyrical group of his works, Animal is usually a doe, a gazelle, a horse or some fairy-tale bird; in the second, full of drama and conflict, Animal is a monkey, a bear or a fantastic monster.

Such close attention to the relationship of Woman and Animal can be traced back to the earliest historical conception of the world. This type of consciousness took shape in primitive times, engendered by the peculiarities of human existence at that early stage.

It is well known that Woman's special role as the giver of life, the continuer of the species and the keeper of the hearth made her the subject of early art and of ancient myths. The historical path of artistic and religious veneration to Woman runs from the sculptures of the so-called "Paleolithic Venus", from the identification of Woman, in image form, with the Earth (Mother Earth), with one's native country (Motherland) and with the sunrise (Dawn, Aurora), by almost all the peoples of the world, and from the goddesses of the ancient Greeks (Ceres, Aphrodite, Athena) up to the Virgin Mary of Christianity. It is precisely along this path that an aesthetic attitude towards Woman has arisen, which at times has grown so important that it has overcome erotic, religious and moral ideas about her. However, in mythological perception, Woman is not simply the embodiment of Beauty; at this early stage in the development of social consciousness the aesthetic attitude to the world is not separate from religious, moral and erotic attitudes. This leads to the previously mentioned identification of Woman with various natural phenomena - the moon, spring, water, the earth, totem plants and animals, giving rise to the characteristic mythological ideas of the moon being transformed into a woman, Daphne into a tree, the Princess into a frog, and other similar stories.

In a mythological view of the world animals are regarded as equal to men, able not only to mix, talk and copulate with them but also able to turn themselves into human beings and so become man's other self. Such an understanding of the relations between Man and Animal is preserved today in fairy-tales, but a fairy tale presupposes a definite knowledge that the events depicted in it are fictional, whilst mythological perception reflects the absolute conviction that everything described in the myth is or was real.

Gudiashvili's creative method is very close to these ideas. If his picture Chukurtma in a Red Hat (1944), in which a suitor is singing a serenade to a semi-naked beauty, is compared to his canvas Tskhneti Serenade (1958) where the subject is the same, except that the serenade is being sung not by a man but by a donkey, it becomes clear that there are no basic differences between the two scenes; moreover, the artist uses the same composition in both, as if emphasizing the similar behaviour of Man and Animal. The reverse situation occurs in Gudiashvili's drawing Pastoral (1963), where men are playing the harp and pipes for animals, and this scene is treated just as naturally and seriously as the previous one was. It is always like this with Lado Gudiashvili - in his picture Tale of a Red Horse (1960) or his gouache Walking Dance (1963), where women and horses are taking part in a traditional round dance together; in the different versions of A Wounded Doe; and in the stylized Egyptian relief Song of the Swans (1964), in which both the composition and the character of the singer underline the kinship of women and birds. An animal can also kiss a woman, as in the drawings Doe's Caress (1959) and A Captive of Love (1963); a lion can approach a woman as a lover (Face to Face, 1951); and Rembrandt's Danaë is parodied in The Unschooled Restorer (1942), in which an ugly ape is approaching Danaë. All these types of relationships between Man and Animal are depicted so naturally that we are not surprised when we see how the profile of the soldier in The Warrior of Georgy Saakadze (1964) doubles as that of an animal, precisely as if a dual personality stood before us.

The picture Spring (1960), in which two pairs of lovers - a pair of young people and a pair of young deer - are shown in the same pose, is especially interesting in this regard. The point here is that we do not see this image as a fairy-tale, legend, allegory or parable: the picture seems completely authentic and true to life. The deer are perceived as bewitched humans, behave like humans and seem capable of turning back into a boy and a girl, since this is the world of myth, not of empirical reality. In one of his 1942 series of drawings, Lado - in Georgia, even people who do not know him use this affectionate name - drew a cat sitting in front of a cage with a man in it: in myth these transformations appear as natural as life.

