Description
PIROSMANI, NIKO 1863-1918 Arsenal Hill at Night c. 1907-1908 Oil on oilcloth, 111 by 88 cm.
Provenance: Collection of N. Bayadze, owner of a tavern in Tiflis, until approximately 1920.
Collection of Kirill Zdanevich.
Acquired from the above by the Soviet Government, probably on the advice of Lily Brik, Moscow.
Collection of Louis Aragon, Paris, from 1957. The painting was a gift from the Soviet Union to the poet on his 60th birthday.
Private collection, Europe.
Literature: T. Tabidze, G. Robakidze, G. Kikodze, K. Zdanevich and K. Chernyavskii, Niko Pirosmanishvili, Tiflis, Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo Gruzii, 1926, No. 98.
K. Zdanevich, Niko Pirosmani, Moscow, 1964, p. 43, illustrated, also listed in the catalogue of works, p. 113, no. 97.
E. Kuznetsov, Niko Pirosmanishvili, Leningrad, Izdatelstvo Aurora, 1984, p. 310, illustrated. We are in Search of Pirosmani, Tbilisi, New Art Union, 2004, illustrated on the cover.
Arsenal Hill at Night is one of Pirosmani's most striking and interesting works. It is of finest artistic quality and has the most distinguished provenance, and its history reveals the intricacies of Sovietdiplomacy.
Painted in 1907/8, the work dates from the period when thepainter's artistic gift was at its peak. Today this is almost the onlyPirosmani work of such a standard remaining outside museum collections. Its uniqueness is determined to a large extent by the choiceof subject, not constrained by the limited framework of tavern-signstill lifes which form the major part of the artist's heritage.
The picture presented for auction is one of a particularly smallnumber of landscapes in the work of this Georgian genius. It is oneof those special, inspired Pirosmani landscapes in which we do notfind images of pure nature. In these paintings, the artist depicts theflow of human life filled with some unknown meaning, invariablyinfused with the spirit of the city, spread out somewhere nearby orvisible from afar. With the lights of Tiflis shining in the darkness ofthe night, Arsenal Hill presents a romantic spectacle, imbued with anelement of mystery. The composition is dominated by the infinitedark blue of the southern moonlit sky, in which the artist's brushpicks out the massive shape of a cliff hanging to the left, distant hillswith the silhouette of a church barely visible against the sky, yellowdots of windows of little houses whose almost indiscernible shapesare glimpsed on the steep slopes, and the line of the valley shiningsilver under the moon. In the foreground is a tiny suburban house,with a pitched roof, a single window and with the same yellow lightburning, two women passing the night around an open-air fire orresting from their long journey on the cart, and finally, the cart itselfand a pair of bullocks unharnessed for the night. Thus, at the interface of urban landscape and genre painting, the artist creates oneof the most poetic images of his native land.
Kirill Zdanevich was one of the first to discover Pirosmani's art.Inspired by his impressions after seeing Arsenal Hill, he wrote in hisdiary that the influence of Georgian folk and classical poetry informing Pirosmani's perception of the world was enormous: "Thespirit of poetry is revealed in many of the artist's pictures, especially his night scenes, where a white moon shines in a dark-blue sky,while the almost black silhouettes of trees frame the canvas. ArsenalHill at Nightis an unforgettable landscape. On a black backgroundof unpainted oilcloth several yellow brushstrokes are applied with asure hand - and you sense the city, with the sky above it, adornedby the moon and white clouds. Standing before the picture, youalmost hear the voice of the poet reading lines from verses on beauty, sadness and hopes".
It is no coincidence that Pirosmani's most romantic picture, ABandit Stole a Horse, is set in the same landscape - a full moon showing between clouds, the broken line of a steep silvery cliff to the left,the "hills of Georgia", immortalised by Alexander Pushkin, spread-ing out in the distance, where, appropriately, "night gloom rests".
