REVIEWS
The Making of a
Nonconformist Artist
Vladimir Kandelaki's art
has been shaped especially by his proud Georgian heritage and the
many tragic and dramatic upheavals which affected him and his
family and their native Georgia during the revolution, civil war
and three quarters of a century of Soviet oppression. These
circumstances reinforced an independent and rebellious streak in
Kandelaki's character which sustained and motivated him in Soviet
Georgia and, more recently, here in the United States.
Kandelaki's heritage,
while primarily Georgian, was closely intertwined with the
history and culture of St. Petersburg which was, until the
overthrow of the Tsar in 1917, the center of Russian imperial
power. After its founding by Peter the Great, St. Petersburg's
centripetal forces reached out into the provinces and drew them
into its orbit. Many high ranking Georgian families, such as the
Bagration, Chavchavadze, Cholokashvili and Orbeliani families,
became heavily involved in the Tsar's court and in the military,
administrative, and cultural life of the city and the empire.
For Kandelaki his Russian
heritage came primarily through his two Russian grandmothers both
of whom grew up in St. Petersburg. His paternal grandmother,
Maria Alexandrovna Kolachova, daughter of a hereditary orthodox
priest, was born and educated in St. Petersburg. After the
revolution she retreated with her husband, Vladimir Kandelaki's
grandfather, to Tbilisi. Kandelaki's maternal grandmother, Maria
Nikolaevna Ivkova, was born to a noble family in St. Petersburg.
Her mother's family estate, "Babushkino," bordered on the Pushkin
estate in the Pskov region. Her husband, Vladimir Antonovich
Vinitskii, Vladimir Kandelaki's materal grandfather, was born in
Tbilisi and showed considerable artistic talent. He was trained,
however, as a cadet in the Junker School in Tbilisi before
studying in the Artillery-Engineering Academy in St. Petersburg.
By the 1917 revolution he had achieved the rank of colonel in the
Russian army and was a Knight of the St. George Cross. During the
Civil War he served in General Denikin's headquarters staff and,
after the White Army's defeat, he settled with his family in
Georgia. He later became the director of the Batumi Technological
School and chief engineer of the Adjaria region where he built
several important bridges before being repeatedly arrested in the
early 1930's due to his earlier affiliation with Denikin's army.
He died unexpectedly in a prison infirmary in 1936.
Kandelaki's paternal
grandfather, Valerian Andreevich Kandelaki, also was extensively
involved in St. Petersburg's activities. He was born in Kutaisi in
the western part of Georgia when it was the capital of the Kingdom
of Imeretia and a lively cultural center which produced classics
of Georgian poetry Galaktion Tabidze and Georgian music Zakharia
Paliashvili, as well as Vladimir Mayakovski, the talented Russian
poet. After finishing the gymnasium there, he entered the
University of St. Petersburg. Following his graduation, he taught
Russian, Greek, Latin, and history in a St. Petersburg gymnasium
before transferring to one in nearby Gatchino where Tsar Nicholas
II had his summer residence. Later he was appointed inspector of
the Alexander 111 Technical School in St. Petersburg, named a
court counselor and decorated with a number of medals. After the
1917 revolution he and his family, along with almost the entire
Georgian community of St. Petersburg, fled to Georgia in the
Kandelaki's case first to Kutaisi and then to Tbilisi in the early
1920's where Valerian was appointed director of the first Georgian
leading school No.55. He died of natural causes in 1936 thereby
escaping the fate of many of his colleagues who died in Stalin's
great purges in the following year.
Kandelaki's father, Andro
Valerianovich Kandelaki, was born in Gatchino in the outskirts of
St. Petersburg in 1916 and left for Georgia with his parents in
1918 as a result of the Revolution. He spent his first years in
Kutaisi where he studied architecture in the Railway Technikum.
Although Andro had shown great artistic talent as a boy and as a
student in the technikum's architecture program, he entered the
Tbilisi Institute of Railway Transport where he received his
degree in 1940 just prior to the outbreak of World War II.
