Niko Pirosmanashvili

Niko Pirosmanashvili (generally known internationally as Niko Pirosmani) ( _ka. ნიკო ფიროსმანაშვილი; May 5, 1862-1918) was a Georgian primitivist painter.

Biography

Pirosmani was born in the Georgian village of Mirzaani to a peasant family in the Kakheti province. His family owned a small vineyard. He was later orphaned and put in the care of his two elder sisters. He move with them to Tbilisi in 1870. In 1872 he worked as a servant for wealthy families and learned to read and write Russian and Georgian. In 1876 he returned to Mirzaani and worked as a herdsman.

Pirosmani gradually taught himself to paint. One of his specialties was painting directly onto black oilcloth. In 1882 he opened a workshop in Tbilisi which was unsuccessful. In 1890 he worked as a railroad conductor, and in 1895 worked creating signboards. In 1893 he co-founded a dairy farm in Tbilisi which he left in 1901. Throughout his life Pirosmani, who was always poor, was willing to take up ordinary jobs including housepainting and whitewashing buildings. Although his paintings had some local popularity (about 200 survive) his relationship with professional artists remained uneasy; making a living was always more important to him than abstract aesthetics.

In April 1918 he died of malnutrition and liver failure. He was buried at the Nino cemetery; the exact location is unknown as it was not registered.

Work

At the beginning of 20th century Pirosmani lived in a little apartment not far from Tbilisi railway station. His paintings included many local scenes and imaginary portraits of Georgian historical figures such as Shota Rustaveli and Queen Tamara, as well as ordinary Georgian people and their everyday life.

In the 1910s he won the critical enthusiasm of the Russian poet Mikhail Le-Dantyu and the artist Kirill Zdanevich and his brother Ilia Zdanevich. Ilia Zhdanevich wrote a letter about Pirosmani to the newspaper "Zakavkazskaia Rech'", which it published on February 13, 1913. He also undertook to publicise Pirosmani's painting in Moscow. The Moscow newspaper "Moskovskaia Gazeta" of January 7 wrote about the exhibition "Mishen'" where self-taught painters exhibited, among them four works by Pirosmani: "Portrait of Zhdanevich", "Still Life", "Woman with a Beer Mug", and "The Roe". Critics writing later in the same newspaper were impressed with his talent.

In the same year an article about Niko Pirosmani and his art was published in Georgian newspaper "Temi" .

The Society of Georgian Painters, founded in 1916 by Dito Shevardnadze, invited Pirosmani to its meetings and began to take him up, but his relations with the society were always uneasy. Although he presented to the Society his painting 'Georgian Wedding', one of the members published a caricature of him which greatly offended him. His continuing poverty, compounded by the economic problems caused by the First World War, meant that his life ended with his work effectively unrecognised.

Posthumous reputation

However, he developed an international reputation after the war, when he became admired as a 'naive' painter in Paris and elsewhere. The first book on Pirosmani was published (in Georgian, Russian and French) in 1926. He also inspired a portrait sketch by Pablo Picasso (1972). Exhibitions of his work have been held in Kiev (1931), Warsaw (1968),Paris (The Louvre) (1969), Vienna (1969), Nice and Marseilles (1983), Tokyo (1986), Zurich (1995) and Turin (2002).

In Russian literature and song

Pirosmani is also known in Russia for the legend of a romantic encounter with a French actress who visited his town; he was deeply in love with her, and to demonstrate it, bought her enough flowers to fill the square in front of her hotel window (allegedly driving himself bankrupt). The story became famous when it was recounted in a poem by Andrei Voznesensky, and later into a hit song by Alla Pugacheva, "Million of Red Roses".

In film

Pirosmani was the subject of a film by Giorgi Shengelaya, made in 1969, that won the Grand Prix at the Chicago Film Festival in 1972.

Director Sergei Parajanov shot a short film entitled "Arabesques on a Pirosmani Theme."

References

Georgian National Museum, "Niko Pirosmani 1862-1918", Tbilisi, 2006. No ISBN.

External links

* [http://www.pirosmani.org/ Niko Pirosmani Home Page]
* [http://www.geocities.com/marinayeung/index.html Biography and Works of Pirosmani]
* [http://www.steele.com/pirosmani/ Biography]
* [http://www.abcgallery.com/P/pirosmani/pirosmani.html Olga's Gallery: Niko Pirosmani]
*A bilingual (Turkish and Georgian) quarterly journal, called Pirosmani [http://www.pirosmani.com.tr/] is published in Istanbul.