This landscape, repeatedly painted by Pirosmani, is so palpable andso archetypal for Georgia that it seems painted from nature.However, this sensation is deceptive: it is composed, assembled,recreated from visual impressions retained in the artist's memory.The composition of the picture is the fruit of a creative conceptualisation of nature, a simplification of form and a striving for theutmost degree of expression. The picture is divided along the horizon by the distinct broken lineof dark green hills. Near the horizon, the sky - a mixture of ultramarine and white pigments - is almost white, despite it beingnight-time; while higher up in the sky it is turning into a thick darkblue. This penetrating blue is not echoed by any hint of blue eitherin the earth or in the black and white figures, nor is the greenechoed either in the figures or in the sky. But the picture does notbreak down into separate fragments: in terms of colour it forms aunified whole. The colouring would seem sparing had the artist notintuitively animated the painting with the harmonious rhythm ofthe spontaneous yellow brushstrokes and the yellow lights of thehouses spread out on the terraces in the middle ground, where themoonlight flooding the valley barely reaches. Horizontal cross-cut-ting of the composition by the rhythmically spaced ridges of the clouds, the scarps of the mountain ridge, the band of moonlightrunning far down along the valley, and finally the roof line at thevery bottom, imparts a sense of monumentality and solemnity. Thecontemplative equilibrium of his world view, characteristic of manyof Pirosmani's paintings, is felt here especially.
Like the majority of Pirosmani's works, Arsenal Hill at Night waspainted for a specific location, most likely to adorn a wall in thewine cellar of N. Bayadze. According to the recollections of con-temporaries, Bayadze's wine cellar (where he traded his wares "ontap and to go", as the inscription on one of Pirosmani's paintingssays) was decorated with a whole collection of the artist's works: "Itwas a unique, unforgettable spectacle when visitors came down thesteep narrow steps into a shabby, grubby little cellar and suddenlyfound themselves surrounded by such unusual paintings, so arrest-ing in their the solemnity and power of Pirosmani's talent.Eldorado, a garden in Ortachala, Bayadze's wine cellar in Saburtalo... and many others were permanent exhibitions of the artist'sworks".
The War, the Revolution and the Chamfort tragedy changed Tiflisbeyond recognition. Most of the taverns and pleasure gardensclosed, and the publicans headed for the villages to wait "for bettertimes". Pirosmani died forgotten by everyone, and the artist's vastartistic heritage began to disappear, it would seem, literally beforeone's very eyes. In the general confusion Bayadze's collection alsodisappeared.
It was found only in 1920 by the poet Kollau Chernyavsky, who wasa devoted admirer of Pirosmani's talent and author of the first catalogue of his paintings. Returning home one evening, he passed anisolated house on the outskirts of Saburtalo and stopped in amazement by an open door: inside a wine cellar, lit by a kerosene lamp,he saw Bayadze's famous collection of Pirosmani's paintings, whichhad disappeared from a railway station basement several years ago.These included works that were to become widely known in thefuture: Arsenal Hill at Night, Eastern Lamb, Fisherman, Wood Seller andothers - twelve in all. Chernyavsky ran immediately to theZdanevich brothers, who had come to Tiflis to search for survivingcanvases of the artist. Bayadze was preparing to leave for the countryside, and that night the three met to discuss where to obtainmoney to save the pictures. A few days later the paintings were purchased by Kirill Zdanevich and taken away to Moscow.
It was probably in Zdanevich's house that Arsenal Hill was firstseen by Lily Brik, who was enraptured by Pirosmani's work,ardently promoted his art, and even collected material for a biography of the artist. After the Second World War, at Brik's instigation the Soviet Government bought the painting from Zdanevichas a 60th birthday gift for the French communist poet, LouisAragon, celebrated in the USSR for his loyalty to the regime andalso brother-in-law to the muse of the great futurist poet,Mayakovsky (Aragon was married to Lily Brik's sister, the famouswriter Elsa Triolet). The picture was presented as an official gift,but the canvas was in need of restoration, and at a family meetingit was decided to leave the Arsenal Hill in Moscow, where it hungfor a long time in the apartment of Brik and her second husband,the literary critic Vasiliy Katanyan.
