198 - Vera PAGAVA (Tbilisi 1907 – Ivry-sur-Seine 1988)

Vera PAGAVA (Tbilisi 1907 – Ivry-sur-Seine 1988) The Dervish Circa 1935 Oil on canvas stretched over cardboard 40 x 32.5 cm Signed lower right "Pagava" Vera Pagava was a painter, draftswoman, and printmaker of Georgian origin. She was born on February 27, 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, a suburb of Paris, home to a community of Georgian exiles. 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 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 participated in exhibitions organized by an artists’ group called Témoignage. To earn a living, she painted fabrics and obtained her nursing license in 1940. She also created two murals in Parisian schools in 1936 and 1937. This work belongs to Vera Pagava’s figurative period. Though still far removed from the abstraction that would later characterize her work, Pagava was already developing a visual language based on the simplification of forms, frontal composition, and the geometrization 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 live models. The figure, depicted seated and resembling a dervish, is constructed from simplified forms and broad swaths of color: the off-white of the garment, the blues and grays of the background and floor, as well as the brown and reddish earth tones that structure the background. The contours, deliberately sparse in detail, reduce the figure to its principal volumes. Pagava clearly seeks more to construct a figure within the organized space of colored and geometric masses than to depict the figure’s anatomical realities. The treatment of light is one of the work’s most interesting elements. It falls from the side, from the upper right, and divides the face into two large areas. This work is a valuable example from the mid-1930s. E.V