At times, the theme of "Man and Animal" is treated by Gudiashvili in a rather humorous fashion. For example, in the drawing Tandila's Dream (1931), a glutton, who dreams of devouring the rows of animals surrounding him, is depicted as their equal; in this hyperbole, an echo of the mythological exaggeration of human actions can be felt.

It is in this way that the theme of "Man and Animal" is expressed in Gudiashvili's art, and it is not surprising that even in his portraits he includes images of animals. Examples are the portrait of Pirosmani with a gazelle, the virtuoso drawing of Galina Ulanova with a doe and birds, the fascinating graphic portrait of the artist's granddaughter with birds (My Anano, 1972), or his self-portrait of 1950 with a monkey and a doe. Also, the drawing My Muses (1964), where women and gazelles are shown in unified and inspired flight, might serve as an epigraph for his work.

What is the source of Gudiashvili's apparently mythological way of thinking? This question can be answered after looking at his numerous depictions of the Georgian feast of berikaoba-keyenoba, which has been celebrated since pagan times. Men participating in these celebrations often dress up as animals and call themselves berikas. The artist painted this feast many times (e.g. Keinoba in Tbilisi, 1937, and Berikas' Favourite, 1947) and he once did a series of water-colour illustrations for a book by David Rukhadze called Georgian Folk Festival. There Gudiashvili portrayed different types of berikas - half-men, half-beasts - a berika-goat, a berika-boar or a berika on a broom-stick; and on the frontispiece, a general scene of the festivity. The latter reveals the deeply popular character of his work, which consists not in imitating the forms of folk art, but in preserving the essential aspects of ancient Georgian culture, thus allowing the twentieth-century artist to follow the traditions of popular art without borrowing its ready-made forms. This is why the works of Gudiashvili are not variations on folk art, but original creations: it is as if his imagination were competing with popular fantasy.

It seems almost superfluous to note that, in contrast to his distant predecessors, Gudiashvili does not believe in the reality of his fantastic images and situations. As a modern man he rejects them, while his artistic consciousness is filled with a naively childish belief in the authenticity of what it creates, and he is able to convey this feeling of authenticity to us, the viewers, and to give us the pleasure of a return to our childhood.

And indeed, although mythological thinking belongs to the distant past, some of its features are constantly being reproduced in the minds of children, who accept the products of human imagination as real and who fully believe in the authenticity of fairy-tales, so that they do not recognize any basic differences between man and nature. That is why childhood reading includes first and foremost fairy-tales, fables and all sorts of fantastic stories like Alice in Wonderland or Pinocchio.

Gudiashvili's artistic imagination is closest to this type of consciousness: it is no accident that most of the books he has illustrated were written specially for children (for example, the fairy-tale The Saddled Hermes by Tenghiz Abramishvili) or else have become children's literature (like folk-tales or the fables of Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani). We need only to glance at his illustrations to realize how much the artist feels himself in the world of a child's imagination, and how faithfully he re-creates a child's thinking.

Psychologists and art critics have more than once pointed out the link between the aesthetic value of a work of art and the artist's ability to preserve a child's perception of the world. It is in this that the key to the specific charm and unusual content of Lado's work lies. Of course, he does not imitate a child - to prove this, it is sufficient to note that his central motif is after all not an animal, but a beautiful woman; and, as well, he reveals the dramatic side of human life, which is hidden from a child's consciousness. Therefore, Gudiashvili cannot be accused of infantilism, for in the orientation of his works towards a child-like perception, the artist nevertheless speaks directly to the adult. The point is that the artist is first of all appealing to those sides of the adult's consciousness which link him with his past, with everything that each of us has been able to preserve from his own childhood and from the childhood of mankind.

