Love at first sight. Enigma at first sight. This painter has a magnetism as inexplicable as the fact that his name has spent more than a century in almost total anonymity. Pure, simple paintings, with a black background, sad figures, innocent paintings, more naive than the French naive ones. Wonderful waxed fabrics. What took you so long, Niko? Why has it taken so long for contemporary art to show his work in a temple?
“It is love at first sight, because it provokes enthusiasm the moment you see his oil paintings for the first time,” said the Russian painter Ilya Kabakov, who died last May. “I feel exactly that, love at first sight, a year that does not leave me,” declares Daniel Baumann, curator of the prestigious Fondation Beyeler in Basel who has bet everything on showing the work of this cursed unknown, the Georgian painter Nikos Pirosmani.
A milkman and cheese and bread shopkeeper who painted seemingly harmless pictures, who one day closed his humble establishment so as not to open it again and until his very early death left a plastic testament of a simplicity that leaves the viewer naked, a string of works by a impact that chars you like Jabba-el-Hat to Han Solo.
Of course, Pirosmani died poor as a rat, deeply in love (they say he spent it all on thousands of roses for his beloved) and buried no one knows where. Not a cross, not a half tombstone, not a sad clue. A letter and an image have been preserved from his entire life. Thin face, thick mustache, expression of suffering.
Pirosmani is one of the great enigmas of 20th century art, his path seemed well drawn. Sam Keller, director of the Beyeler, whose exhibitions are always anthological, remembers that in 1913, having just been discovered by the writers and artists Mikhail Le Dentu and the Zdanevich brothers, “he exhibited in the influential exhibition Mishen (Objective) together with neither more nor less than with Marc Chagall, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov and the maestro Kazimir Malevich.”
The springboard was ready for a triple corkscrew, with an individual exhibition included, in Paris, the mecca of success, of isms, of glory. But the pool was emptied with the arrival of the Great War and from then on, reality became silence and legend, sometimes exaggerated... Georgia, in the Soviet confines, was too far away to be included in the canon of the USSR (artists almost all of them fled from Russia) and, over time, made him their national painter, and perhaps added salt and pepper to his figure.
“There has been a tendency to make him a myth with his work outside the Western canon. Stories about him have proliferated, some embellished, others directly invented,” Keller and Baumann point out. “His life and his work have been enthroned in the category of icons,” they conclude.
Be that as it may, the artistic value of Pirosmani's (or Pirosmanashvili's) work had a very special stage. Halfway between the 19th and 20th centuries, Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, was baptized as the “Paris of the East”, where Western, Slavic and Persian culture converged in an explosively rich and prolific mix and from there came its art that It is shown in its splendor with a triptych at the entrance as a prologue and a wink.
Two works by a certain Pablo Picasso flank Henri Rousseau's famous painting, Le Douanier, in which a lion emerges from the lush jungle and sinks its teeth into a wild boar. Rousseau is the totem of naïve painters and the appetizer of all of Pirosmani's works, waxed canvases, many on black backgrounds, with mustachioed male characters with the day's catch in their hands and their feet in the pond, a lady in a red dress intense and generous bust as generous as the tank of beer you are drinking.
There are goats, donkeys loaded with firewood, deer and silver foxes illuminated by the moonlight. There are camels, a symbol of a country that is a crossroads of cultures and paths. There are still lifes that overshadow some surrealist works that appear in all contemporary art manuals.
His style is reminiscent of the pure, naked and silent drama of the immeasurable film Sayat Nova, the color of the pomegranate, from 1968, by the persecuted director Serguei Parajanov where realism is more miserable than magical, especially in the painting “Farmer Girl Going to Get Water with their children.”
As a shopkeeper, Pirosmani did very well: he opened a store on Olga Street (today 37 Rustaveli Avenue), selling milk, butter, cheese, eggs, then he moved to Vekua Street. By then he was already painting non-stop and earning enough to hire an assistant... which helped him get out of the business and paint non-stop. He closed in 1901.
In a film that praises his figure (Pirosmani appears on Georgian banknotes, he is not just anyone in his country), he distributes cheese, butter and bread to the poor. He is left with nothing. He closes the door, picks up the two hanging paintings and leaves. But he's already back.
Pirosmani's exhibition is demanding. His pictures are legible. Technically simple, but they force you to move to that multicultural and independent Tbilisi (it would later end up within Soviet borders), imagine what the painter's life was like, why his obsession with animals. The exhibition elevates and does not dispel all the secrets or enigmas. It is powerful, so much so that the neighbor, with magnificent fabrics by Matisse and Derain is for another day. With the pyrotechnics of Pirosmani, the black sky of Basel is already very well illuminated.
