His essay, published in the tenth issue of the journal Dreaming Chamois in 1923, recalls an earlier gathering of Tbilisi’s avant-garde circles in such a disjointed manner that “Notes of a Modernist Intoxicated by Hashish” might have been a more fitting title than the rather pretentious “Dadaism or the Blue Horns.”
Yet, filled with unexpected digressions that occasionally seem detached from their context, the text constitutes a genuine and distinctly period-appropriate example of a Faulknerian stream of consciousness. It is precisely because of this singular quality that no other work captures the storm that swept through Tbilisi’s artistic scene during the 1910s as vividly and comprehensively as this celebrated essay does.
At Café Imedi, where the “crusading” members of the Blue Horns had first unveiled the “terrorist dynamite” they were preparing to plant within Georgian poetry, an evening in December 1917 was devoted to another revolutionary-minded group. This time, it was the trio of “Russian Futurists,” Zdanevich, Kruchenykh, and Terentiev, who, like the Blue Horns, had deliberately chosen the Tbilisi stage as the strategic point from which they would attempt to overturn the entirety of human culture.
Yet the northerners’ ambitious “project” was fundamentally opposed by another position, this time mystical and irrational in character. Rooted in “Nietzsche’s anarchy of instincts, the subterranean shudder of Edgar Allan Poe, and geological catastrophes,” this position was championed with extreme emotion and rhetorical abandon by Grigol Robakidze, who had been proclaimed a “specialist in the Apocalypse.”
This was merely one episode in the far-reaching struggle waged by artists of every persuasion to seize Tbilisi’s strategically situated 41st parallel, a place where, in an atmosphere warmer than that of Russia, exhausted by civil wars, art seemed to unfold almost of its own accord, on some mysterious plane.
1. From the Ashugh Tradition to Modernism
Shamakhi, Tiflis, Erzurum, Istanbul.
This was the so-called Transcaucasian Corridor, one of the world’s oldest trade routes, which had, in effect, never ceased to function throughout its long history.
From ancient times, Tbilisi was one of the principal centres of the Transcaucasian Corridor and an important crossroads. At the same time, the city successfully developed as a centre of production and craftsmanship.
These distinctive characteristics left a particular mark on Tbilisi’s social and cultural landscape. Over the centuries, the city’s ethnically diverse population, detached from its original national and religious foundations, developed within the Tbilisi environment a new form of civic culture shaped by mercantile and commercial life.
Pluralism was one of this culture’s most distinctive features. It represented diversity not so much through profound differences in content as through the formal coexistence of different cultural characteristics, seemingly marked by a certain bohemian quality.
In reality, this was a subculture born from the very heart of the city’s marketplace. Its colourful narrative combined the cynical eloquence of the kinto, sharpened through petty trade; the exuberant toasts of the unruly karachogheli; echoes of Karagöz shadow theatre; the sounds of the zurna and duduk; the tradition of mukhambazi poetry; the languid atmosphere of the sulphur baths; and homosexuality.
This entire “bacchanalia” found its fullest expression in the work of Tiflis’s troubadour-poets, the ashughs. The ashugh tradition represented the true pinnacle of the city’s urban culture.
The existence of such a fully developed subculture, an “underground” in contemporary terms, already provided favourable conditions for a synthesis of so-called “low” and “high” culture, upon which the aesthetics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western modernism were largely founded. In Georgia, however, cultural development did not follow this course. Tbilisi’s prolonged political isolation, together with Georgian intolerance towards the notion of urbanity, associated with both the “merchant” and the “foreigner,” distinguished the city’s subculture so vividly, in linguistic and aesthetic terms, from the broader landscape of Georgian national culture.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Georgian culture remained in the hands of the country’s former ruling class, an aristocracy now deprived of sovereignty. Although its members had elegantly adopted Russian military uniforms, their creative work continued to mourn the glories of the past. It was precisely this underlying disposition that gave Georgian Romanticism its national and patriotic character, distinguishing it from its European and Russian counterparts.
From an intellectual and aesthetic perspective, however, the nineteenth century remained the age of realism. Through its reassessment of established values, realism was the first movement to offer civilisation entirely new prospects for development.