We have examined Lado Gudiashvili's artistic method. Let us now see how it is expressed in his work. For Gudiashvili, as for any painter, perception of the world is vision in the literal meaning of the word, i.e. direct, sensual and concrete perception. Every painter, however, perceives the world in his own way. Lado perceives it in concrete three-dimensional forms and in the individual features of various objects and actions, hence the graphic character and clear-cut linear design of his drawings as well as of many compositions in gouache, water-colours and oils. Not infrequently, especially in his book illustrations, he is satisfied with just one delicate contour. Without lifting his pen from the paper he gracefully outlines a hand, neck, face and eyes in Indian ink. Lado Gudiashvili is a brilliant draughtsman, and that is why an outline is often enough for us in his drawings to distinguish the shape of a human or animal body and to capture its sense of motion. The more one views these drawings, enjoying the perfect accuracy of the line, the expressiveness of the contour and the musical rhythm of the design, the greater is the impression that the artist draws with his eyes shut and thus transforms his empirical observations into a sort of inner vision of the essential properties of the ideal form - an ideal hand or an ideal breast, or the ideal outline of a face. This is true of his illustrations for Georgian folk-tales or for Rustaveli's epic The Knight in a Pantera's Skin (1934, 1939), or of such works as My Muses (1964), Walking Dance (1963), A Picture of Life (1964), Lovers (1960) and Fortune-teller (1969). It goes without saying that the artist proceeds from nature, but he treats nature as a manifestation of some kind of ideal perfection, a "divine archetype", as Plato would have termed it, rather than as a direct visual sensation or an individual phenomenon. Plato, no doubt, would have acknowledged Gudiashvili as his type of artist - someone who depicts the ideal as real, dispensing with naturalistic copying of empirical reality.

It is only natural that in his visual idiom Lado Gudiashvili resorts so freely and on such a scale to the technique which we call "distortion" for the lack of a better term. To quote the artist: "I do not know what makes me distort figures. But I know that it is necessary for me to do so in order to express the inner world of a man." A better word would here be "transformation", for the object is not deprived of its original form but is altered for the sake of some significant "super-goal", as the theatrical producer Stanislavsky expressed it. Gudiashvili creates the image of the Beautiful Woman quite naturally and with an elegance that is uniquely his. He varies the image all the time but in every variation it retains easily recognizable features - the neck is longer than it is in reality, the whole body is longer, the fingers are more nimble, the eyes are exaggeratedly almond-shaped and so on. Women and does such as these inhabit only the imaginary world of Gudiashvili; they are created by the artist rather than taken from reality. Lado resorts to distortion in the real sense of the word when he depicts something ugly, horrible or phantasmagoric, for example, the characters of Georgian mythology: demonic devs, semi-human, semi-bestial berikas and monstrous heads of chimeras. In creating these images, he deliberately distorts the real form of a human or animal body, for the more perfect Beauty is, the more hideous must be Ugliness opposing it. Here we come across one more principle of the mythological approach to the creation of art forms, which Gudiashvili has mastered to perfection.

All this probably explains the lack of studies from nature or sketches of everyday life in the artist's studio. Lado normally draws from imagination and not from nature, and so every one of his drawings is compositionally perfect and complete in itself. "A true realist", declares the artist, "cannot depict nature with out a model." But there is no real model embodying "the essence of man or nature", and hence "the artist has to grasp, through fantasy and thought, the very essence of the phenomena he depicts."

But even when he draws portraits from life Gudiashvili still sees the ideal, the "potential image" of his sitter, if we may use this expression. Such is the case with the portraits of his daughter Chukurtma, or granddaughter Anano, or the ballerinas Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya - he shows in his finished work what he imagines rather than represents his model's real features. This reminds us of Sophocles' remark: "I represent men as they ought to be, but Euripides portrays them as they are." Lado Gudiashvili follows Sophocles' principle. In this respect, the canvas Portrait of an Art Scholar (My Muse), painted in 1976, is very characteristic. It depicts his wife, Nina Gudiashvili, holding his portrait; we do not, however, see any physical resemblance to the model, for the artist seeks to convey something entirely different: using majestic and charming forms, he reveals his model's inner nature, her perceptions of the world and her spiritual type. Is this embellishment and idealization of the mode1? The answer is no, for the artist never introduces into the image any traits foreign to the model, and what he does is a "realization" of the model, i.e. the revelation and development of spiritual and material features inherent but latent in the model. Thus in depicting an actual man Gudiashvili paints the Beautiful Man because that is his way of looking at the world. In essence this is the principle of classical art rather than Neo-Classicism, that of Renaissance artists rather than academic imitators. The artist himself frankly acknowledges this principle in his art and the tradition he follows: "We must paint the ideal," he writes. "Rustaveli taught us to portray the majestic and the ideal in life."

