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198
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Vera PAGAVA (Tbilisi 1907 – Ivry-sur-Seine 1988)
See original version (French)
198
-
Vera PAGAVA (Tbilisi 1907 – Ivry-sur-Seine 1988)
See original version (French)
Estimate €20,000 - €30,000
Voluntary lot
Description
Vera PAGAVA (Tbilisi 1907 – Ivry-sur-Seine 1988)
The Dervish
Circa 1935
Oil on canvas mounted on board
40 x 32.5 cm
Signed lower right ‘Pagava’
Vera Pagava was a painter, draughtswoman and printmaker of Georgian origin. She was born on 27 February 1907 in Tbilisi, a city that was part of the Russian Empire at the time and is now the capital of Georgia. She came from a noble and cultured family. From childhood, she was surrounded by artists and intellectuals, such as David Kakabadze, Hélène Akhvlediani and Lado Goudiachvili. In 1919, her family left Georgia due to her father’s illness and political unrest. They lived first in Berlin, then in Dresden, before settling in 1923 in Montrouge, near Paris, where a community of Georgian exiles lived.
In France, Vera began studying art. She attended several schools: the École des Arts Décoratifs, the École des Arts et Publicité, and then the studio of the painter André Lhote in 1929. In 1932, she enrolled at the Académie Ranson. There, she took classes with Roger Bissière and befriended other artists such as Jean Bertholle, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Árpád Szenes. In the 1930s, she took part in exhibitions organised by a group of artists known as Témoignage. To earn a living, she painted fabrics and, in 1940, qualified as a nurse. She also created two wall murals in schools in Paris, in 1936 and 1937.
This work belongs to Vera Pagava’s figurative period. Although still some way from the abstraction that would later characterise her work, Pagava was already developing a visual language based on the simplification of forms, frontal composition and the geometrisation of forms and space. At the time, Pagava was a student at the Académie Ranson in Roger Bissière’s studio, where she worked primarily from life.
The figure, depicted seated and resembling a dervish, is constructed from simplified forms and broad swathes of colour: the off-white of the garment, the blues and greys of the background and floor, as well as the brown and reddish earth tones that structure the background. The contours, deliberately lacking in detail, reduce the figure to its principal volumes. Pagava is clearly seeking to construct a figure within the organised space of coloured and geometric masses rather than to depict the figure’s anatomical realities. The treatment of light is one of the work’s most interesting features. It falls obliquely from the upper right-hand corner, dividing the face into two distinct areas. This work is a valuable example from the mid-1930s.
E.V
See original version (French)
Auto-translation. Refer to original language for legal validity.
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
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