His whole life was a chain of intermittent ascents and descents, of illusions and disenchantments, of contradictory, even preposterous actions - all indicating an impetuous character and an ungoverned temperament, which made him a homeless pauper and eventually led him to a solitary death (his grave has never been discovered). Yet one can read a diferent story into his life: that of a man with a prodigious talent whose only instinct was to obey his call, casting off all temptation and surmounting every obstacle to achieve self-expression; a man who reached his goal of full creative freedom and who finally dissolved his very self to serve that goal and thus achieved truly phenomenal self-expression. Pirosmani tried his hand at a number of occupations: he tried to set up an establishment to paint shop signs, worked as a railway guide, engaged (indeed, quite successfully) in trade until the urge to paint became irrepressible. He then dropped everything to be an artist; not an amateur who paints in his leisure hours but a professional who lives by his brush. This turning point came only in the artist's late thirties, coinciding with the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a few years he made a name for himself in the part of Tiflis which is centered round the railway station and which henceforth became his one and only retreat. Pirosmani was not a painter in the way we understand that term; not somebody who shuts himself up in his studio to follow his vocation. He had a large clientèle made up of the owners of small shops and pubs, and painted signs for these establishments, for bear-houses and, most often, for the dukhans (popular small Caucasian restaurants). For the same clientèle he provided large paintings and murals, and also painted window panes. Occasionally he performed simpler tasks, such as whitewashing a wall, renovating a number on a house façade or giving a wheel-barrow a new coat of paint. A painting career of this kind was not at all extraordinary in Tiflis. At that time the city had a regular amkar (guild) that engaged precisely in this work. Pirosmani, however, did not fit properly into this age-old system.
He was not a formal member of the amkar, having never gone through the long years of apprenticeship. He was entirely self-taught, avidly absorbing all that he saw that could serve him as a model or archetype: works of folk art, the shop signs of Tiflis, icons and medieval church murals, deplorable reproductions of the Old Masters, portraits of the well-known Tiflis school, hack illustrations in periodicals, Russian popular prints, eighteenth century Persian portraits, pictures in lithographic Persian books, and even the ordinary photographs which at that time adorned the walls of many homes.
The artist assimilated and refashioned this mass of random and motley visual impressions ranging from the vulgar to the sublime. He adopted, assembled, surmised and invented until he arrived at an amazingly integral and original painterly system of his own, which bore no resemblance to anything that existed then or before his own time, neither to the "academic" art nor to the clever and competent craft of the shop-sign painters. He opted for a medium never used by anyone, his famous black oilcloth, developing its unique possibilities.
Pirosmani's life style itself was far from the ordinary. A homeless vagabond, he only rarely occupied a cubbyhole in a cellar or under a staircase, and as often as not he would sleep where he happened to be working at the time, in a shop or dukhan. His worldly possessions were limited to the clothes he wore and a small home-made case to hold his paints and brushes. He was content to get a pittance for his work, and would often work free, just for his board and wine.
The artist was very popular in his milieu, and his work was sincerely admired. He was much sought after, his signs were a feature of the streets in the railway district of Tiflis, and his paintings adorned the interiors of countless establishments on these streets. He even had his patrons and followers who collected and cherished his works (some collectors had several dozen of Pirosmani's pieces). This is hardly surprising since although his vast talent and matching insight placed him high above his rather common, uncultivated milieu, he was flesh and blood of this milieu, and he shared the tastes, aspirations, likes and illusions of these people - in short, their general outlook.
It might well appear that the popularity of the artist, circumscribed by this milieu, was not destined to overstep its limits. To educated people who had a different social and cultural background his works were bound to appear as mere appurtenances of shops and dukhans, and not as an art, somewhat on a par with a streetorgan or an artificial palm-tree; as appealing and funny things, perhaps, but without any bearing whatever on "true", "lofty" art. What is more, this is how the artist himself must have seen his own efforts. Let us note in passing that this approach was only natural at the time; but even today, a condescending attitude to Pirosmani, without any appreciation of the true calibre of his art, is not uncommon.