This transformation of the real into the ideal does not concern only plastic forms of reality but also its colour characteristics. Gudiashvili was one of the first painters to break the tradition of the dark tonal scheme thought to be an inherent feature of Georgian national painting. His French experience helped him to find brighter shades, to master the language of decorative contrasting combinations of colours, to appreciate the expressive value of both linear and three-dimensional rendering of space. As a result Gudiashvili's works became richly colourful; the artist now aimed to reconcile two different trends - the trend towards conveying the rich colours of the real world and the trend towards concentrating on vivid decorative effects. It seems, however, that his interest in depicting sensually concrete things gradually gave way to a search for decorative effects, his compositions growing more and more conventional in their colour range. Thus his early canvas By the Black Brook, painted in 1925, brings to mind the French Impressionists, while his pictures of the 1930s and 1940s, such as The Whirlwind Dance (1937) and Girls by Their Favourite Spring (1943), are characterized by heavily impasted texture; and, eventually, the series of fine gouaches, beautiful pastels and drawings in mixed media (including elements of collage), executed in the 1960s and 1970s, mark the culmination of this trend. The latter period is best exemplified by such works as The Radiant One (1968), Fortune-teller (1969) or The Diamond of Armazi (1973). The trend of this development will be clearly manifest if we compare the gouache Tsiuri by a Spring executed in 1969 with the 1925 picture By the Black Brook, which share almost the same theme, or the image of Chukurtma in the 1964 gouache and in the canvas Chukurtma in a Red Hat (1944) painted some twenty years before it. It is also very significant that in this late period of Gudiashvili's work pictorial design was not subordinated to line drawing, and as a result he produced unusual pieces such as In the World of Colour (1968). It is worth mentioning that during his last year Gudiashvili introduced gold in his colour scheme, assigning a very important role to it, that also in this period he began to use decorative material such as coloured foil in his collages (Rainbow, 1969; Fortune-teller, 1969) and sometimes imitated mosaics on a sheet of paper (A Fairy from Nabakhtevi, 1971; A Princess from Vardzia, 1967). All this could be a manifestation of his unrealized dream of creating monumental decorative mosaics.

In terms of colour the logic of the artist's development was the same: he tended to move away from the vividly concrete colours of reality to the ideal, imaginary world, preeminently decorative in colouring, which he was creating. Gudiashvili perceived this imaginary world inwardly rather than outwardly, and that is why the images created by the artist more often than not acquire supersensual and symbolic meaning, signifying not only what can be visually observed in them but also what can be perceived emotionally or mentally. For you cannot really see the Beautiful Woman, or Love, Peace, the Motherland, Good or Evil - and nevertheless these images are the subjects of Gudiashvili's art rather than the actual woman, real event or concrete situation he is representing.

This explains the peculiar fact that Gudiashvili's portrayals of nude women have never been vulgar or erotic, or done in a manner intended to arouse lust. His interest in female images sprang from the fact that for him they symbolized some general notions: ideas of Life, Beauty, Love, Good, Tenderness, Peace and Art. In his drawing Quest for the Secret of Beauty (1942) the ideally beautiful is personified by Woman; in other drawings in this series female images symbolize the unity of Beauty and Art ("Who knows when it will come in handy?", 1942); and in The Ravisher (1942) the contrast of Woman and Beast epitomizes the struggle between Good and Evil.

