Tbilisi Podcast · Eat This! Food & Wine Tours Georgia

Discovering the Art of Niko Pirosmani

·27 min·1 clip

Mikhail Ledentu and Ilya Zadnevich found Pirosmani's tavern paintings in 1910.

The episode starts with the familiar Tbilisi Podcast banter. Meg brings up foodfuntravel.com, gets teased for calling it little, and the exchange drifts through family life, tired-parent jokes, and the kind of domestic side talk this show likes to keep in play before moving to the main subject. Then it turns to Nikol Pirismani. The episode presents him as a self-taught master painter and lingers on the primitivist, naive style that makes his work stand out as a record of Georgian life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His world is uneven. There is a run through the Georgian painters society founded in 1916, the fact that they invited him to meetings, and the way he did not always get on with the other members. One painting caused trouble. After he showed Georgian wedding to the society, one member published a caricature of him in a local newspaper, and the offence sent him back toward taverns and drink. Money kept pulling him away. The conversation keeps returning to that point, saying he would take odd jobs and other work because survival mattered more than applause. He still made a lot. The number attached to him is more than a thousand pieces of art, even if only a few have survived. Most of that loss sounds ordinary and grim. The episode points to negligence, closure of the spaces where the paintings were kept, and the way cellars, tea rooms, and taverns do not always protect art just because someone once hung it on a wall. The survivors are scattered. Some are at the National Museum, and others are at a few museums around the world, with the Sighnaghi Museum getting a specific callout for having quite a few works. The host even checks a painting up close. When she and the co-host walk into the Sighnaghi museum, she thinks the Pirosmani works might be copies, steps over the red line for a closer look, and sets off an alarm. The episode closes on the usual invitation to keep up with the show. It points listeners toward the podcast site, the email newsletter, social links, and the travel, tours, and expat services the show says it covers.

As heard by us

A self-taught painter story that moves from acclaim to offense, survival, and the museums that still hold his work.

Nikol Pirismani comes through as a self-taught master painter whose primitivist, naive work preserved a vivid sense of Georgian life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You get Nikol Pirismani, a self-taught painter whose primitivist, naive style captures Georgian life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Tbilisi Podcast