Abstracts - International Initiative for Georgian Cultural Studies

110
MODERNISM IN GEORGIA
signs of contemporary art emerged. However, it is in Pirosmanashvili’s paintings dating from the 1900s that
we see artistic solutions which are normally achieved at the end of an artist’s evolutionary path rather than
at the beginning of it. In Pirosmanashvili’s art, extremely laconic rendering is one of the key organizing
principles applied in addressing the controversies faced, and this can be evidenced by his paintings created
well before the works of the artists of Paris school.
Liana Antelava
Tbilisi State Academy of Art. Georgia
Continual Model of the Universal Space/Time in Georgian Paintings
Painting is traditionally attributed to spatial arts. However, it is also without doubt that everything that
exists has a temporal dimension. A specific feature of time is that it is not subject to perception. Being
non-sensorial, the image of time is closely linked to and defined by metaphors (through which the nonsensorial
is modeled). Thus in painting, traditionally articulated as spatial art, time manifests itself through
metaphor.
Connection with space is inherent to time. It is therefore natural that time can be explained through features
characteristic of space. Space and time are “bearing structures” of the image of the world known to us.
The correlation between space and time reflects the vision/perception of the outside world. The continuum
of space and time accumulates basic phenomenal features of a given culture, epoch, style, and artist. The
study of these features shall demonstrate the individual character of a given culture.
The presentation will address this issue by presenting works by Niko Pirosmanashvili and Davit Kakabadze.
Marina Medzmariashvili
G. Chubinashvili National Center of Georgian Art History and Monuments Protection.Georgia
Pirosmani’s Art in the Framework of European Modernism
This paper addresses self taught artist Niko Pirosmani and modernism in Western Europe and Russia.
The paper discusses some aspects of Pirosmani’s art as the first signs of modernism in Georgia.
Pirosmani had not received any professional education and represented the member of Tiflis’ lowest
levels of society, thus his art reflected his feelings but not any knowledge. Pirosmani’s original art created
issues, which were new to Western Europe and Russia in the first years of XX century, but were unknown
in Georgia.
Pirosmani’s works are also successful in a very specific, artistic way - that is how they dealt with space,
color and shape. The same problems at the same time were raised in the Russian, French and German
artistic world. The lecture compares Pirosmani’s works with the paintings of H.Russo, P. Picasso, N. Goncharova,
M. Chagall, A. Macke and others. The lecture points at the influence of Pirosmani’s art on Russian
“neo-primitivism” and other areas of avant-garde art.
Russian artists M. Ledantu and M. Shevchenko created remakes of Pirosmani’s works, an issue almost
untouched until today. Though, some of the works of these Russian painters were known to public, they
were never reviewed as remakes.
We would like to stress the role of the leaders of Russian avant-garde, including M. Ledantu, and of
futurists, such as Iliazd and Kiril Zdanevich, in the discovery of Pirosmani and introduction of his works to
Georgia, Russia and France (in 1972 year Picasso created Pirosmani’s portrait).
Pirosmani’s phenomenon lays in the natural sublimation of artistic ideas from East and West, in the national
and international trends in art, and in the combination of folklore and modernism.