Gudiashvili did not, however, use only straightforward symbolism: even in those instances when he depicted seemingly concrete people and real situations he usually gave his pieces titles which lead our imagination to a different plane of perception and interpretation of what we see. Examples of this are: The Song of Leaving for the War (1964), Spring (1960) and Pastoral (1963). Such works are manifestations of the artist's irresistible drive to transcend the limits of direct observation and to fill his images with broad generalizations and poetry without depriving them of their sensual elegance. Thus the compositional aspects of painting became especially significant to the artist. Preliminary studies were of no importance for there was no longer any direct transfer onto canvas of objects seen in real life, and because of this, the composition of every picture has to be carefully thought out beforehand. The major principles of this stylistic method appeared in the early stages of Gudiashvili's work and changed little with time. The most important of these was the striving for extreme simplicity in composition.

His compositions are most frequently portrait like and contain only one figure, usually in the central foreground, either facing us or turning slightly away, against a background without any details. Sometimes there are two- or three-figure arrangements but they still follow the same principle: quietly posing models who calmly look straight into the eyes of the artist and the viewer. They are in the same place and their spiritual condition is identical, but there is no other link between them, for there is usually no plot; even simple narrative is rarely seen in Gudiashvili's works.

If the artist chose after all to link his characters by introducing some sort of action in the picture, this action always took place in the foreground and ran parallel to the plane of the picture, and therefore was easy to grasp at first glance. The artist avoided all complex and sophisticated subjects and limited himself to depicting the most simple and natural collisions: the struggle of two forces, which was expressed in the straightforward conflict between Man and Beast, and sometimes, less frequently, between men. Thus Lado's characters have no inner conflicts, dramatic versatility or nuances in their spiritual lives. Their psychological state is always simple and clear; they are integral types - either in their spiritual beauty, peace of mind, ease and tranquillity or in their cruelty, malice and frenzy. In any case the artist did not depict that which is fleeting, transitional or changeable in men, but rather that which is steady, constant and lasting, i.e. that property which embodies the essence of the human type. As a result even Gudiashvili's small pictures give us the impression of something monumental. It seems as if they are meant to be translated into wall paintings; and we should remember that in his youth Lado studiously copied medieval frescoes in churches and in 1946 he painted murals in the Kashveti Church in Tbilisi. This experience can be traced in his paintings and drawings. This is the framework of the world created by Gudiashvili, a serene, innerly significant world devoid of vanity and haste even in its dramatic manifestations.

When we compare Gudiashvili's artistic works of the 1960s and 1970s with his earlier ones, we can see that his talent did not grow old. It was rather the contrary: the artist turned to new means of artistic expression, to pastel and mixed media with the use of collage; his drawing became amazingly light and his decorative motifs bold and expressive. All these typical features bear witness to a kind of "rejuvenation" which came to Lado in these years. Probably that victory over age, that overcoming of the drama of reality through belief in its harmony was the effect of Lado's passionate art on his own life.

The interpretation of reality in Gudiashvili's work is outwardly rather simple and yet in essence profoundly philosophical. I would sum up the simple and profound ideas, both vital for us today and yet universal and eternal, which

underlie Gudiashvili's art, as follows: our world is essentially beautiful and harmonious, there could and should be Love and Friendship, Good and Beauty; but Evil, Hate, Ugliness and Violence also exist in the world and bring with them suffering and misfortune, tragedy and disaster, all caused by the violence of Evil and its attempts to destroy Good and Beauty. Gudiashvili took little interest in the concrete, empirical, everyday forms of conflict which resulted from this hostility. He did not depict daily life, and even the tragedy of war was expressed by him in symbolic and generalized images, such as The Greedy Raven of War (1942) or The Monkey's Target (1942). Gudiashvili rarely let all the conflicts, tragedies and dramatic aspects of life enter the world of his imagery; excluding the series of drawings of 1942, which were his direct response to the Nazi invasion, we can find only isolated works f a dramatic nature -for instance, A Wretch 1930), Motherhood (1968), The Death of Niko Pirosmani (1946) or White Maidens and Black Wolves (1965). It was a completely different mood - lyrical optimism, the enthusiastic assertion of life - that dominated his work. His satirical and grotesque view of the world arose from the acute pain which social evil caused him, whether it was violence to the human body (The Ravisher, 1942) or to the creative work of the human spirit (The Extraction of Brains, 1955; Design for a Monument to Reactionary Censorship, 1942). Gudiashvili asserts by all his art that Evil is not the major force in life and therefore we should not gaze too frequently or too long into its horrible face. We should rather look at The Radiant One (1968) and enjoy the numerous variations of sparkling Beauty - the only thing truly deserving of worship.