The reformist theology initiated by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, followed by Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment, gradually established the primacy of human reason within European thought. As a result, human creative potential came to be regarded as equal to divine creative power and acquired the status of an independent phenomenon.
This gave rise to the ambition to create an earthly alternative to the “Kingdom of Heaven,” a harmonious order that might be realised here, upon our sinful earth, within human society itself. Although no social formation proved capable of achieving such a universal condition, by the nineteenth century realist literature and art were prepared to declare boldly their readiness for the complete renewal of everything that had become obsolete. They also began actively to outline the possibility of the emergence of a “new human being.”
Realism first took root in Georgian art through portrait painting.
Unlike the centuries-old traditions of Georgian painting, which had developed upon the foundations of Christian aesthetics, this new form of art, emerging alongside increasingly secular tendencies, placed the individual at its centre. More specifically, it sought to portray “the powerful of this world” with the greatest possible degree of realism.
From the outset, Georgian portraiture differed from the comparable, already considerably modernised tradition of Russian art. Portraits of identifiable individuals, for example, continued to display many features characteristic of mural painting, including a disregard for perspective and three-dimensional volume.
Instead, as in ancient frescoes, these “new Georgians” were depicted through frontal and static arrangements of figures upon a flat surface. Their forms were also visibly generalised, a method equally characteristic of the tradition of icon painting.
Meanwhile, the strengthening of democratic tendencies within the Russian Empire was imposing increasingly rigorous demands upon realism and its further development.
Nikolai Chernyshevsky insisted that art should comprehend “the essential aspects of life not through detached and abstract concepts, but through the concrete diversity inherent in the particular and the individual.” A demand expressed in such categorical terms dealt a devastating blow to Georgian “realist” painting, which remained distinguished by its traditional formal language.
Nevertheless, the “demands of the age” soon produced results. Until then, no one in Georgian painting had represented the subject with such clarity as Giorgi Maisuradze, a former serf of Alexander Chavchavadze and the first Georgian graduate of the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg.
Following this initial and necessary step in the development of realism, one might have expected the next generation of Georgian artists to place greater emphasis on social themes, as contemporary journalism and literature had done. With a few exceptions, however, the principle of “speaking the truth,” established by Ilia Chavchavadze, never became particularly influential in nineteenth-century Georgian painting.
Moreover, the unprecedented social engagement of the so-called Peredvizhniki, the Russian Itinerant painters who emerged in Moscow during the 1870s, found virtually no response in Georgia.
Consequently, the work of such outstanding Georgian painters as Romanoz Gvelesiani and Gigo Gabashvili appeared to escape the prevailing clichés of realism. Supported by impeccable technical skill, their art instead explored an entirely different realm of meaning.
The traditional life of the Georgian people, the diversity of their native landscape, and the country’s history constituted the fundamental realities beyond which Georgian painters intuitively sensed the existence of something greater. They sought painstakingly to capture this deeper reality in its simplicity and fullest form within the framework of realism.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, such aesthetic “manoeuvres” were no longer sufficient to confront the challenges of the new era. Georgian literature and art had clearly lost the energy required to preserve their distinctive character amid the rise of a revolutionary age determined to destroy everything associated with the old order.
2. Along a European Radius
Despite the First World War raging across Europe, Kutaisi, renowned as a “purely Georgian city,” continued its tranquil existence into the early twentieth century. Local society entertained itself chiefly through traditional feasts and witty retellings of stories that circulated as popular anecdotes.
Against this background of routine provincial life, the appearance in February 1916 of a ten-kopeck journal entitled The Blue Horns struck the city like a thunderbolt.
“We believe in every form of orgy; we reject the past.” These few words from the first manifesto of the Kutaisi Symbolist poets, written by Paolo Iashvili, were enough to mobilise almost the entire population of the city against the young celebrants of hashish and eroticism. Immediate preventive measures appeared necessary to keep this “bacillus of depravity” from infecting the “immaculate” body of the wider community.
