Nico Pirosmani is an artist whose life is almost never documented, as if there was no such person at all. But he was. He was and created his straightforward and piercing paintings as simple as he lived.
Childhood and youth
So far, it has not been exactly possible to establish in what year the Georgian artist Pirosmani was born. Art historians suggest that this happened in 1862. Niko Piromanoshvili lived in a poor peasant family in the village of Mirzaani. He was the youngest child and helped his father with household chores. However, work on earth did not capture him. Every free minute he devoted to drawing. I recreated everything that surrounded him on an old brown paper with a pencil stub: clusters of grapes, a cracked jug, a scant dog ...
At the age of eight, the boy loses his father, and soon his mother and older brother. Since then, he earned his living himself. He walks around the neighboring villages and is interrupted by small part-time jobs. Naturally, in such a difficult life situation, there was no question of any kind of education, let alone art. However, Niko still learned to read in Russian and Georgian.
The path to art
From his youth, the future artist Niko Pirosmani took painting lessons from wandering masters. He adopted the ability to paint signs for shops and taverns from them. In the eighties, Nico attempted to open an art painting workshop with his friend, also an artist. However, this idea failed miserably: there were practically no orders and the workshop had to be closed.
Having accumulated a small capital, working as a conductor on the railway, Pirosmani invests in dairy trade. However, Nico was a creative person, trade was alien to him. But he received a small income from the dairy shop, and that was the end of his entrepreneurial attempts.
The beginning of the 20th century became an era in the work of Pirosmani. The artist is fully committed to art. He again returns to the manufacture of signage, and is also interested in creating decorative panels. It was during this period that Nico draws a lot on oilcloth with the help of independently made paints. He was especially successful in black. Pirosmani added furnace soot, infusion of oak bark and a couple of drops of oil to the ash. Oilcloths were white or black. And where it was necessary to display these shades, he simply left unpainted areas. So the artist developed one of his unique techniques. It looks especially impressive in portraits, giving the picture an extraordinary depth and penetration.
First successes
In the tenths of the XX century, Nico was paid attention in professional circles. Futurist artist Kirill Zdanevich acquires a large number of paintings by Pirosmani, some of them were written to order. Cyril’s brother, Ilya, published an article on Nico about the Artist Nugget in a local newspaper. And already in March 1913, self-taught paintings were exhibited at an exhibition in Moscow. Of course, this was not a personal exhibition, but nevertheless a personal grandiose success for a poor peasant from a Georgian village.
In 1916, it was finally possible to arrange an exhibition where exclusively the works of Pirosmani were presented. The nugget gained a certain fame. He was invited to the Society of Georgian Artists, his works began to be bought for private collections. However, despite this, the artist Pirosmani, whose name came to be associated with authentic creativity, died in poverty and poverty.
Trace in art
Primitivism - a painting style characteristic of the artist Pirosmani - is the artistic embodiment of children's drawings. Naive in their execution and honest in their emotional component, these paintings do not carry anything pompous, superfluous, superficial. Only the simplicity of perceiving life, whatever it may be. Nico drew quickly. Could create a picture in just a few days. He did not like to correct or modify anything in the work - as it happened, it happened.
The main motives in the work of Niko Pirosmani are animalistic. The artist portrayed animals with the gaze of human eyes, touching, on which, it seems, tears are about to wrap up. Niko's friends claimed that in portraying animals, Pirosmani actually paints himself more than a giraffe or a lamb. Due to the fact that they were performed in an original technique, the animals looked especially defenseless and lonely.
Also one of the favorite topics was the image of feasts and feasts. Rich tables burst with food, wine pours forth, people have fun, forgetting the hardships of life. All this had a huge contrast with the realities of the artist's life - poor, hungry, lonely. He painted Pirosmani and portraits, but often not from nature, but simply redrawn the image from the photograph.
Not so many works of the hand of a self-taught artist have survived. Basically, we can appreciate the creativity of Pirosmani by its signs for shops and taverns.
The most famous paintings
Niko Pirosmani is an artist whose paintings are striking in their penetration. “Actress Margarita” is a work that was once exhibited in the Louvre. They say that even the Frenchwoman, pictured on the canvas, came to the exhibition and looked at the picture for a long time without taking her eyes off. The artist emphasized the elegance of the legs of the actress, the slim waist of the girl. With great love, he portrayed Margarita, for the sake of which he once took a desperate step.
The work Childless Millionaire and Poor with Children seems to show what true wealth is. Dry hemp trees in the background emphasize the meaninglessness of life that cannot be immortalized in posterity.
In the picture “Vintage” you can see the artistic development of Pirosmani. He applied the image of perspective - vineyards that go into the distance, emphasizing the fertile, rich Georgian land. The artist also drew a breaking light through the leaves - an attempt to play with light and shadow.
What was he like?
The artist Pirosmani, whose name is now known to the whole world, was a mystery to contemporaries and remained an unsolved mystery for us. At the end of 1910, fans of the artist’s work began to walk around the village and collect information about him in order to compile, if not a biography, then at least an approximate portrait of Nico. From the reviews of the peasants, we know that Pirosmani had an explosive character and unbalanced disposition. Straightforward, emotional, desperate. Neighbors said that the artist had seven Fridays a week, as if he were not from this world. Such gossip reinforced the stories of Nico himself that he sees the saints and his brush "writes itself."
Tangled Track
It is known that the artist corresponded with his sister, but these letters were not preserved. They were burned by the girl herself, apparently frightened by the fact that strangers began to question more and more about her brother in nearby villages.
They say that Niko had a notebook with which he never parted and constantly made notes in it. But even during the life of the artist, these notes were lost somewhere. And only shortly before his death, Pirosmani met educated people who understood the value of Nico's life and recorded the events of his meeting with him and personal impressions.
Interesting facts about Niko Pirosmani
- In 1969, a personal exhibition of Niko Pirosmani was held in the Louvre.
- The story of the poor artist’s unhappy love from the song “A Million Scarlet Roses” was taken from the life of Niko Pirosmani. The artist spent all his savings to endow the French actress Margarita de Sevres who arrived in Tiflis.
- The painting "Arsenal Mountain at Night" was sold for $ 1.2 million at Christie's auction. The work was presented in the Russian Art section, which caused discontent among the Georgian community.
- The artist Pirosmani, whose biography is filled with tragic moments, inspired many creators to work. Three films were made about him (one of them is short). Nico was dedicated to poetry by Bulat Okudzhava, Andrey Voznesensky, Yaroslav Smelyakov.