While at the Institute he
continued to develop his artistic talents and began to contribute
caricatures and political cartoons to satirical journals such as
Niangi, the Georgian equivalent of the Russian journal
Krokodil. This work provided him with valuable on-the-job
training which served him well when he was drafted into the army
in 1941. His satirical drawings and political cartoons soon began
to appear on the pages of various Soviet army publications. When
he resumed to Tbilisi for a month's leave to visit his wife in
October of 1942, he resumed work for Niangi as well as for
other periodicals before returning to the front. Andro's wife,
Natalia Vinitskaya Kandelaki, was born and grew up in Tbilisi. As
a student, she wanted to accomplish her French, what she had known
from a childhood, but was advised by her relatives to enter the
Agricultural Institute in order to "blend" with the proletariat
for safety. She was never employed in agricultural work but
devoted herself during the war to nursing and to her family.
It was into this dramatic
and tragic multicultural but largely Georgian heritage that
Vladimir Kandelaki was born a Gemini to Andro and Natalia in
Tbilisi on June 4, 1943, at the height of World War II.
Fortunately the Germans had been turned back at Stalingrad and in
the North Caucasus and, therefore, never achieved their goal of
occupy
ing Georgia. As Vladimir
grew up in the years following the war, his own artistic
interests were stimulated by his father's work as a caricaturist
and cartoonist who dealt in a politically orthodox fashion with
the various events of his time. Meanwhile, his mother, Natalia
Vinitskaya-Kandelaki, and grandmother, Maria Ivkova, stimulated
young Vladimir's imagination with tales of Georgian and Russian
folklore and past heroic deeds, as well as with selected readings
in European and American literature. From 1956 to 1963, Kandelaki
attended the prestigious Nikoladze Art School in Tbilisi and then
entered the highly respected Tbilisi State Academy of Arts where
he won a number of special awards as a young artist and was
recognized for outstanding work six years running in
republic-wide competitions. In 1966, when only 23 years old, he
was selected out of a large field of older and highly respected
artists to do the illustrations for the 800th anniversary of the
Georgian national poet Shota Rustaveli, and to participate in a
special exhibition.
As an artist and as a
person, Vladimir Kandelaki owes much not only to his father and
family but also to the outstanding Georgian painter Sergo
Kobuladze, who was considered one of the best illustrators of
Shakespeare and whose art was recognized in the Encyclopedia
Britannica. Another artist who had a significant influence on
Kandelaki and his work was the Russian, artist Vasili Shukaev who
had been a member of the avant-garde artists' group Mir
Iskusstvo in St. Petersburg. Much later, having been "sent to
the provinces," Shukaev spent a number of years teaching at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Tbilisi where Kandelaki was one of his
prize students.
Kandelaki's first solo
exhibition was arranged in Tbilisi just after his graduation from
the Academy in 1971 by Merani, one of Georgia's largest
publishing houses. A reviewer of the exhibition noted favorably
that this was Kandelaki's "first step into the world of great
art-a step that is firm and certain." From 1972 to 1975, Kandelaki
was given several solo exhibitions in Moscow and its environs-at
the Central House for Soviet Writers (more than 100 works), at the
exhibition hall of Smena magazine, and at the House for
Scientists in Dubna, an important site for research on the atomic
bomb. Russian critics praised the "originality of Kandelaki's
imaginative thinking based solidly on a fine academic grounding."
Later in the 1970's and
1980's there were solo and group exhibitions of his art in Poland,
Finland, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Turkey, Japan, Cuba, Canada, and
the United States ( New York City and Washington, B.C. in 1976).
Sadly Soviet travel restrictions prevented Kandelaki from
attending any of these exhibitions with the exception of those in
Finland where he participated in the 7th Finnish-Soviet Youth
Friendship Camp. His exhibition at the camp attracted considerable
interest prior to its traveling to several Finnish cities.
Articles he wrote for Finnish publications indicated how important
this experience in Finland was in opening his eyes, exposing him
to new ideas and enriching his artistic imagination.
