!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> Streamline Training & Documentation: Niko Pirosmanashvili, Georgian Artist

Friday, September 05, 2008

Niko Pirosmanashvili, Georgian Artist

To offer something cultural as a counterpoint to news of strife among Georgia, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Russia, here's a sample of the work of the important self-taught Georgian artist, Niko Pirosmanashvili (1860-1918). Pirosmanashvili mostly painted signboards and pictures, primarily on oilcloth and wood.

"Roe," by Niko Pirosmanashvili
Source: kosmyryk.typepad.com

A collection of Pirosmanashvili images are shown in the video below.



"We cannot help but bow down before the splendor of his "illiterate" (not anatomically correct) lions, his splendid camels standing alongside oddly proportioned human figures, and his tents which overcome the one-dimensional flatness of his medium through the power of color alone. If the French had known of Pirosmanishvili, they would have come to Georgia to study painting."Osip Mandelstam (The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. by Jane Gary Harris, p. 162)

Giorgi Shengelaya produced a critically lauded film biography of Pirosmanashvili in 1969.

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