For many years, the Georgian National Museum was keeping the Holy Cross of Tkhota. On April 6, the museum transferred the cross into possession of the Georgian Patriarchate.

The Georgian National Museum presents the exhibition –“Evolutionary Gender” – prepared within the framework of UNDP project “Gender and politics in the South Caucasus” and supported by SIDA and the parliament of Georgia. The aim of the exhibition is to present the process of “gender evolution” in the visual culture of Georgia and to show how particular types of bodily representations have been established. The exposition presents paintings and graphic works by artists living in Georgia at the beginning of the 20th century and in early Soviet times. Photos and artifacts showing this particular epoch are also displayed at the exhibition.

The myth of Jason held powerful dominion over the minds of the ancient Greeks. The voyage of the Argonauts — from the Aegean Sea, through the narrow waters of the Hellespont, to the Black Sea and into the hinterland — represented the archetypal passage from the relative safety of the known world into a perilous land of mystery and incantation. It was the transition from civilization, from reason itself, into something akin to barbarism and savagery.

A tingling sense of what was at stake can be felt among the glowing artifacts that are now displayed at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, which has just opened in a Renaissance-style townhouse on the Upper East Side.

It turns out that the story of Jason and the Argonauts has some basis in fact. Ancient Greeks did sail across the sea — the Black Sea — to Colchis (modern-day Georgia), a land rich in gold and other precious metals. It seems the Colchians had a technique, involving sheepskins, for extracting gold dust from running water — hence, the Golden Fleece.

Those who associate graduate school with penury and physical discomfort — seminar rooms that are overheated in winter, hours spent among the dusty stacks — may be surprised by the luxurious interior of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, a new scholarly research center and graduate program affiliated with New York University, housed in a townhouse off Fifth Avenue, near the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Founded in 2006 with $200 million from the Leon Levy Foundation, the institute is currently hiring faculty and won't begin accepting graduate applications until the fall. In the meantime, however, it has completed a stylish renovation by Selldorf Architects, the firm that did the interiors of the Neue Galerie. Next week it will open its first public exhibition, "Wine, Worship, and Sacrifice: The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani."

 

National Museum imports its first major international show since independence

To the question of “When will you be exhibited in Tbilisi?” the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso answered that there was no point in exhibiting his own work in Georgia because the Georgians already had the great Pirosmani.The greatest works by Georgia’s iconic, primitivist/modernist painter Niko Pirosmani continue to travel around the world, gaining new converts among the global community of aesthetes. Most recently, 35 Pirosmani paintings – insured for a cool 41.4 million – were shown in Istanbul’s Pera Museum and this autumn French society will have the possibility to appreciate Pirosmani’s world-recognized original works at the Museum of Vezeley. The exhibition of Pirosmani in France will last for nearly three months from August 31, 2008 to November 11.  

Elene Akhvlediani, just as other Georgian artists of her generation – David Kakabadze, Lado Gudiashvili and Keto Magalashvili – started to work in the early decades of twentieth century. The achievements of these masters, based on the legacy of national and European cultures, have largely determined the distinctive features of Georgian modern art and haven’t lost their importance to this day.

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