Sergei Yurievich Sudeikin, 1882-1946

In the early summer of 1917, Sergei Sudeikin and his partner Vera Arturovna Boset (1888-1982) left Moscow for Simferopol and the Black Sea coast, living in and near Yalta until April 1919. They then went on to Tiflis where they were to stay for several months launching themselves wholeheartedly into the cultural melee, with Sudeikin coming to be known as a "prisoner of the Caucasus", a reference to both Pushkin’s poem and to Lermontov.

Already an important centre for creative experiment and an incubator for the avant garde, Tiflis became a magnet for those artists wishing to leave both the harsh climate and stark political realities of life in the north, and the Transcaucasus witnessed a diaspora of artists wishing to live in the comparative freedom that they offered. Sudeikin’s friend, Osip Mandelstam, described Georgia as "a kind of Switzerland…a land of exile, but of a welcoming, hospitable, and desired exile"

David Burliuk, Kamensky, Kulbin, Mayakovsky, and Kruchenykh, all either lived there or visited Tiflis, and the Zdanevich brothers Ilia and Kirill, both natives of Tiflis, exhibited there, propounding various art movements, and advocating the work of the Georgian naïve painter Niko Pirosmanashvili.

Shortly after arriving, Sergei Sudeikin had a one-man show and was subsequently commissioned as a muralist and designer, most notably the interior of the Khimerioni Cabaret. Sudeikin left for Paris in 1920, subsequently settling in New York, where he was to continue with his Georgian designs when in 1924 he was commissioned to decorated the interior of the Caucasus Nightclub.