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Biography of Elena Akhvlediani

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"When I lived in Paris," wrote Akhvlediani, "David Kakabadze, Lado Gudiashvili and Keto Magalashvili were also there. On Sundays we gathered at Datiko's (Kakabadze.- Ed's note) but on other days we saw each other rarely, all working hard." Morning hours were given mostly to visiting museums, and after dinner she pursued her studies. Her natural inclinations made her choose the Academic Colarossi founded back in the 1880s. It was a studio without a teacher, where for a small pay anyone could paint or draw from a nude model. The studio was as a rule crowded and had an atmosphere of complete freedom. When she got tired of drawing from the model, Akhvlediani sketched portraits of her colleagues.

The studio was well known in the artistic circles of Paris. It was visited by those who wanted quickly to acquire habits of making sketches. The model often changed poses, and that required concentration, trained to quickly catch the form, the movement, and the proportions, to feel the composition, in a word, splendidly trained the eye and the hand, which is especially important for the artist seeking a life-like and direct representation of reality.

We have several albums and paper-cases with Akhvlediani's drawings made at Colarossi's. Up to fifteen sketches were made daily. They show that the artist worked very unevenly: depending on her mood the sketch was sometimes good and sometimes went wrong altogether. Nevertheless her mastery was growing. An increasingly picturesque, free and anatomically correct manner was taking the place of a rigid monotonous outline and conventional modeling of the form.

The artist was being increasingly captivated by the representation of an individual form of the human body. In her works, whose purpose was clearly training, Akhvlediani did not forget about the imaginative aspect of the drawing. By slightly exaggerating the proportions, she achieved at times a keen expressiveness of the model's image. The drawings were done in pencil, charcoal, sanguine, or Indian ink. The dominating role in all works was assigned to outline.

The style of the drawings reveals the influence of various masters, from Ingres to Picasso and Matisse. Intensive work continued outside the studio as well. Thus numerous sketches made in Paris appeared in Akhvlediani's albums, her drawings revived scenes she had seen in cafes, in the parks and in the streets. In Paris was also created a series of urban views which specialists consider to be among the best in the artist's legacy. As previously, in Italy, she did not depict the city's most remarkable sights admired by the tourists.

She was inspired neither by the carefree Paris of the Impressionists, nor the tragically languishing Paris of Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud, nor the Paris of the artistic and the- atrical Bohème. She found fascination in the prosaic workers' outskirts, in the humble dwelling areas, where houses with crumbling plaster live, just as their dwellers, a complicated, hard life. Akhvlediani's views of Paris are distinguished by a diversity of composition methods. They were some- times painted from the window, from above, and the artist cut off by the frame of the picture the lower storeys of the buildings. Or the spectator, together with the artist, finds himself in the street and the city surrounds them by the picturesque facades of the small houses or captivates by its far or high perspective.

When observing Paris, Akhviediani felt and conveyed in her pictures one of its characteristic peculiarities: the special humidity and luminosity of its air. The same is mentioned in the reminiscences of A. Shchekin-Krotova: "The moist air of Paris, where one feels the remote breath of the Atlantic Ocean, made a miracle of seemingly most ordinary views of the city." The impression of this peculiar light and colour was so strong that it remained in the palette of some views and landscapes done by the artist already after her return to her own country.

In France, Akhvlediani also continued painting pictures devoted to Georgia, using sketches made before her journey abroad. The views and genre compositions of that time have something in common with the works of her elder colleagues, the Georgian artists living in Paris at the same time. Thus the personages of her pictures are recognizable as the types of Georgians occurring in her works of Gudiashvili, and the hills covered with patches of fields remind one by their regular pattern the original formula of lmeretian landscape found by Kakabadze.

Several pictures portray the traditional Georgian 'feast'. This theme in Georgian art already had its history. Niko Pirosmanashvili painted 'feasts', imparting a symbolic meaning to the national holiday meal. Gudiashvili most frequently emphasized the tragic frustration of his personages concealed by outward bravado. Akhvlediani's 'feasts' are traditional genre scenes, and the feasting kintos - jesters and merry-makers - are those whom the artist met in the streets of Tiflis. Of considerable importance in these works is landscape. In contrast to the views and landscapes devoted to Paris life, Akhvlediani's pictures on Georgian themes are characterized by certain conventionality of the range of colours based on the combination of warm brown and green tones with small quantities of light blue in the distance. Colour is applied in thin, almost transparent layers in the classical mixed method.