To the credit of Kutaisi’s citizens, this “timely response” gradually achieved its intended effect. Not even the impassioned lecture delivered by Grigol Robakidze at the city theatre in defence of the Blue Horns could save them. With curses and denunciations, local society expelled its prodigal sons and sent them towards Tbilisi, a city whose reputation, in Kutaisi’s eyes, had already been compromised by its being “filled with people of every kind.”
The Blue Horns, however, regarded themselves as a genuine order of mystical brotherhood. Possessed by bohemian dandyism and Imeretian pride, they boldly proclaimed to the capital the necessity of aligning all Georgian art “along a European radius.”
Meanwhile, the “radius,” or vector, of European art had already diverged considerably from the principles of realism. Having escaped the pages of books and the walls of exhibition galleries, it persistently sought, through various provocative actions, to penetrate every sphere of public life.
Claiming the power to bring about a new “Creation,” modernism was inaugurating a new era. In pursuing this ambition, it had already developed its own methods of struggle and clearly defined objectives.
Its foremost task was to convince the individual of the new age of the practical power of human intellect, so that salvation would no longer be sought in divine ideas, as it had supposedly been during the “dark” Middle Ages.
From this perspective, the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of archetypes offered an ideal means of strengthening the capacities of the still-emerging “new human being.”
There was no need to venture into the distant and obscure realm of the irrational to understand the matter. The issue concerned processes occurring “right here,” within the human psyche, both collective and individual.
According to Jung, the collective psyche could be expanded to encompass the whole of humanity. Within it, one would inevitably encounter shared “primordial images,” the so-called archetypes, or “psychic structures.” By contrast, the individual psychic phenomenon consisted solely of complexes, fear, inferiority, and so forth.
The realisation of human creative potential was therefore possible only through the fundamental conceptions of the collective or society. These supplied the “primordial images” for subsequent interpretation, ultimately producing various cultural phenomena, such as myth.
By confining human creativity within the boundaries of the psyche while simultaneously envisioning a universal cultural structure, modernism acquired a distinctly horizontal and pluralistic direction. Upon this rational foundation, the possibility of radically renewing everything was proclaimed.
Yet if all this was not to resemble a collection of “faceless theories,” modernism clearly required practical results. Two Germans took up this challenge of the age: Friedrich Nietzsche attacked the stagnant existing order from the cultural front, while Karl Marx naturally chose the sociopolitical sphere as his arena.
In the philosophies of Nietzsche and Marx, the intersecting interests of art and political processes became clearly visible for the first time.
The tendency to dissolve the boundaries between the various elements of public life, even to the point of their complete disappearance, was equally important to Nietzsche’s cultural revolution and to Marx’s pursuit of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
This left-wing path towards total “unity” was directed primarily at eliminating the very causes of conflict between opposing elements. Friedrich Nietzsche categorically argued for the presentation of simplified, empty artistic forms stripped of substantive meaning. This would erase the boundaries not only between individual artistic objects but also between the object and its surrounding environment.
The elimination of the elements that produced antagonism between social classes, the creation of an international world, and ultimately the “promised” communist paradise: through this kind of sociopolitical rhetoric, familiar to people of the post-Soviet world, Karl Marx echoed Nietzsche’s cultural initiative.
To realise their unprecedented ideas, the German philosophers proposed methods that were distinctly severe and radical: the rejection of everything that had previously existed; the abolition of conventional notions of spirituality; and liberation from the “ballast” of tradition and history. Freed from these burdens, the “new human being” would be able to advance towards perpetual progress, guided by entirely new intellectual impulses.
The practical realisation of Marx’s and Nietzsche’s theories also coincided fatefully in time. The Russian proletarian revolution of 1917 unfolded almost simultaneously with the emergence of Dadaism in Europe, which began in Zurich in 1916. Dadaism was the most radical movement in the history of art and effectively launched a left-wing countercultural assault on society’s dominant cultural and moral values, seeking their complete transformation.
Grigol Robakidze writes in one passage about the “atmospheric influence of ideas.” Despite the limitations of communication and access to information at the time, artistic processes emerged in European and Georgian art at precisely the same moment and in almost identical forms, a parallel that lends considerable credibility to the writer’s observation.
