Niko Pirosmani

Georgia’s most famous artist, Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918) is a fabled figure in the story of early modernism. The painter, self-taught and penniless during his lifetime, was heralded posthumously for his "naive" style. Pirosmani’s paintings are simple—blunt, colorful depictions of rustic scenes gleaming against black canvas backgrounds, extraordinary icons of glowing intensity.
This exhibition catalog showcases around 50 rarely seen Pirosmani masterpieces alongside a historical text on the artist written in 1926 by Kirill Zdanevich (who "discovered" Pirosmani); a fictional (but historically accurate) essay discussing Tbilisi as the Paris of Pirosmani’s age by the Danish art historian and writer, Kaspar Thormod; an interview with the Georgian art historian Nana Kipiani and her artist husband Levan Chogoshvili by Swiss curator Daniel Baumann; and reflections on the artist by contemporary artists Thea Djordjadze, Mamma Andersson and Tal R.

The art of the legendary Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918) spoke to all, from people otherwise uninterested in art to avant-garde artists and writers. Painted around the turn of the century in a flourishing Tbilisi, his portraits, animal paintings, landscapes and scenes from everyday life draw on medieval iconography and testify to a deeply felt sense of belonging. Like Henri Rousseau or Marc Chagall, Pirosmani is one of the exceptional and uncategorizable innovators of early modern art. This catalog demonstrates Pirosmani’s painterly qualities in numerous illustrations, showing how his rapid brushstrokes on black oilcloth give the sparsely applied colors a glow as if emerging from a dark depth. As expertly explained here by Georgian art historians, Pirosmani was a contradictory figure and an important part of the art scene in Tbilisi, then considered the "Paris of the East."

The Georgian “naive” painter Niko Pirosmani, sometimes known as Nikala (1862–1918), is long overdue for rediscovery. Today, this autodidact, who painted his pictures of animals and people for inns and pubs, is admired as a leading representative of “naive” art, but the story of his original critical reception is remarkable. Hardly known outside of Georgia these days, his work was nevertheless displayed alongside works by Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall in the legendary 1913 exhibition Mischén (Target) in Moscow, where he was known as the “Rousseau of the East.”

Pirosmani devised a unique visual vocabulary—black background, elementary colors of red, blue, yellow, green and white—to create his paintings of animals and portraits of merchants, shopkeepers, workmen and noblemen. This book, published for the Albertina’s major Pirosmani retrospective, examines his paintings in the context of art history.