While Kandelaki was
enjoying increasing recognition at home and abroad and official
acceptance or, at least, toleration by the art authorities and
political watchdogs, the suffocating atmosphere of the Brezhnev
"stagnation" and the continuing repression of artistic freedom was
affecting him and other independent and creative young Georgian
artists. In this atmosphere of repression, Kandelaki's dangerous
family history and his choice of Georgian historical and
religious themes as well as ambiguous or satirical sub-
ject matter made him
suspect 10 uuin iviumu
Georgian communist party officials. Those in Moscow
were particularly disturbed by Kandelaki's nationalistic
tendencies while the Georgian communist officials, who tended to
sympathize with these pro-Georgian sentiments, were suspicious of
Kandelaki's mocking of the endless and meaningless communist
ceremonies and his critical allusions to restrictions on
individual freedom by the Soviet regime.
This form of double
jeopardy was also a problem for nonconformist artists in other
outlying republics such as neighboring Armenia as well as in
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. In these
republics, with their distinctive foreign languages and cultures
and histories of Russian and Soviet oppression, art which might
be stylistically acceptable to Soviet authorities at the center
could be rejected locally because it was thought to promote
undesirable "formalism" or western influences. On the other hand,
local national pride and the struggle for some degree of
independence from Moscow by local art authorities lead to an
acceptance in Moscow of deviations from the Socialist realist norm
on the ground of permitting cultural diversity. In this way
national cultural and other differences might provide a degree of
protective cover from distant Moscow controls. In these republics
almost all of the best and some of the most independent artists,
like Kandelaki, were members of the artists' union of their
republic. These artists exhibited at home and even abroad.
Although many were respected teachers in art schools, as was
Kandelaki, certain of their works were noticeably provocative and
were refused exhibition or had to be altered for acceptance. Each
of these artists had to decide just how far he or she would go in
provoking the wrath of the authorities. As a consequence, some of
the best works were never offered for exhibition and teachers
often succumbed to self-censorship in order to avoid trouble or
even the loss of their jobs.
Kandelaki did not seek to
be identified as a nonconformist artist despite his conviction
that he was born with such a mandate as a consequence of the
tragic experiences of his parents, his grandparents and of his own
generation. In his youth, his rebellion found expression in a
variety of ways—sometimes childish and often outrageous and
dangerous. One example comes from his time as a student at the
Tbilisi Academy of Fine Arts. The faculty of the Academy could be
divided into two groups, those who loved art and creative freedom
and those who held that artistic expression must be subverted to
the needs of the state. Those in the latter group were, of course,
communist officials. Every year students of the Academy were
obliged to participate in the parade on November 7th that
commemorated the October Revolution. In 1964, Kandelaki failed to
attend. The following day, as he arrived at the hall where a
special party for students of the Academy was being held as part
of the November 7th celebration, he was accosted by the First
Secretary of the Komsomol organization who announced loudly that
Kandelaki was not permitted to participate in the party because
of his absence from the parade. Kandelaki was at first hurt and
ashamed and left immediately. However, the next day after brooding
about the episode he impetuously sought out the First Secretary in
his Red Corner office and slapped him
about the face, reddening
his nose and cheeks. This very nearly ended Kandelaki's career as
an art student. He was saved from disaster only through some high
level intervention by a number of supportive professors from the
first group who prevailed over the second group. As a consequence,
Kandelaki achieved a fabled status at the Academy for his daring
and very risky act.
Another incident involved
Kandelaki and a small group of his nonconformist artist friends
who were always ready to resist or even criticize communist
officialdom. During an All-Union symposium of Soviet artists,
producers, poets, actors and architects in Bakuriani in 1977,
members of this group reproached communist officials for
persecuting artists who attempted to show their avant-garde or
ironic Sotsart-style paintings in public exhibitions. In the face
of this criticism officials hastily disbanded the symposium
hoping to prevent further trouble and avoid negative publicity.
These events did not escape the notice of the Voice of America,
however, which reported on them in its broadcasts. Unfortunately
this international exposure did not shield Kandelaki's group from
retribution. For a long time the members were neither allowed to
participate in local, republic-wide or all-union exhibitions nor
to make purchases in the official state-run art supply stores.
With such tactics communist art officials were able to carefully
manipulate and repress the creative impulses of Soviet artists.
Despite Kandelaki's
disparaging attitude toward the Communist Party and its
restrictions on artistic freedoms, his many awards and other
honors-both domestic and international-made him one of the "elect"
whom the Party hoped would grace its membership. Although the
Party asked him to join numerous times, he always demurred,
saying facetiously that he didn't have the money for the
membership fees and that he had not yet matured enough to warrant
the honor.