The Dada movement initiated by European avant-garde artists at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 found a direct Georgian parallel in the Kutaisi “rebellion” of the Blue Horns and, later, in the events that unfolded at Café Imedi in Tbilisi.
To deepen the mystical dimension of this parallel, it is worth recalling that long before many avant-garde movements, including Dadaism, had even been conceived, the “dark” champions of Symbolism, Heredia, Rimbaud, Émile Verhaeren, and Stéphane Mallarmé, had already raised modernism’s “black” banners during the second half of the nineteenth century.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Symbolism had already passed into history. Georgian avant-garde poets nevertheless began their activities precisely by reviving this forgotten revolutionary movement.
Symbolism was, in effect, the first movement to realise the idea of pluralism within the realm of poetry. From mythology to anthroposophy, virtually no field remained outside the scope of Symbolist interest and representation.
According to Baudelaire’s theory, everything moves towards everything else, and everything signifies or alludes to something else. Such a premise offered limitless possibilities for creative improvisation. Symbolist poetry therefore became an expansive synthesis of mystical visions, prayerful ecstasy, and demonic imagery. In Jean Moréas’s view, only this form of art could “partake of eternal joy” and freely lay claim to the status of a “new religion.”
Although the pursuit of universality was also a defining characteristic of the Georgian Symbolists, their concerns were considerably more grounded. They centred primarily on the possibility of synthesising Eastern and Western cultural values.
“My madness and my daring know no bounds;
from Elbrus, I summon the Alps and the Himalayas.”
Iv. Kipiani
The scale of these ambitions was indeed impressive, yet the Georgians, like their European and Russian Symbolist counterparts, were destined for disappointment. By the 1910s, the envisioned unity of Western and Eastern cultures appeared to have remained an insurmountable challenge, just as poetic virtuosity alone had once proved insufficient for attaining Jean Moréas’s “eternal joy” or Vladimir Solovyov’s “higher world.”
Despite being somewhat out of step with its time, by 1917 Georgian Symbolism occupied a genuinely avant-garde position in Tbilisi’s artistic battles. Unintentionally, it also served as a counterbalancing force to the entirely new and radical phenomenon introduced by the Russian Cubo-Futurists.
“We are searching for pure forms.” These words by Michel Foucault, one of the foremost authorities of twentieth-century postmodern philosophy, would have been particularly apt for the entire legion of Russian avant-garde poets and artists who arrived in Tbilisi in large numbers during the 1910s.
Their principal interest lay in investigating the so-called “primordial” sounds and “primary images” preserved within language and material culture. Materials gathered through ethnographic research and other forms of inquiry nourished such fundamental currents of the Russian avant-garde in Tbilisi as Zaum poetry*, Neo-Primitivism, and Cubo-Futurist painting.
These artistic initiatives ultimately found their most fully developed expression in Ilia Zdanevich’s theory of Vsechestvo. Regarded as one of the most distinctive features of the Tbilisi avant-garde, its fundamental principles were later carefully introduced by the émigré Iliazd* to Pablo Picasso and his Parisian circle.
3. “Niko Pirosman”
Every tendency within the Tbilisi avant-garde, in other words, the entire left wing of the artistic front, seemed to regard it as almost an obligation to interrupt, if only for a moment, its turbulent and scandalously provocative creative activity in order to express its attitude towards a slender Kakhetian who appeared to be involved in the same artistic processes, yet in reality remained almost invisible, lost in a kind of mystical haze, and whom the pleasure-loving citizens of Tbilisi somewhat dismissively referred to as a “painter.”
Paradoxically, Niko Pirosmanashvili’s art appealed equally to the Neo-Primitivist ideas of Tbilisi avant-garde artists who were otherwise bitterly opposed to one another, to the messianic ambitions of the Symbolists, and, remarkably, even to the earthly Dionysian intuitivism of Nietzsche’s Georgian followers.
Given such a harmonious symbiosis of “opposing elements” around Nikala, one might paraphrase a remark by Titsian Tabidze and say that modernism was “already a fact in Georgia.” Yet such a conclusion would clearly be premature, for matters were by no means so simple.
