Niko Pirosmani, Actress Margarita

(Click here for the Romanian version)

Who was this Margarita? There is so much legend...

The carts were full of flowers up till edges, with drops of water, seemed like the early-dew sprinkled them with billions of rainbow drops.
The carts stopped at Margarita's house. Carters talked awhile with each other in low voices, and then started to unload the carts and throw flowers on the ground in front of gates, covering stones in pavement and road. Yes, these were thousands of flowers that Niko got for his beloved woman.
(Konstantin Paustovskii)

Niko didn't know what is love before he met singer-dancer in cafe-shaitan. In Mushtaid Garden, on lightened stage, accompanied with sounds of mazurka beautiful and alluring madam Margarita appeared before of amazed public, she was dancing and singing charming and cheerful Paris songs... Niko couldn't stop gazing at her, he was captivated.
(K. Zdanevich)

Margarita's face is done according to the conventions of great naives, by which everything is too big and out of proportions. Oversized lips, bulging eyeballs, enormous years. Niko gave this portrait to Margarita. The girl shriecked in indignation. His talent condemned him to solitude.
(Ryszard Kapuscinski)

And one day Margarita left for Paris. He would start to wander through dukhans (old Georgian inns) and to paint there, living in lonely abandonment. The portrait of Rustaveli is from these late years of the painter.

Over and over again he painted his feasts, with that table against a mountainous landscape. He was fifty-four when he died, in Tbilisi, in some room, of unknown causes, hungry, maybe mad.
(Ryszard Kapuscinski)







(Pirosmani)