Yet the way was opening up in art at the beginning of the twentieth century for a drastic revision of the traditional disdainful attitude to all the "primitive" art forms (meaning all those that fell short of the academic canon), from African sculptures and early rock drawings to popular prints and shop signs. Accordingly, the educated élite was bound to discover Pirosmani, which it did in 1912.
Credit for this discovery goes to three young men: the artists Kirill Zdanevich and Mikhail Le Dentue and the poet Ilya Zdanevich, Kirill's brother. Once they became familiar with Pirosmani's work, they were carried away it and started a vigorous publicity campaign, writing articles and reading papers about the artist and sending his works to exhibitions. They also began to collect his works and to take records of his life.
This undertaking was far from easy. Fierce controversy raged around Pirosmani's name in the art world. This was quite natural since new art can affirm itself only with the greatest difficulty, and it is by overcoming this very difficult start that it eventually proves its durability, its true merit. The bad part of it was that Pirosmani's recognition, which was so natural and had such farreaching implications, was powerless to affect his own life. He spent his remaining years in increasing solitude, losing both spiritual and physical strength. The recollections of those who occasionally succeeded in tracing his whereabouts and visiting him, are heart-rending testimonials of an irreversible decline. He died in April 1918, having lain ill for three days in a cold cellar which he inhabited at the time.
However bizarre and extraordinary the life of Niko Pirosmani, his posthumous destiny, or rather that of his paintings, has proved to be truly fantastic.
Today he enjoys worldwide renown. His works are deposited in major art galleries and reproduced in glossy art books and catalogues. Exhibitions of his works make triumphant tours of European capitals. He is compared in earnest with famous masters of different nations and periods. Poems, short stories, novelettes and essays are devoted to him, as well as plays and films. His image appears in countless paintings, drawings and engravings. Shortly before his death the great Picasso drew Pirosmani's portrait; and enterprising metal chasers oblige wills a mass of his likenesses in copper and brass. Eager journalists interview the old men of Tbilisi, dig into archives, pore over old periodicals in the hope (often successful) of finding some minute details that have escaped the attention of biographers. Naturally enough, this popularity is strongly tinged with curiosity and sympathy nurtured by the somewhat poeticized image of a solitary homeless painter. The important thing, however, is the continuously changing scope of the artistic appreciation of his work.
At the 1913 exhibition of the Mishen (Target) art society, Pirosmani's pictures were first shown to the public, but they were displayed next to children's drawings, anonymous shop signs and the works of two amateurs of whom we know nothing but their names. Pirosmani was sincerely admired, but mainly as an exponent of naive art, endearing for its pure integrity and its promise of new trends in painting. Soon after that, however, he began in earnest to be compared to Henri Rousseau, until then the reigning primitivist artist. This comparison persisted for a long time and subsequently achieved the status of an equation (Rousseau the great French artist and Pirosmani the great Georgian). Finally, at the Moscow - Paris Exhibition (1981) the dividing eline between the two artists came into sharp focus, leaving Rousseau rooted in the nineteenth century and fully belonging to it, and Pirosmani, only eighteen years his junior, firmly perceived as a twentieth century master.
Indeed, the primitivist style speaks only of the artist's origin and the nature of his work but not of his true stature (similarly, the work of an artist proficient in academic painting may be banal and hackneyed in the extreme). Primitive art (to which the names of "naive" and "amateur" are also applied) is a vast realm and it has thousands of exponents at every level. Of course, they all share, though to a varying extent, a pure vision of the world and spontaneous emotional expression, and it is these qualities that make this art so endearing. It stands to reason that its vast stock, which is only partially known to us, is not all of the same standard. It has its rare great figures such as Henri Rousseau, Louis Séraphine, Ivan Generalic, Edward Hicks, and Grandma Moses. Pirosmani stands out even alongside them.
The legacy of any artist, whether "academic" or "primitivist", owes its stature only to the significance of his inner self. The richer and more complex that self, the richer and more complex the art, which we can never hope to comprehend in full. Every generation is bound to see in it something new, something that has eluded us. The posthumous rediscovery of Pirosmani is a good case in point, and it continues to add new dimensions to our understanding of his work.
