Georgian Easel Painting (Second Half of the 18th Century to the 1920's)

This richly illustrated book presents a study of Georgian easel painting (2nd half of the 19th century--1st quarter of the 20th century) in connection with Russian and European art. The definition of its artistic peculiarity with respect to the common European artistic process is an important problem of modern Georgian art criticism. Beginning with the renaissance European culture and easel painting have followed a centuries-old path of stylistic evolution and despite the heterogeneous development of European painting, general artistic processes occurred simultaneously in different European countries, in which the historical unity of European painting is manifested. In the second half of the 18th century Georgia witnessed acceleration, contraction, uneven development of this centuries-old process due to the specific character of the political, social and economic development of Georgia, quite different from that of other countries. Georgian easel painting has no clearly defined regularities of stylistic development. Parallelism of various stylistic tendencies or artistic trends, their merging instead of alternation taking place within the narrow chronological limits of its development, complicates the specification of stylistic peculiarities of painting of this period. The purpose of this book is to define basic artistic and stylistic tendencies of Georgian easel painting in relation to its contemporary Russian and European painting on the basis of theapplication of typological and comparative methods.