Niko Pirosmani 4

Photos: Füsun Kavrakoğlu, Georgian Museum of Fine Arts, Tbilisi, 2025.

Niko Pirosmani has created the whole portrait gallery of the society around him: craftsmen, artisans and store owners, workmen, ladies, children and so on…All of them are presented with the equal meaningfulness. Each of them has individual features and at the same time each of them is the general image or icon of one or another social group. These works have of almost the same format, representative manner, and identical composition. Figures in close-up are presented with the whole body and are painted in narrow format, background is almost neutral, somewhere there is only a monochrome flat surface, somewhere there are some signs of ground, grass or flower. The most important here is a person presented with his social status, sex, age or occupation. We look at these works with simple compositions, few colors and get amazed by lively impressive images painted with wonderful simplicity and creative improvisation.

It is noteworthy that in times of Pirosmani, Georgian fine art had the period of turning point. Due to some historical events, realistic school of art (in European meaning) did not exist in Georgia. Georgian fine art had a tradition of Christian fresco painting and folk art.

In the given portraits, despite of the individual style, the generalized expression and monumentalism of medieval Georgian fresco painting can be obviously felt.

Eagle with Captured Hare
The eagle depicted on the painting, is not only a depiction of nature, but maybe, the symbols of struggle between the good and the evil.
The painter with his characteristic mastery manages to render the scene with vivid convincingness, with the acute feeling of mercilessness of the bird and sympathy for its victim.

Signboard: Cold Beer
Niko Pirosmanashvili’s contemporary Tbilisi was full of taverns and wine shops. Thus, there was a demand for advertising signboards. There were special studios where artists painted signboards by hand. In addition to a text, a signboard also contained an image. The image intensified the content of the text, and vice-versa. Apparently, Pirosmanashvili started his artistic activity as a painter of signboards, and gradually, taverns and other similar eateries were filled with works of the painter on various topics.
The signboard ‘Cold Beer’ is painted on tin plate. The original hand of the autodidact painter is obvious. You see the artwork without academic rules, where the logic of real forms, interrelation of proportions is violated. The style of the painting is plain, childlike, that leaves impression of sincere convincingness and unique charm.

Information panels of Georgian Museum of Fine Arts in Tbilisi.