Gudiashvili created a particular cult of female beauty in his work; in this he follows in the footsteps of Raphael, Leonardo, Giorgione, Rubens, Ingres and Renoir.

However, the beauty of a woman's body and the mystery of the "smile of the fresco" are not self-contained values in Lado Gudiashvili's works, as they are in the paintings of most of his predecessors and even of his contemporaries (including Modigliani and Bashbeuk-Melikian). They are the expression of some other supersensual principle, the essential quality of reality, Harmony manifested as Beauty and Love. And in this respect the conception of the world underlying Gudiashvili's art goes back to the philosophical and aesthetical world-view defined many centuries ago by Pythagoreans, a view to which art has always tended to return despite all the drama of history, because it rejects the temporary domination of social evil in human life. The work of Lado Gudiashvili is one more artistic proof of this simple and poetical truth, which after much repetition never grows stale and is full of meaning for mankind. Gudiashvili proves this by absolutely convincing means - true and great art filled with a sincere and irrevocable confidence in his conception of reality.

Original and markedly individual as it is, Gudiashvili's art is also manifestly national, and attains the summits of the universal humanist interpretation of life. But how can this dual dialectics exist? How can the individual and national, the national and universal be organically joined?

This is possible because neither the individual nor the national in Gudiashvili's art is confined to the external features of his paintings or drawings - their specific form or means of expression - but permeate his art at all levels, both representative and emotional. I have already made some general comments on that stamp of individuality which marks Gudiashvili's whole work. The artist realized this individuality in many ways. He brought a theme of his own into Georgian art and remained true to it throughout a career spanning half a century. He created and developed this theme according to a world view and philosophical ideas which were entirely original and constituted an inseparable part of his personality. In addition, to express this theme, he evolved his own language which had been unknown in Georgian, Near Eastern or European art.

Indeed Gudiashvili took the motifs of his art mainly from Georgian life. At first he treated ethnographical subjects, such as scenes from the life of the so-called kinto - picturesque Georgian bohemians. These include Kinto Revelling with a Woman (1919), Khashi (1919), A Meal at Dawn (1920), Toasting at Dawn (1920), Tsotskhali (1920) and so on. The characters depicted in them and their surroundings were of course typically Georgian, but national features in this series were external rather than internal. It is quite understandable that these paintings astonished the French and won their hearts, and that they sold well and found their homes in many foreign countries, from Spain to the USA. It is equally natural, however, that the artist himself never again depicted those subjects once he had returned to his homeland, as if he felt that such treatment of the Georgian national character was too narrow and limited. This approach seemed good enough in faraway France, but it turned out to be superficial at home, especially at that time when great revolutionary changes in the nation's life were taking place. Gudiashvili always felt very acutely the conflicts of the old and the new in the life of his native people. He makes use of this theme in one of his pictures named The Old and the New (1932). Gudiashvili has studied with deep interest the features of the new Georgian way of life both in towns and villages. At first, however, the international character of mass industrial production, technical equipment and dress, and new forms of human behaviour threatened annihilation of national originality and for that reason the artist turned back to the past, to the glorious, heroic and legendary history of his people. Thus began the cycle of large canvases of the 1930s and 1940s, which included portraits of great Georgian writers and artists, such as those of Akaky Tsereteli, Nikoloz Baratashvili and Niko Pirosmanashvili, and, later, the narrative pictures Berikas Beating a Policeman (1938), A Drinking Song of Old Tbilisi (1940), Irakly II (1940), The Worthy Answer (1945; dedicated to Queen Tamar) and others. However, the historical themes did not long prevail in Gudiashvili's art. He gradually arrived at another way of capturing the spirit of the Georgian people, a re-creation of folk art, legends and myths. Starting in the 1930s, Gudiashvili often illustrated books of classical Georgian poetry and folklore, The Knight in a Panther's Skin by Rustaveli, The Wisdom of a Lie by Orbeliani, as well as folk-tales. Scrutinizing these works, we can see that contact with the treasures of folk art and the national sources helped Gudiashvili to better comprehend the profound meaning of Georgian culture, its folk roots and the whole framework of Georgian artistic consciousness. In all these book illustrations we feel the uniqueness of the national character very clearly, because they are based on a most deep study of Georgian history, everyday life, traditions and customs. It is no accident that Gudiashvili once illustrated a scientific research book, Georgian Folk Festival by Rukhadze, already mentioned, and that several works by Gudiashvili are in the Georgian museums of history and ethnography, literature, and the theatre.