During the Middle Ages, when art in the modern sense scarcely existed, the creative process was inseparably connected with highly complex ascetic and mystical practices. While painting an icon, the artist, inwardly and almost outwardly assimilated to the transcendent state of the “bodiless powers,” acquired the capacity for universal vision, or, in philosophical terms, “contemplation,” and brought into reality the forms and images of an “unknowable” world, together with their distinctive effects.
This concerns a so-called relativistic state in which a universal reality exists where everything is perceived from a single point of vision, without distinctions such as right and left or above and below. In the painting of the period, this idea was conveyed through the principle of flatness. Space was represented not through deep perspective but within a “flat” dimension. Against such a background, figures were also depicted in a distinctive manner. A figure, for example, could be perceived “simultaneously” both frontally and in profile.
This specific system of visual representation, developed upon the theoretical foundations of the Christian churches of Western Asia, re-emerged with extraordinary clarity in such nineteenth- and twentieth-century avant-garde movements as Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Suprematism, and abstraction.
“Everything we see is unreal; our art must reveal permanence.” This conviction of the great Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne was motivated, at least in part, by his profound knowledge of religion. Another leading figure of Post-Impressionism, Henri Matisse, seriously considered the possibility that an artist might become physically attuned to Plato’s “world of ideas.”
As for Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, the founders of abstract art, they understood the foundations of their work primarily from the perspective of Orthodox Christianity.
Although such powerful impulses derived from Christianity were realised only within the framework of particular artistic movements, it should nevertheless be acknowledged that the relationship between the creative potential of great artists and the irrational is undeniably striking.
Niko Pirosmanashvili arrived in the city in search of work and found employment as a railway conductor. He travelled extensively throughout Transcaucasia, but when his health began to fail, he decided to invest the money he had saved from the railway in a more profitable enterprise. He opened a tavern in Vera, near the turn onto Olga Street, and the business prospered. Nikala became relatively well-off and began frequenting Tbilisi’s café-chantants.
It was there that he first saw a troupe of Parisian cancan dancers. One of them, a woman named Margarita, captivated him so deeply that his love inspired one of the most extravagant gestures in romantic legend: he sent a procession of carts laden with countless red roses to the dancers’ hotel. By then, however, the “actresses” had already left Tbilisi for Europe; they had departed the previous day.
The roses, still covered in morning dew, withered pitifully beneath the blazing Tbilisi sun, and Nikala, too, was transformed.
Fortune suddenly turned against Pirosmanashvili. The once-prosperous businessman and romantic admirer found himself cast into the city’s poorest quarters. From then on, Nikala appeared only occasionally, wandering through the city like a sleepwalker. Carrying his “painted pictures” beneath his arm, he hurried towards the tavern owners who commissioned him, leaving behind, for a few coins or merely in exchange for food, the remarkable works that would later stir the souls of Tbilisi’s avant-garde artists.
Nikala naturally dreamed of making a comeback and continually longed to recover his former prosperity. Yet it was evident that he no longer belonged entirely to himself. From that point onward, his fate appeared to be governed by an “unknowable” and immensely powerful creative force.
Artists belonging to the various currents active in Tbilisi clearly recognised the distinctive foundations of this “self-taught” painter’s work, and this explains the widespread admiration he inspired among them. Within this circle, however, Grigol Robakidze stood apart through his conspicuous extravagance and distinctly subjective approach.
Behind the pseudonym “Niko Pirosman,” which, I believe, was fashioned in a rather Saxon manner for this peasant from Kiziki, Grigol Robakidze sought determinedly to uncover the Dionysian and bohemian foundations of Pirosmanashvili’s art. In doing so, he attempted to reveal the origins of Kardu, the Georgian messianic ideal he had formulated as a prototype of Nietzsche’s “new human being.”
Like Nietzsche, Robakidze sensed that “the womb of the earth had dried up in Europe.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau had already warned of this danger of cultural “erosion,” arguing that its solution required a “return to nature.” From his country estate at Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy, dressed in a peasant’s smock, likewise called directly upon humanity to embrace “simplicity.”
