David Kakabadze

FAMOUS GEORGIANS

DAVID KAKABADZE

Collage / kolaJi, 1924

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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 Kakabadze’s 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 film 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 overflown 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 earth’s 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 Kavkaskiy’s private art studio. He returned to the independent republic of Georgia in 1918, where his works were exhibited in the “Temple of Glory” (nowadays Georgia’s 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, Kakabadze’s 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 fine example of organic abstraction.

In 1926, in Paris, the American artist and collector Katherine Dreier purchased Kakabadze’s 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

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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 Kakabadze’s 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 first to create organic or biomorphic abstractions; Kakabadze was also one of the first 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 film, taught at the Art Academy in Tbilisi, and published works on the theory of art; he also made a film 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.

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Nowadays, in our three-dimensional age, it has become obvious how progressive Kakabadze’s 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 finally realized in Sweden with the help of Lund municipality. Yet despite his avant-garde, experimental style, all of Kakabadze’s work is based upon classical, established rules.

At the turn of the XIXth and XXth centuries, David Kakabadze’s 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

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