The artist exhibited her views of Paris and compositions devoted to Georgia in the Salons d'autumne and Salons des indépendents. Akhvlediani's work was received with approval by the French art critics. In 1926 her personal exhibition was held with success in the Quatre Chemins Gallery in Paris, and her pictures were bought by Paul Signac. The artist was invited to exhibit her pictures in Holland, but for family reasons she was compelled to return in 1927 to her country. There Akhvlediani at once began actively participating in the artistic life of the Georgia. Reviews of her works were arranged in Telavi and then in Kutaisi.

Successfully pursuing painting, Akhvlediani regularly exhibited her landscapes and 'purpose' pictures at different group exhibitions. In those years she began trying her hand as a stage designer. From then on and over several decades her creative activities were in the main determined by her work at the theatre under Konstantin Mardjanishvili. The famous director liked to work with young people and often entrusted the stage designing to artists and actors previously known to no one. Mardjanishvili had a special gift of discovering a person's abilities. At first he gave to the beginner full independence, providing to him an opportunity to try his strength, but he could also direct someone else's creative searches into his own channel. "I trust myself," he answered to those who expressed doubts. Mardjanishvili thus brought to the theatre many talented painters, David Kakabadze in particular.

After visiting Akhvlediani's personal exhibition in Kutaisi, Mardjanishvili offered to her cooperation. The stunned artist's timid confession that she had no experience of work at the theatre was brushed aside at once. "You may rely on me in that. I can see better whether you will be able to work at the theatre or not. So you will work with me." "I shall never forget how Konstantin Alexandrovich invited me for the first time to make stage designs for the production of The Rails Are Booming. He first showed the wings, the traps, the sources of light, in a word, all technical equipment that can be used. Then he gave me the play. "Read it attentively. I want to know your ideas, and to think for an artist means to draw. Bring me the designs in a week. The door of the works is the only thing that is definitely needed, everything else is for you to decide."

The first designs satisfied Mardjanishvili and Akhvlediani received another assignment. She was now to design the scenery for Kaladze's play How. The setting was extremely laconic: for some of the scenes, for interiors in particular, use was made of laths painted white placed on black velvet so as to create the impression of a closed interior or an industrial view. In other scenes the means of the shadow theatre were used. In addition, fragments of films were introduced into the play to show the revolutionary events of 1905. The performance was an innovatory one and with an acutely expressive imagery.

In cooperation with Mardjanishvili Akhvlediani was the scenery and costume designer of many plays (The Whites by Shengelaya, Kvarkvare Tutaberi by Kakabadze, Solar Eclipse in Georgia by Antonov, A House on the Bank of the Kara by Kaladze, Shakespeare's Othello, and others). Not all was of the same quality. Akhvlediani, however, could critically appraise the results of her work. "I remember how delighted I was when the scenery for the play The Rails Are Booming was ready. But, alas, my joy did not last long. Less than six months had passed when I began insisting that it should be altered because I considered it overdone. God alone knows how many times the scene-shifters cursed me for the scenery being so cumbersome... When he heard my opinion, Kote grinned and said: 'Fine I did expect that. Now you see your sins. ' It was then my turn to be surprised. 'But why did you say nothing when I gave you the sketches?'

'There were no major mistakes, the general line was correct, and the complicacy of the scenery was for the artist herself to perceive. I like the stage designer to find his own way in the process of work. If he does everything on the director's instructions, nothing good will come of it. That will fetter him, and an artist must feel freedom...'.". There was much that impressed Akhvlediani in Mardjanishvili's creative principles. Without being professional musicians, both loved and subtly felt music. Music usually ran through the whole of the play in harmony with what was taking place on the stage. In the late twenties, Mardjanishvili's scenery was very laconic. "Light worked equally with the setting's, and each performance was a fairy-play."