In response to this problem, Robakidze advanced a concrete proposition: he presented Niko Pirosmanashvili as the embodiment of “naturalness” and “simplicity.” “He himself was primitive; he was simple and luminous.” Most importantly, these human qualities were also transformed into creative principles, showing humanity a path leading from simple “sincerity to ultimate wholeness.”
According to Robakidze, in Pirosmanashvili’s case this path led directly through “urban bohemia”: “The visionary and drinker of vodka loved the tavern. Here he encountered the bohemia of Tiflis, the kinto in celebration.”
It therefore appears that Nikala’s reputation as a “drunken” painter was largely Robakidze’s creation, an essentially arbitrary attempt to present him as an original phenomenon born from the depths of Dionysian intoxication.
One of the finest monographs on the artist, written by Kirill Zdanevich and based upon the recollections of people who knew Nikala personally, makes a particular point of noting that the “Count”* neither enjoyed drinking nor taking part in feasts. He would occasionally drink a small amount of vodka to warm himself, but was greatly troubled when revellers in the taverns where he worked repeatedly pressured him to drink.
It is telling that, when invited to a meeting of the Society of Georgian Artists in 1916, Pirosmanashvili proposed only that his fellow artists, his “brothers,” should gather regularly to drink tea and discuss art.
Nevertheless, scenes of tea drinking are nowhere to be found in Pirosmanashvili’s work. The traditional Georgian feast, by contrast, became one of the most recognisable motifs of his artistic legacy.
Yet it should be emphasised that his depictions of Georgian princes, urban kintos, and Kakhetian peasants at their feasts contain none of the bacchanalian excess usually associated with bohemian life. On the contrary, as Geronti Kikodze observed, Pirosmanashvili’s work seems to preserve with particular emphasis “the inner discipline of the Georgian feast, that dignity and restraint which astonished Jean Chardin as early as the seventeenth century.”
Moreover, the quality of stillness in Nikala’s painting carries significant conceptual meaning. It is naturally connected to the expressive characteristics and mystical foundations of Georgia’s centuries-old tradition of mural painting.
Pirosmanashvili represents both human beings and their surroundings in a radically distinctive and simplified form. His forms are reduced to their essentials, while his range of colours is similarly restrained. In certain works, an astonishing clarity of image is achieved through little more than lightly applied, incomplete brushstrokes.
What emerges is Pirosman’s modernist idea of “renewing everything.” Everything here appears new, as though every person and object had been ennobled through the grace of catharsis: the prostitutes of Ortachala, the coarse kinto, and the Georgian prince overcome by drink; a bear in a tree enveloped in an almost otherworldly light; or Arsenal Hill at Night.
In Pirosmanashvili’s case, the historical and natural foundations of his ideas and visual forms clearly shaped not only the distinctive character of his art but also his difficult personal life.
He lived in the railway-station district, in a wooden shelter somewhere beneath a staircase. Its wall contained a narrow, unglazed window and numerous cracks. His only furniture consisted of a wooden bed and a cupboard, inside which he kept dried bread and a jug of spring water.
He would set fire to a piece of cloth placed on the floor and hold a large sheet of glass above it. He then scraped the blackened surface, collecting the soot to mix into his paint. Everything in the already dark room had become stained with smoke. The black oilcloth leaning against the wall was almost impossible to distinguish. Nikala himself was so completely covered in soot that the only features visible in the darkness were his large eyes against his smoke-blackened face.
The chill of early spring entered from the street, making the room unbearably cold. Yet Nikala’s frozen hands seemed to rise of their own accord to perform a miracle. As at the moment of the first “Word,” “light” emerged from the surrounding darkness: weakened by hunger and cold, the painter brought a white lamb into being upon the canvas, accompanied by the unexpected words: “Thanks be to God that we have lived to see Easter.”
Until the very end, Niko Pirosmanashvili remained committed to that sacred struggle, one of whose most powerful knots was tied directly upon the 41st geographic parallel at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the effort to preserve the eternal values that had been wholly rejected, he alone bore the burden of sacrifice.
“You look at Pirosman, and you believe in Georgia!”
On this point, it is indeed difficult to disagree with Grigol Robakidze.