Gudiashvili, however, could not be satisfied with this secondary role as illustrator or interpreter of things created by others, even in the case of folk art. The very nature of his talent opposed it. The artist turned more and more often to independent works based on the images of his fancy. He created myths of his own aiming to penetrate those layers of national life and culture which had not found artistic expression even in folk art or in Rustaveli's epic poem. It was in the late 1930s that Gudiashvili produced his first works of this kind; in them, he mainly developed the theme of dance (The Whirlwind Dance, 1937; The Dancer Leila, 1939; and Court Dancers, 1940). While depicting beautiful, sometimes semi-nude dancing girls, conveying a feeling of vigorous movement, making use of bright colours and emphasizing the vivid temperament of the dancers, the artist strove to demonstrate certain significant features of the Georgian national character. The most eloquent manifestation of this kind is The Whirlwind Dance. It has no outward national features and therefore the melodious and rhythmical quality of this turbulent and swift Georgian dance becomes much more pronounced.

Gudiashvili often dealt with the theme of dance, and musical subjects in general were frequent in his work. I believe that this cannot be properly explained only by the impressions he received in his early childhood or by individual peculiarities of his artistic gift. It is because love of song and dance is deeply rooted in the life of the Georgian people and vividly expresses many aspects of their national character. No matter what explanation we give, Lado's works are manifestly of a musical nature. The movements and gestures of his characters are rhythmical and melodious even in those situations where they are not actually dancing or making music but simply gathering fruit or playing with animals. The whole of Gudiashvili's art is permeated with this amazing unity of artistic idiom - the drawing, colour and rhythmical construction of the picture, on the one hand, and its musical and choreographic quality on the other. The movement of line is also musical in his works, as is the correlation of colour, which follows not the logic of empirical reality but the demands of decorative harmony and ornamental rhythm. At the same time the form of a human or animal body is not rendered as a static abstraction but expressed dynamically, in smooth and graceful movement, as if in a real dance; and this musical and "pantomimic" rendering of human actions and, indeed, of the behaviour of deer, gazelles, horses and birds, provides us with a glimpse into the Georgian national character.

Many years ago, the Georgian artist Tarial Kherkheulidze gave a very colourful description of Lado Gudiashvili performing the Georgian folk dance kintauri: "He dances jerkily, with a violent grace, twisting his body in turbulent arabesques. He dances with every muscle, with his eyes, his eyebrows, his entire body. In barbarous ecstasy or childish sincerity he is carried away by the crazy and lithe rhythms until he is almost convulsed. It is as if the God of Dance has seized him in his claws and now directs him and plays with him as if he were a steel spring... The major line of this dance is the hyperbole of gesture, of oriental gesture at that. And one must remember that oriental gesture is hyperbolic in itself. As for Lado, he was always boiling with hyperboles as an artist..."

