CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/14/2019

Painting as emancipation in Niko Pirosmani

"Roebuk and Landscape" (1913) is reproduced from Niko Pirosmani, Hatje Cantz's fascinating new monograph on the "vagrant autodidact," sometime railroad brakeman and dairy farmer who eked out a living painting signs for stores and taverns in Russian Georgia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "For Pirosmani, art was a wide-open field," Bice Curiger writes. "He was an outsider—a vagabond, as they say—who deliberately chose moving about as a way of life. He was a wanderer between city and countryside, between inns and stables, who at the same time resided in the center of community events. Indeed, Pirsmani located his commissioned works in society, literally in media res, in almost allegorical places that embody conviviality and open exchange, in inns, taverns, bars and stores—not in the symbolic interstice of galleries, artists' associations and museums. From earliest childhood, Pirosmani was influenced by personal blows of fate, but also by the experience of failure and the inability to integrate into a regular professional life. For him, art—painting—was emancipation."