Lado Davidovich Gudiashvili

A gift from the artist to David Lomadze in 1939
Thence by descent to the present owner

Rome, Complesso Monumentale di San Michele a Ripa, Salone degli Aranci, Lado Gudiashvili, 20 January -15 February 1991

V.Beridze, Gudiashvili, Zrini: Tbilisi, Budabest, 1975, pl.15 illustrated
M.Kagan, Lado Gudiashvili, Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers, 1984, pl.8 illustrated
B.Mantura (ed.), Lado Gudiashvili, Rome: Arti Grafiche Demar, 1991, p.33 listed, p.54, pl.14 illustrated

Structural Condition The canvas is unlined and is inscribed on the reverse, stretched onto keyed wooden stretcher. This is ensuring an even and secure structural support. Paint Surface The paint surface has an even varnish layer. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows a number of carefully applied retouchings, the most significant of which are on the girl's face, veil and torso. There is also a thin horizontal line, which is approximately 14 cm in length, between the girl's left hand and the right vertical framing edge. There are other small scattered retouchings in the background. Summary The painting is therefore in stable condition and no further work is required. It should be noted that a number of retouchings have been applied to the flesh tones in particular, which are detailed above.
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This major work from Gudiashvili's Parisian period is a stunning example of Georgian folklore seen through the prism of French impressionism. The largest painting by the artist ever to be offered at auction, it is also in a sense a genuine rediscovery: as his daughter Chukurtma Gudiasvhili (b.1934) recalled, when the artist returned to Georgia he found the aesthetic of his Parisian period out of favour with Soviet ideology. He therefore had to repaint the nude body of the sitter in the present work, covering her with a semi-transparent dress and painting over the original face to bring it into harmony with the clothes. Remnants of this dress are visible in the image published in the 1991 Rome exhibition catalogue, so clearly the over-painting was partially removed at some point in the intervening years; the face however, was left entirely obscured (fig.2). The painting has since been returned to its pre-Soviet state, the over-painting removed and the original face which the artist intended in 1925 is at last revealed.

Gudiashvili had enjoyed considerable success almost from the moment he arrived in Paris as an unknown young artist on New Year's Day, 1920. He rented a studio on Montparnasse not far from the famous Café La Rotonde. The four canvases he sent to the Salon d'automne that year were extremely well received. A few days after the Salon opened, the famous Spanish painter and collector Ignacio Zuloaga came to Gudiashvili's studio, looked around and straight away declared, 'I buy everything'.

He met leading Paris artists and writers, Pablo Picasso, Amadeo Modigliani, André Derain, Fernand Léger, Maurice Utrillo who transformed his palette and artistic vision. As Kagan notes, Gudiashvili was one of the first painters to break the tradition of the dark tonal scheme thought to be an inherent feature of Georgian national painting. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in his work from the 1920s. 'His early canvas By the Black Brook, painted in 1925, brings to mind the French Impressionists' (M.Kagan, Lado Gudiashvili, Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers, 1984).

Even by these standards however, 1925 was an important year for Gudiashvili. The famous art critic Maurice Raynal published a highly complimentary volume on him, a significant expression of his professional recognition, in which he admires him for art 'so profoundly vivid, so vibrant with sensitivity and at times also with gentle humour... He remains a Georgian, after he has absorbed in Paris the recipes of his craft brought by artists from all over the world, and for this he deserves great credit... Gudiashvili has created an original and lasting art which has the power to stir emotions, to charm and to excite. It is a rare merit.'

The exhibition catalogue for his important solo show at Galerie Joseph Billiet in Paris in 1925 was penned by another influential critic, André Salmon, who praised him for succumbing 'to his wonderful desire to be a poet, in accordance with his secret nature and the instinct of his race. He will be admired precisely for this.... Is not Gudiashvili the herald of an art which the young nation, previously oppressed, will create in the future? I believe that a great future awaits my friend in Tiflis.'

Few paintings better reflect the vibrancy and poetry which clearly made such an impression on Zuloaga, Raynal and Salmon, or resonate with Gudiashvili's own dictum, 'We must paint the ideal. Rustaveli taught us to portray the majestic and the ideal in life'. The fantastic and semi-mythical perspective of the offered work, rises and falls on a single plane, recalling the primitive derivation of landscapes by Derain, Survage and Rousseau (fig.3), whereas the languid pose of his subject and the way her forms are echoed in the landscape brings to mind Matisse's Joy of Life .(fig.4)

Towards the end of his time in Paris, 'the theme of Georgia begins to dominate his art. He sees his Motherland as a beautiful woman against the background of splendid imaginary scenery. Nature acquires a new independent meaning – it is no longer simply an alternative to ugly reality or just a background; now it merges with the female image, lending a polyphonic quality to Gudiashvili's pictures (By the Black Brook [sic.], Green Nymphs (fig.5), In the Waves of the Tskhenistskhali River). Gudiashvili's colouring becomes lighter and much more vivid. The angular and heavy manner of the Kinto series gives way to a light and delicate rhythmic pattern' (M.Kagan, idem, p.231).

In November 1925, Gudiashvili returned to Tbilisi. By the Black Stream was given by the artist in 1939 as a present to his compatriot David Lomadze (1897-1988), who studied law in Tbilisi and Vienna. He worked in Germany and participated in the Hamburg Uprising of October 1923 alongside the political agitator, Ernest Thälmann (1886-1944). Lomadze married a German, Ekaterina Samassa, and in 1929 the couple returned to Tbilisi. It was then that Lomadze met the young Lado Gudiashvili, recently returned from Paris, and the lifelong friendship between the two families began (fig 1).