Working with light captivated the artist. "It was wonderful how the 'magic ray' imparted to any, seemingly most prosaic object, a romantic tone. To see his rehearsals was a delight, and as to the light rehearsals, I don't even know how to call them. As a rule Mardjanishvili made them together with the artist before the first night." During these the artist could see how the scenery she made (Mardjanishvili always insisted on it) would live in the performance and could eliminate mistakes. The producer was able and loved to work with the artist, sometimes under the latter's influence he partially changed his intentions.

Attaching much importance to the graphic aspect of the performance, Mardjanishvili stressed that the actor is aided in the creation of the image by everything: the scenery, light, music, props, and costume.

In Akhvlediani's designs, the colour of the costume, its cut and the choice of the material - all helped to disclose the nature of the personages and their place in the play. Especially interesting in the artist's interpretation are character and comic parts. Both the costume designs and the costumes themselves, in the making of which, according to the best theatrical traditions, the artist herself took part, making during the fittings the necessary corrections, contain elements of an interesting plastic outline of the role and at times also of the true inner state.

During her work of several decades, Akhvlediani made stage and costume designs for over seventy plays. She cooperated with different stage directors but her association with Mardjanishvili and his profound and precise criticisms and advice were of special importance to her. , From the mid-thirties and then in the fifties Akhvlediani made a great deal of drawings for books. She illustrated works of foreign classics and Georgian writers, mostly for children and the youth. Not every interpretation of book illustration can now be accepted but mention must certainly be made of the graphic culture and mastery of execution of most of the works and Akhvlediani's striving to find her own way in art.

A comparison of the books illustrated by the artist shows, above all, the diversity of manners and styles. Illustrations for Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer are pen-and-ink drawings. They include both swift line drawings and scenes drawn in detail. The illustrations for the Georgian fairy-tale A Woman Butterfly arouse admiration by the finesse of the pen drawing and the impressive contrast of large black and white surfaces. Illustrating Pshavela's tales, Akhvlediani in her pen-and-ink drawings approached more than in other books, the style of woodcut, while in the illustrations for Ninoshvili's short stories, made in gouache, her style was close to that of linocut.

While working as a book illustrator and stage designer, Akhvlediani continued giving much of her energies to easel painting and drawing. The artist travelled Georgia, collecting material for her pictures. Her works were regularly exhibited. Landscapes, however, remained her artistically most important works. In the works of the Parisian period already, several different stylistic and thematic lines of development made themselves felt in her art. With some modifications they remained in the artist's productions in the subsequent years as well. Thus the landscape Telavi (1927), just as the views of Montmartre, seems to radiate an especial warm light. These works also reveal the use of brush drawing, conveying with its soft movement the wavy texture of the tiled roof of a house or the trembling lines of the powerful crowns of the trees. One cannot but feel, when viewing the canvas, the pleasure with which the artist applied the plastic oil, enjoying every touch of the brush on the canvas.

The works of this group are distinguished by a special harmony and noble quality of colour. However, in the landscape Old Tbilisi. Maidan, painted in the same year and in the same technique, colour relations are more strained and the soft luminescence characteristic of the earlier canvases disappears. Several pictures continue the series of Georgian landscapes begun in Paris. The Alazani Valley (1937) is apparently one of the last in this group. Just as in the composition The Old Belfry (1926), the artist paints here a dark foreground and, without any transition, a sunlit background, the very interpretation of which also has certain similarity with the picture painted almost a decade earlier. But it is more strict and geometricized, more logically constructed. The desire to transform life rationalistically is especially noticeable in the group of such graphic works as Fairy-tale (A Joke) and Bolnisi (both 1927), A Paris Café (1929), and others. Human figures, architecture, and various objects incorporated in the composition are turned here into ideal geometricized volumes.

The space surrounding them is divided by planes and looks fragile. The artist herself regarded these works as experiments. The most of the above-mentioned pictures and drawings are signed by the author in Latin letters as the works done in Italy and France, which sets them apart from other works of the same years. They can be assumed to have been conceived and possibly begun abroad. Later, in Georgia, they might have been finished and dated. As recalled by her relatives and friends, the artist could paint a picture with interruptions, sometimes for several years. That was a peculiarity of Akhvlediani's creative method, which had formed back in the early years and remained unchanged throughout her life.

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