Days 48-49 (13-14 July)

Until our trip to Sighnaghi, I had never heard of Niko Pirosmani. But the paintings in the museum -- such expressive faces, such beautiful eyes, such affirmation of life, yet such melancholy -- immediately drew me in. (Here are two of my favourites.)

Since then, I've been on a little quest to find out more.


It's a classic artist's tale, sadly. Born in 1862, Pirosmani lost his father (and his financial security) at the age of eight. From that point he lived with various families -- treated well for the most part, but essentially filling the role of a quasi-servant.

His art was self-taught, and he earned money painting signboards for shops, and selling his work in the poorer parts of Tbilisi, often in simple taverns (dukhans) to earn a meal.

As this account explains, at the beginning of 20th century, the artist was living near Tbilisi's railway station, and his paintings adorned all the little enterprises in this neighbourhood: "They pictured Georgia, its beautiful land and sky, Georgian people, their everyday life. Also there are scenes from the past of Georgia, wonderful queen Tamara, brilliant Shota (12th-century great poet), heroes and heroines -- real people, but by their deeds talked about like a saint. He pictures kings and peasants, town and country, parties and prayers, dancers and singers, people and animals."

All this leaps out at the viewer across the years.

In 1905, the story goes, he fell in love with a French actress/dancer, Margarita de Sevres. And in a dramatic move -- was it bold and romantic, or just foolish and extravagant? -- he sold everything he had to gift her a sea of flowers.



The gesture is immortalized in a beautiful Russian song: "A million scarlet roses".

Pirosmani's gamble didn't work. Reportedly, Margarita left town with a rich man...

We will never know if he had any regrets. Regardless, there's still something desperately splendid about what he did.

As the song puts it: "The artist lived on alone; he endured many hardships. But in his life there was a whole courtyard of flowers."

True, no? In his life there was always going to be that time when he did something really amazing. Crazy, perhaps. And not successful, in conventional terms. But still amazing.

How many of us can say that?

Towards the end of his life, the artistic community in Georgia began to pay attention to Pirosmani. A little financial support came his way. But according to this account, the idyll was short-lived, shattered by a cruel cartoon that the artist took very personally.

The end is heart-breaking. He was reduced to living in the space beneath the stairs. When he couldn't afford the rent even for that minute room, he was evicted. After dark he used to go to the vacant basement of the house. At the end of the winter of 1918, already sick, he went down to the basement, and couldn't get up the next day. After a couple of days a neighbour found him unconscious. Pirosmani was taken to hospital, but he died a few hours later.

We visited the tiny museum that preserves his last real home. It's impossible not to be moved by the contrast between his talent and his means.







The street is now named after him, and a number of buildings sport copies of his paintings.





There's also a little installation near Galaktioni bridge. The colours have faded a bit, and one seems to have disappeared completely. But it's a reminder...


The National Gallery contains a number of characteristic Pirosmani works (as well as really interesting pieces by Mose Toidze, Iakob Nikoladze, David Kakabadze, Vlafimeri Gudiashvili, Ketevan Maghalashvili, Shalva Kikadze, Gigo Gabashvili, and Irina Shtenberg).

And if you go hunting near that touristy area that we didn't take to last week, you can find a couple of very beautiful tributes:

A sculpture of the artist, and a three-dimensional representation of Pirosmani's A Janitor.






Pirosmani now also figures on a number of wine labels. (Here's a saperavi we enjoyed drinking this evening, with some good Georgian cheese. This is very fitting, given the number of feasts he painted.)


Two side-notes:

1. Many of the houses in the railway-station part of town (including the one where Pirosmani had his tiny cubby-hole) have courtyards: informal, multi-purpose, balcony-lined spaces that form the heart of the building.

This article notes (as we had already noted) that a few "garishly renovated streets" are always packed with tourists, whereas if you turn onto any side street, you are likely to share it only with cats. The most interesting sights of the city, the author maintains, are generally away from the main tourist routes, and included among these tucked-away places are Tbilisi's so-called "Italian courtyards". They're actually influenced more by the Persian caravanserai than anything Italian. But Tbilisi's courtyards are more unpredictable and fluid than either of their predecessors.

2. While we've been carrying out this little mission, we've happened upon some more of Georgia's wonderful but simple dishes (the sort of thing even Pirosmani would have been able to afford):

-- Kharcho, a beef soup with amazing flavour (only a couple of pieces of beef figured in ours). It is best eaten with lots of the local bread, shotis puri, to soak up the juices. We ate this combo, along with a really tasty salad -- cucumbers and tomatoes have really never tasted as good as here, not even in Greece where I raved about the tomatoes -- at a little place not far from the station. It was cheap and excellent. Maybe Pirosmani would remember it...

-- Gomi, a polenta-like cornmeal dish that came to us with thick slices of sulguni cheese.


What a rewarding place Georgia is... Food for the imagination and the body.