First, a correction to a story going around: Niko Pirosmani’s record price is not news from this month. It dates to November 2018, when Georgian Woman Wearing a Lechaki – oil on oilcloth, 105 by 85 centimetres – sold at Sotheby’s London for £2.23 million ($2.84 million) against a £500,000-700,000 estimate. It remains the highest price ever paid for a Pirosmani. What makes the picture worth revisiting now is not the hammer but the chain of hands it passed through – beginning with Stefan Zweig, in Moscow, in the Tolstoy centenary year of 1928.
The discovery
Zweig, then Europe’s most translated author, had come for the Tolstoy celebrations and wandered into the Tretyakov Gallery, where he encountered magnificent Russian paintings “completely unknown to us over here”. Among them was Pirosmani. Zweig declared the Georgian would be a true discovery for Europe and nicknamed him the great Piro. He bought the Georgian Woman on that trip; it became his favourite and hung in his Salzburg home until he left Austria for London in 1934; exile later took him on to New York and Brazil. After his death in 1942 it stayed with his first wife Friderike, passed as a gift to Dr Harry Zohn in 1953, and was donated by Zohn to the Zweig Room at Fredonia, New York, in 1981 – where it waited nearly four decades for its evening.
Note the veil, not the tambourine: the lechaki of the title is the triangular white head-cover of traditional Georgian dress. Details matter with Pirosmani, whose five known versions of this composition differ in things as small as the bird on a lapel.
The painter
Pirosmani (1862-1918) had no formal training and earned his crust painting shop signs and interiors in Tbilisi, often paid in food and drink. He worked on whatever came to hand – tablecloths, oilcloth – and conservatives mocked his inability to paint “correctly”. In 1912 the futurist Zdanevich brothers “discovered” him for the avant-garde and carried his works to Moscow’s Mishen exhibition of 1913, alongside Goncharova and Larionov. Just as attention arrived, the painter retreated into obscurity; he died in Tbilisi in 1918. The raw, untutored look that invited ridicule became, within a generation, the thing Georgian and Russian modernists were trying to break toward.
The market catches up
The market took its time. A Roe Deer made £629,000 in June 2016 (bought, it was reported, by Bidzina Ivanishvili, who had already paid $1.5 million for Arsenali Mountain at Night in 2015). Then the Zweig picture tripled its estimate – provenance doing what provenance does. A painting that hung in Salzburg while its owner fled a continent will always outbid the same paint without a past. Zweig’s 1928 prophecy took ninety years to clear. The great Piro can stop waiting.
