MOTHER'S DAY SPECIALS! SHOW ME MORE
Arkady Troyanker is an award-winning graphic designer who has worked for major publishing houses since the 1960s and was the creative director of ""Itogi"" magazine (1995-2001). Tengiz Mirzashvili (1934–2008) was a respected Georgian artist, stage and film designer, and book illustrator. Known for his landscapes and genre paintings, his work drew comparisons to Pirosmanashvili, whom he spent many years researching. Mirzashvili’s work can be found in several museums and private collections. Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006.
When Niko Pirosmanashvili: A Study of His Life and Art arrived at my door, I quite seriously thought that a small piece of furniture had just been delivered--but no, it was only this hefty doorstop of a book, the largest I now own, and the remarkable fruit of almost fifty years of on-and-off guerilla scholarship by a pair of amateur art historians. Defying all odds, Tengiz Mirzashvili and Arkady Troyanker scoured the tangled backstreets of Tbilisi and villages of rural Georgia to document the last oral sources and locations relating to Niko Pirosmani (1862-1918), the self-taught artist whose improbable journey from homeless sign-painter to avant-garde doyen I recounted in the December 2023 issue of The New Criterion. As esoteric as its subject might sound, this book holds universal appeal, for in its six hundred pages--jam-packed with beautifully printed antique photographs and full-color details of Pirosmani's paintings--the story of Georgia and a bygone, preindustrial world of country feasts, high Easter holidays, and harvest-time revelry is told with elegiac beauty. Isaac Sligh - The New Criterion