Every sensitive and attentive viewer must have felt how many dimensions his art possesses. Viewing his works at an exhibition or in the permanent display of the Museum of Fine Arts of the Georgian Republic (this museum has the great majority of Pirosmani's extant works) or simply leafing through the plates in an art book, we share this first, general impression: the impression of seeing something extraordinary, something that is a rare wonder - a fantastic world painted with amazingly vibrant colours.
A closer look, however, makes this first glimpse seem deceptive.
The colouring which initially appeared so vibrant, is in actual fact dark and contained, with rare flashes of bright colour; black clearly predominates, lending the paintings a certain austerity and even gloom. The subjects are not at all extraordinary and are taken mostly from everyday life; some details, figures, even entire scenes often recur in diferent versions. This might. suggest a certain monotony or lack of imagination. There are neither allegories nor symbols, nor any allusions that have to be explained. Everything seems to be clearly perceptible, except that occasionally one might welcome a short comment by an ethnologist or by someone well versed in certain details of that distant life style. And in actual fact everything is perceptible because Pirosmani worshipped, as does every peasant, the beauty of the physical world, its diversity and richness; and he was endowed, as is every artist, with the indestructible urge to multiply this beauty by reproducing it in his works. There, we see the apotheosis of sensuous, material and infinitely desirable life. Everything radiates health and vigour, everything is presented in bold relief, is strikingly tangible and seems to burst out of the paintings in an effort to challenge life, aspiring to be even more beautiful and full-blooded than reality. Every subject presented by the artist is of such tangibility and excellence that it appears the very embodiment of its type: a shashlik epitomizes the tempting succulence of all the shashliks of the world, a vine - the mellowness of all grapes, a radish - the crisp freshness of all radishes.
Yet as one gets a deeper insight into Pirosmani's world, which is so material and wide open, one comes to realize that the initial, spontaneous feeling of wonder is fully justified.
The wonder lies in the artist's approach; far from trying to reproduce directly what he sees, he aspires to conjure up new realities in keeping with the rules of artistic creation. Mikhail Larionov, the outstanding artist who saw Pirosmani's work more than seventy years ago, commented: "...the few means with which he was able to accomplish so much, are truly magnificent". This brief comment might seem too general, but in actua1 fact it contains a concise formula of Pirosmani's approach: a frugality that achieves an effect of richness.
This frugality applies first of all to the style of the artist, who, instead of faithfully portraying an object, renders it with a few assured brush strokes. It applies again to the colouring, based as a rule on few shades (four, three, even two) which nevertheless give the illusion of a full variety of colour. It applies also to the style of drawing, which omits details to boldly generalize the form - to a degree which very few artists have ever been able to achieve.
For Pirosmani the physical world was not something to be depicted or mirrored; he saw it as the material out of which he could build a new world, a new reality - similar but not identical to the one that existed. The definition "fantastic realism" which emerged in a different setting and referred to something different, fits the art of Pirosmani to perfection: he is a strictly realist painter as regards the authenticity of the material he selected and reproduced, but his perception of this material is in effect fantastic. That is why one should under no circumstances look to his work for "a portrayal of the life" of Georgia and Tiflis in his time; for that, there are other, more circumstantial and accurate sources. That is why one should not be taken in by his seeming artlessness: behind it lies a complex and significant content.
The main thing for Pirosmani was to embody in a clear and convincing way his idealized, exalted notions of the essence of man, of his status and destination in the world, of his relationships with other people and with nature. These notions themselves are evocative of the ideals of the Georgian people which took shape over the ages and were perpetuated in their folklore, national character and special life style; and the artist's worship of reality vested these notions with compelling tangibility. This union of the spiritual and sublime, on the one hand, and the sensuous and earthly, on the other, is one of the most distinctive features of the Georgian national character; what is more, both these principles are manifested in their extremes, as is seen in Georgian culture and art. It was in Georgia that the lovely comparison of poetry with a flower arose: it is blue because it looks into the skies - into the sublime, but it has a red stalk because it is nurtured by the sap of the earth.