As the eighties arrived:,
the critical content in Kandelaki's art became more evident and
telling. Examples of his subversive and satirical digs at party
or government bureaucrats are paintings depicting broken down
military equipment and stalled party vehicles carrying propaganda
banners in patriotic parades. Later, shortly before the policies
of Glasnost and Perestroika were promulgated,
Kandelaki made prescient sketches and paintings of elaborate and
precarious "Houses of Cards" which symbolized the unstable
Soviet system on the verge of collapse. Even more threatening to
his status as a politically acceptable and respected teacher of
art were his veiled criticisms of the system in 1986 and in
following years expressed by the cruel constraint of gorgeous
peacocks imprisoned in chain-link cages. These lovely birds,
classical symbols of freedom, clearly represented the suffering
Georgian people confined in the Soviet Russian cage-but sometimes
Kandelaki's paintings showed a cage with a ragged hole torn in it
suggesting some hope for the peacock's ultimate escape to
freedom.
Norton Dodge
Profesor Emeritus
St. Mary's College of Maryland
Vladimir Kandelaki:
Between Two Cultures
Georgia is an ancient
kingdom, with a long history of Christianity and an equally
treasured tradition of religious tolerance. Of the sixty
synagogues remaining in the former Soviet Union in 1988, more than
half were in Georgia. Here, in the Caucasus mountains, the
audacious Prometheus challenged the power of the gods, and was
chained to a hillside and tortured. Here knighthood took on as
important a role in history and folklore as it did in medieval
Europe through the writings of the poet Shota Rustaveli. Here, in
the mountains and gorges of Tusheti, Osetia, Abkhazia, Kaheti and
Guria, European culture and Asian influence are both felt in the
life style of the people, and in the architecture and ornament of
the buildings.
From his Georgian heritage
then, the artist Vladimir Kandelaki, draws a self-image of pride
and individual responsibility, and a rich and complex visual
vocabulary. Georgians have a sophisticated aesthetic, literary,
military and culinary culture that has survived attack both from
foreign conquest and the seventy-four year siege of socialist
dogma.
From his mother and
grandmother, who fed his imagination with Georgian history, and
folktales and literature of old Russia, Kandelaki learned an
expansive and expressive way of synthesizing imagery and
information. From the use of images in his Russian Orthodox
religious background, the artist learned a highly structured mode
of presentation. In an early group of paintings, represented in
the exhibition by Georgian Life, the structure of society
and the customs which hold it together are portrayed almost
reverently. A hierarchy of importance is established by place in
a kind of secular altar screen. A "madonna and child" are at the
compositional core of the painting, on the top rank of the
images. Their proximity to the hearth, the center of the home, is
no accident. It is a metaphor for their joint importance in
traditional Georgian society. And, as in the traditional altar
screen, events and customs that are defined by the temporal world
are relegated to the lower ranks of the panel.
In a later group of
panoramic paintings, Kandelaki combines images of festival,
celebration, children's games and occupational routine on the
streets and plazas of old Tbilisi, Georgia's capital city. They
are cherished memories, apparently structured by the winding
streets and alleys, but they too are carefully organized.
In these paintings, scale
is important both to design and to symbolism. Objects dominate
human activity: gigantic squashes, fruits and ears of corn are
carried on horsedrawn wagons through the foreground of the
paintings; massive wine bottles and jugs dwarf and sometimes
replace buildings, a huge meat bone commands the attention of
guests at a convivial dinner table, and a paper airplane larger
than an air transport glides over the city. Interspersed among
family rituals and seasonal festivals, small vignettes of daily
routine activate the composition: children's games with barrel
staves and slingshots, itinerant knife sharpeners, and
coppersmiths hammering out great pots for the hearth.
These large canvases have
a kind of choral quality, many voices of different color, range
and strength, unified by a melody that all the members of the
chorus have known for centuries and sing without reference to a
score.
Kandelaki's "Georgian"
paintings are nostalgic, but they are also optimistic; they are
suffused with light and are full of symbols of hope and strength.
