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FAMOUS GEORGIANS

DAVID KAKABADZE

Collage / kolaJi, 1924

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A PUBLICATION OF TBILISI MARRIOTT HOTEL & COURTYARD BY MARRIOTT TBILISI

FAMOUS GEORGIANS

new, diverse ways of expression. He began with Cubism and


progressively moved towards abstractionism, and elements
of Dadaism and surrealist abstraction also emerged naturally
in his work.
Every technological innovation of the time inspired
Kakabadzes admiration and enthusiasm. Even when he was
only a young student at the gymnasium in Kutaisi, he bought
a camera with his savings and always kept it at the ready.
Kakabadze was also a great admirer of cinematography:
between 1922 and 1923, he designed a stereoscopic lm
projector which created an illusion of three-dimensionality
without the viewer having to wear special spectacles. He
was granted a patent for his invention in many Western
European countries as well as in the United Kingdom and
the United States of America. Later, Kakabadze used the
scraps of glass and metal, accumulated in his studio during
his work on the projector, to create collages: he used lightbulbs to illuminate some of these collages, and the shards
of mirror, lenses and sparkling elements he included in his
compositions innovatively underlined depth and created a
new sensation of dynamism. When developing these new
techniques, Kakabadze sought inspiration in his own times,
which he referred to as the epoch of machinism and
cinematography.

avid Kakabadze depicted the world as


seen from the hills of Imereti, as if he had
overown his native land.
As a painter active during the days of Cubism
and abstraction, David Kakabadze had an
acute sense of time and space. The earths
surface, divided into colourful swathes, covers
the slopes of his paintings like a carpet.
Having graduated from the gymnasium (high school) in
Kutaisi, between 1910 and 1915, Kakabadze pursued his
studies at both the Natural Science Faculty of the University
of St Petersburg and in Dmitriev Kavkaskiys private art
studio. He returned to the independent republic of Georgia
in 1918, where his works were exhibited in the Temple of
Glory (nowadays Georgias National Gallery) along with
those of other Georgian painters. The Georgian government
then sent Kakabadze and other young Georgian painters to
Paris, where he stayed from 1919 to 1927. Kakabadze had
joined the modernist pursuits as far back as in St. Petersburg,
while Paris uncovered a wide arena for his inquisitive mind.
Here, in the heart of the art world, Kakabadzes vision found

From 1921 to 1927, Kakabadze created a series of


biomorphic abstractions distinguished by their organic and
embryonic outlines. His only sculpture Z or The Speared
Fish, held in the Yale University Art Gallery in America is a
ne example of organic abstraction.
In 1926, in Paris, the American artist and collector Katherine
Dreier purchased Kakabadzes sculpture from the Gallery
of Independent Artists. Later she paid a visit to the artist and
selected up to twenty of his works for the Brooklyn (New
York) International Exhibition. At the show David Kakabadze,
along with Duchamp, Mondrian, Man Ray, Kandinsky,
Brancusi, Miro, Malevich, Leger and other leaders,
represented the avant-garde art of a new era.
With the exception of some of the works he produced during
his student days, Kakabadze never depicted the nude female
form, but this theme is nonetheless present in his work in
a non-traditional way. Terra-ground was his model: in his
landscape paintings of Imereti, Kakabadze very rarely depicts
sky or water. In the portraits of the mother, he generalizes the
idea of the motherland (Imereti - My Mother), and his organic
abstractions must be seen as an unconscious replacement of
the female theme.
In the abstractions he created before leaving Paris, it almost
seems like Kakabadze shows cells seen through the lenses
of a microscope or cosmic landscapes viewed through a

A PUBLICATION OF TBILISI MARRIOTT HOTEL & COURTYARD BY MARRIOTT TBILISI

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FAMOUS GEORGIANS

Imereti, my mother / imereTi, dedaCemi, 1918

telescope. These works assure us that micro and macroscopic


universes in Nature are based upon a shared organic order - the
basis for the entire body of Kakabadzes art, with Nature and the
beginning of life as his constant sources of inspiration.
When he left for Paris, Kakabadze planned to study new forms
of artistic expression and to reinterpret them in his own way. He
achieved this aim - not only following new artistic movements, but
also as one of the rst to create organic or biomorphic abstractions;
Kakabadze was also one of the rst artists whose work shows
signs of Art Deco.

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Kakabadze returned to Georgia in 1927. When he had left, the


country had been independent and home to rising modern artistic
and literary movements. When he returned, however, Georgia
had already undergone years of Sovietisation, and avant-garde
inclinations had become an offence. Kakabadze designed sets for
theatre and lm, taught at the Art Academy in Tbilisi, and published
works on the theory of art; he also made a lm about Georgian
monuments, later returning to the landscape genre of painting. As
an artist, he was constantly criticized for his incompatibility with the
principles of Soviet realism - an incompatibility which even led to
him being dismissed from the Art Academy. Kakabadze died of a
heart attack in 1952.

A PUBLICATION OF TBILISI MARRIOTT HOTEL & COURTYARD BY MARRIOTT TBILISI

FAMOUS GEORGIANS

Nowadays, in our three-dimensional age, it has become obvious


how progressive Kakabadzes ideas were for his time. He tried to
solve the problem of depicting depth by experimenting with new
techniques, even when working on a two-dimensional surface.
In order to achieve this aim, Kakabadze sought inspiration in the
theories of optics of scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz and
James Maxwell, and researched Georgian architectural ornaments
as well. A distinguished representative of modernism, Kakabadze
left behind innovative inventions which have continued to exist in
process even in the 21st century: in 2011, his project to create a

holographic portrait of Stalin was nally realized in Sweden with the


help of Lund municipality. Yet despite his avant-garde, experimental
style, all of Kakabadzes work is based upon classical, established
rules.
At the turn of the XIXth and XXth centuries, David Kakabadzes
artistic vision, atop the hills of his native Imereti, aligned with his
epoch. He saw the world through the eyes of a classical artist, and
created a body of avant-garde work, based upon eternal values.

Imeretian peisage / imereTis peizaJi, 1919

A PUBLICATION OF TBILISI MARRIOTT HOTEL & COURTYARD BY MARRIOTT TBILISI

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