Every work by Pirosmani is a daring transfiguration of reality.
A considerable number of his extant works (at least a quarter of them) are portraits of specific people. We include in this category not only Portrait of Alexander Garanov, Sarkis Pouring Out Wine or Portrait of a Railwayman: Misha Metekheli, etc., but also those portraits that bear no name and were traditionally regarded as characteristic figures of Tiflis: A Janitor, Chef de Cuisine, Woman with a Beer Mug, Little Girl with a Balloon, etc.
They were real portraits, each commissioned by somebody, and they hung on the walls of shops and dukhans: paintings of relatives, friends or acquaintances. Placed next to one another, these portraits would make a gallery of people whom the artist knew, and a true-to-life gallery at that, as he was able to attain remarkable likenesses. This is no mere supposition. In one case it was possible to compare the figures in a group portrait (Feast at Gvimradze's) with miraculously preserved old photographs, and the likenesses were beyond any doubt. Observing this motley gallery of men and women of different age, profession, status, character, outward, appearance, etc., one nevertheless gets the impression that there is something, perhaps as important as consanguinity, that all of them share. It brings to the mind the members of one clan: children and the old, men and women, high-brows and semi-literates, those who have made it to the top and those who are social failures. All of them have a certain likeness in their very dark hair and eyes, in the noticeably rounded faces and eyebrows. All of them have the same characteristic traits - seriousness, nobility and dignity.
Portraying so many people who were so different apparently ought to have challenged the artist with a variety of solutions: one of the personages might be thoughtful, another gay; one might be still, another gesticulating; one might be in communication with the viewer or with a companion, another self-contained; one might be portrayed engaged in some task, another openly posing for his portrait. The history of portraiture demonstrates countless opportunities of effectively conveying the inner self of an individual.
We find none of that diversity in the portraits done by Pirosmani, whose models seem to be stripped or their professional, psychological and domestic surroundings and placed face-to-face with the viewer. They exist by themselves, in the quiet concentration with which all of them are endowed, engrossed in their own thoughts and feelings, but willing to share with us their preoccupation; only they seem not yet ready to do so.
This is the mood of the characters even in those Pirosmani pieces which generally go by the name of "feasts". These, too, are portraits - group portraits to be exact - even though the models are always shown sitting at a banquet table. One of these, Feast at Gvimradze's, has already been mentioned. The very title indicates the portrait genre; moreover, the name of every participant is written in small letters next to his likeness. Yes, they are all portraits - Feast of the Four Traders, A Family Picnic, Feast of the Tiflis Traders with a Gramophone. As often as not they are called "colourful scenes from the life of Old Tiflis", but at closer observation it transpires that none has any bearing whatsoever either on genre scenes or on the actual merry-making of a group of friends. Pirosmani's "feasts" are definitely not "true to life". The very place where the characters are assembled is mysterious, a sort of no man's land: it may look like a barren void; it may have blue skies above and lush grass below, as symbols of nature rather than a real natural setting. The table, covered by a snow-white tablecloth hanging down to the ground, looks like a huge slab of co1d marble, a sort of grave-stone or church lectern rather than a table. A wineskin or a jug invariably placed at the foot of the table suggest the attributes of a sacrament. The food, exquisitely laid out at great intervals, is placed direct1y on the tablecloth and it is always untouched. Last but not least, the members of the feast neither eat nor drink; their hands never even touch the table as if it were a sacred place rather like an altar. They are not merry-makers, they are aloof, distanced from all that is commonplace, raised above the trivia of life.
These pieces usually adorned the walls of dukhans, hanging over the real tables where real people would sit eating and drinking, often the very people who had been portrayed or their good companions. The portraits looked down at the clients and the clients would look at the portraits - with or without identifying themselves. Pirosmani restored to the traditional banquet scene its past dignity - that of a ceremony that for many centuries was regarded as a fraternal union, and he presented the ordinary men of his own milieu as the noble and dignified sons of their homeland.