The Georgian "Christmas tree", the chichilaki, is made of wood
shavings. It sits in a window, set against a sunlit snowscape over
a traditional Georgian balcony. It is surrounded by seeds, beans
and preserved fruits. It is an ensemble of hope, perhaps a way for
the artist to reassure himself of a personal and national rebirth.
The Caged Peacock
is a mixed message, a metaphor for sadness and stubborn pride, a
statement of personal frustration, but a collective one as well.
Kandelaki's countrymen, the writers, say "This beautiful peacock
is Georgia, confined in a cage. But even there behind the bars,
the divine rays of real and subconscious hope, do penetrate."
Kandelaki was, like many
of his colleagues in the former Soviet Union, a member of the
Artists' Union. As such, he had an official face and an unofficial
one, and came to learn the meaning of "stagnation" (as the era of
Brezhnev came to be known) all too well. His paintings of Georgia
were collected for major museums throughout the Soviet Union, but
they were viewed by many officials, both in Moscow and Tbilisi, as
reactionary. He was viewed by some as too nostalgic, too
nationalistic.
As Kandelaki began to
ponder the relationship of Georgia to the Soviet system and
considered the suffocation of his own creative expression, his
subject matter and mood changed dramatically. Ilyich 's Lamp
is ostensibly another memory of school days when the artist
was taught that electricity came to the Soviet Union thanks
to the wisdom and leadership of Vladimir "Ilyich" Lenin. In
fact, Lenin's transparent image on the huge and fragile light
bulb, while central to the composition, is ignored by the people
in the painting. They go about their daily routine: talking,
drinking, playing, having already recognized the sham of
propaganda.
In the painting called
simply Composition, the emptiness of socialist sloganeering
and ceremony is evoked by a parade in which masses of faceless
people carry large red banners, void of message. Interspersed in
the crowds are monuments of hands, gesturing rudely in defiance of
authority.
As he looked at what
Communism did for his beloved Georgia, he created two paintings:
one, a painting of Spring which serenely portrays
Christian and pre-Christian symbols of re-birth, colored Easter
eggs and sprouts dominate; the other, Soviet Spring, is
similarly composed, but depicts muddy roads, rutted by April
rains. The most obvious features of this painting are a Soviet
truck, broken down, its driver defeated and a work crew paralyzed
by the immensity of the tasks.
Small studies focus on
individual animals, symbols of human insecurity. A small snail
creeps on a road through an immense space, isolated and
vulnerable. His journey is long and his present is uncertain. A
slow moving turtle is trapped behind a maze of walls. While there
may be a way out, the exit is hidden and the route demands the
patience and tenacity of the legendary tortoise.
While many of Kandelaki's
paintings are eerily prophetic of the demise of Communism and the
insecurity of the individual in its wake, the most powerful image
is House of Cards. A childhood game becomes an allegory for
the precarious foundation of the Soviet system. The sunlight of
the Georgian paintings turns here to inescapable gloom. The weight
of red stars and banners, hammers and sickles, and even the
fragile Lenin light bulb of Ilyich's Lamp threatens the
ephemeral structure, and a huge, empty bottle of vodka completes
the pessimism of the scene. The immense house of cards will bury
jnany when it collapses.
Since his arrival in the
United States in 1990, Kandelaki has maintained his Georgian pride
and independence, though his experience with Americans has not
always been positive. His journey to the land of rugged
individualism has been a "trial by fire." He has found this
country both fascinating and infuriating, strangely new, and too
large and unwieldy to synthesize quickly on canvas. All the
while, though, he has been studying the details of the city: row
house architecture of the city, tiny gardens with fig trees, the
contrast between public spaces and private ones, and the colors of
our Autumn and Halloween costumes, Christmas lights, and
Philadelphia's Mummers finery. He is gradually taking it all in.
In Halloween,
Kandelaki has harkened back to a familiar image in the
jack-o-lantern. The "great pumpkin" which dominates the canvas is
a benign be ing, a Georgian harvest symbol, which seems imbued
with the magic of Cinderella's carriage as it transforms the young
ghosts and goblins who accompany it. It is telling that, even
though the painting is nocturnal, light has returned to Kandelaki
- whose name in Georgian means "candle."
Thora Jacobson
Director of the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in
Philadelphia, January 1992
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