The author concluded quite accordingly: "Maybe you need to see Lado dancing to fully appreciate his canvases? Don't his dances and canvases interpret each other'? Don't we find similar features both in his dancing and his painting - the versatile and passionate line of an old Georgian fresco, the sensual elegance of a Persian miniature and the modern expressionist gesture with its feverish, magic spell?" Thus, it should come as no surprise to learn that Gudiashvili was once invited to stage kinto dances in the drama performance Solar Eclipse in Georgia. Here is the origin of the rhythmic, musical atmosphere which dominates his painting, and this is why it is not abstract or decorative but serves to express the national character of his perception of the world.

The 1942 series of grotesque and dramatic drawings inspired by the tragedy of the Nazi invasion had great significance for consolidating national Georgian elements in the art of Gudiashvili. I have already commented on them; here I need to emphasize that their mythological narratives of Life and Death, Peace and War, Love and Hatred, Good and Evil, Beauty and Ugliness, Humanism and Bestiality, Art and Vulgarity are particularly striking because of the way the artist translates universal ideas into national forms almost without recourse to external ethnographical, historical and archaeological material. Such details are very rare in those drawings and if present, are not very important; more obvious are the associations with Goya's great series of aquatints, The Disasters of War and Los Caprichos. But the train of thought, the perception and the artistic interpretation of life are unmistakably national and highly original. We can see this quite clearly if we consider the role given to the image of the Beautiful Woman in this series.

Worship of woman in Georgia can be traced back to the most ancient mythological beliefs. In Georgian hunting mythology there was an image of the so-called "Lord of Animals" or the "Keeper of Animals". At first it was personified in a leopard, wild ox, bird or a snake; later it assumed a human image, for a time, a beautiful woman with fair skin and golden (sometimes black) hair, usually called Daly. (It is therefore not surprising that Daly is one of Lado's favourite names for his female images.) The development of patriarchal relationships in society resulted in another transformation of the image of the "Lord of Animals". It now took the shape of a man - a son, brother, father or a husband of the "Queen of the Forest", who retained purely aesthetic functions symbolizing an intimate link with the world of the beasts and of eternal beauty. Hence women in Georgian folk consciousness are even today a symbol of beauty, and beasts or men have a dual role; accordingly, their conduct towards a woman can be friendly or inimical - worship or enslavement of her.

This distinctively national attitude to women found its expression in the art of Gudiashvili, and it is no coincidence that many art critics consider the Venus of Georgia to be the major image of his entire artistic career. Usually, this is a half-length representation of an imaginary or semi-legendary maiden. The artist sometimes gives her a name but more often calls her in some abstract or symbolic way: the "Beauty", the "Fairy", the "Radiant One" and so on, thus emphasizing her fantastic origin. The artist's favourite composition includes three beauties standing side by side, different in appearance and at the same time sharing some similar features - they are variations of one common type, the Venus of Georgia. The artist may call them Actresses (1960), or Nobles from Vani (1962), or The Awarded Ones (1971), but in fact they are always variations of one and the same national type of female beauty. The artist pours his deepest emotions, admiration and chivalrous devotion into their portrayal because for him they are not just beauties but the embodiment of the Georgian national ideal. This seems to be the only type of woman's beauty that the artist is able to depict, for even in his illustrations for La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, he endowed the novel's heroine with some features of a Georgian woman; he did the same in the portrait of the Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova.

There is an old Georgian legend explaining why there are so many beautiful women in Georgia. The king of India Shedat decided to create an earthly paradise. He intended to gather the most beautiful women, houris, from all over the world and to settle them in his paradise. But when the royal envoys with their group of houris passed through the Caucasus on their way back to India, they learned that God had severely punished king Shedat for his impudent ambition. The women reasoned like this: "There is no point in going to India now, and returning home is likewise out of the question. We will stay here, for this beautiful land is better than any paradise."

In classical and contemporary Georgian poetry we encounter many poems with this attitude to woman as a symbol of the Motherland, and Gudiashvili is the poet of this eternal theme in painting

In July 1980, at the age of 84, Lado Gudiashvili died.