More than a quarter of Pirosmani's extant works are representations of animals. In his own words, he liked to draw "those friends of his heart". Yet nobody could ever call him an animal painter, and we pay no attention to the incorrect proportions of the animals' bodies, to the polar bear being surrounded by tall corn and the giraffe being silver-grey instead of yellow. All these pictures have to do with people rather than with animals or birds.
Small wonder that for the most part he painted those creatures that corresponded to his ideal of beautiful and harmonious people leading a dignified life without defiling the earth through either malice, cunning or greed: noble and proud Deer, wise and mighty Lions, tender and meek Fawns. Another well-loved figure was the Lamb of God as the embodiment of a pure and innocent creature doomed to death and going towards it without challenging implacable and cruel fate. The famous Giraffe, placed in the midst of a strange barren plain and looking at us with grief and horror, seems to be an extraordinary self-portrait, the very image of the artist's anxious soul.
This is how Paustovsky, a well-known Soviet novelist, alluded to the Giraffe when he saw it for the first time in the Zdanevich family's Tiflis apartment: "I glanced at the oilcloth and my eyes became locked in the wild, damp, all-knowing stare of a tall animal. He was bending his neck slowly, as if he expected a shout to ring out in the empty, deserted rooms..." And further on: "A strange beast, tense as a string, was looking me straight in the eye - anxiously, inquiringly, and obviously suffering, yet unable to speak of this suffering." Could it be the shadow of the artist himself, looking out into the world in the vain hope of finding something joyous?
It was this longing for the joyous that so often prompted Pirosmani to depict the countryside. Both he and his permanent clients and public had at one time or another come to Tiflis from the country. They were still tied to their home villages and dreamed of eventually returning there, and they continued to regard the countryside as the source of all that is good, beautiful and natural - a sort of human paradise.
Pirosmani's contryside pieces are diverse in the extreme: they show figures or miniature scenes, possessed of inimitable beauty. The acknowledged masterpiece of the countryside scenes is Woman and Children Going to Draw Water, but in this series, too, pride of place goes to the panoramic pictures with characters and incidents: Vintage Time, A Vintage Feast, Festival on the Tskhenistskali River, Kakhetian Epic, The Feast of St George in Bolnisi, and others.
These true-to-life scenes of the Georgian countryside are in their turn a generalized embodiment of life, a succession of widely diverse events, ranging from sad to joyous and from festive to commonplace. One is often at a loss to find the dominant feature: all appears to be of equal value and of vital importance, every episode, every detail and every face is of interest not only in itself but also as a component of the powerful and everlasting stream of human life that is linked to the life of nature. It amounts to an epic view of the world rooted in the very depths of folk consciousness. It found its earliest expression in great epics and myths; in our own time it has had an unexpected revival. It is not fortuitous that one of Pirosmani's largest pieces, Alazani Valley, has another and more popular title: Kakhetian Epic. The word "epic" has firmly attached itself to other related pieces.
The nature of these "epics" is involved. They comprise elements of reality rendered with documentary accuracy, dreams of a bright harmonious life, an image of Mother Georgia cleansed of all that is painful, unsightly and ugly, i. e. the image imprinted in the people's minds. It is this combination of the concrete and the poetic, of epic aloofness and intimate tenderness that gives the paintings their magnetic force.
"I never witnessed an awareness of Georgia like Niko's... As I enjoy his paintings I feel rejuvenated by their strength, by the very sap of the earth concentrated in Niko's oilcloths," said the Georgian artist David Kakabadze. Paustovsky echoed his words but as an impartial observer who had encountered Georgia for the first time and viewed it with a perceptive and unbiassed eye: "Without Pirosmani I would have seen the Caucasus like an under-developed photograph, pale, void of colour and shade, detail and contour, and the blue mists of its half-Oriental, half-European expanses. For me Pirosmani filled the Caucasus with the juice of ripe fruit and the sharpness of dry colours. He introduced me to this land where joy is mingled with a faint, unintelligible sorrow."
So it is only natural that even in Pirosmani's lifetime several young men active in different branches of Georgian culture interpreted his work as a wonderfully integral and powerful emanation of the national character, and regarded him as the founder of the new Georgian art. This enthusiastic appraisal by a group of very young men was natural because though barely embarked on their own careers, they had themselves come up against mocking and skeptical attitudes. Yet today, many decades later, their appraisal does not appear in the least exaggerated. Pirosmani was indeed charged with the mission of linking the new Georgian painting with its severed early tradition as well as with its folk roots, and in this way to exert a powerful impact on the development of both Georgian painting and Georgian art as a whole. This has been fully conceded today, with Pirosmani honoured as an embodiment of national genius, almost on a par with Shota Rustaveli, the genius of Georgian poetry.
It goes without saying that every national culture has its own scale of values which does not necessarily coincide with that of global values. Often enough, a master who is duly honoured in his own country earns no more than polite condescension abroad. Not so Pirosmani. His name has long been placed alongside the names of the great masters of other countries and nations - of those whose contribution shaped the development of world art in the twentieth century.
Monumentalism has become the coveted goal of twentieth century art, and this urge dominated the overall trend of the searchings by many of its prominent exponents who strove, in particular, to achieve a synthesis of monumental and easel painting, that is to lend a monumental quality to their easel works. By no means all were successful, and the quest was often limited only to the superficial, dissolving into a preoccupation with rhythm, with the flat effect and with the generalized "large" form as an end in itself.
True monumentalism is not the sum of certain techniques but the outcome of a certain perception of the world: the artist arrives at the essential artistic idiom in the process of conveying this perception to the viewer. Pirosmani arrived at the monumental precisely in this way: he never pondered on the problems of monumentalism, he strove for self-expression and conveyed his own attitude to life nurtured by folk mentality. It is this that gives his paintings their expansiveness of colour, style and design, and their striking rhythm, all of which we justly regard as the manifestations of his effortless organic monumentalism. It is only natural that the reproductions of his paintings give people the impression of very large, often wall-size pieces, despite the fact that most of them are of average size or even small. They seem large because all of them are endowed with true monumentalism.
Pirosmani's panoramas are equally monumental though they lack the usual trappings of monumental art: in place of historic battles and legendary exploits, of gods, heroes and solemn processions there are the most commonplace, sometimes even amusing features of rural life. But this life is conceived of as infinite being, as a powerful stream in which the incommensurable destinies of individuals are dissolved like tiny particles. Equally monumental are his portraits - neither heroes, kings nor generals but workers, traders or organ-grinders; here, too, the individual traits are superseded by the generalized. Even Pirosmani's still lifes are monumental: the most ordinary objects, such as a shashlik, a boiled chicken, a jug or a fish, appear imposing and even grand.
This monumentalism alone, which Pirosmani attained in such a natural and effortless way, would suffice to place his art on a level with that of the finest masters of this century. But there is much more to it than this.
Pirosmani sprang from the heart of folk culture but he outgrew it and headed for professional art and the attendant individualized consciousness. That is why he was able to sense and express that which was shared by many outstanding artists of the time: the premonition of great historical upheavals, the approaching end of that world with which nineteenth-century men and women identified themselves and which they had come to accept as immutable.
This feeling permeates all of his work, shutting out all idyllic optimism; sometimes vented in a strong, unequivocal manner, sometimes barely implied. There is a distinctive note of sadness even in Pirosmani's serenely beautiful pieces, for the artist is distanced from what he depicts; it appears unattainable or irretrievably lost, like a dream or a fond memory. As he presents to us his ideals, the artist infects us with his anxiety about their future. And from this standpoint he belongs totally to our own century.
Anxious doubt and epic monumentalism, bitterness and admiration of the material world... In Pirosmani's case, these seemingly incompatible qualities are complementary and, ultimately, they have made his art unusually rich, complex and lofty. Herein lies the source of his compelling appeal. Because of this, his work will appear to coming generations, too, as an everlasting and enigmatic challenge.
By decision of UNESCO the 1996 year was declared a year of Niko Pirosmani.
