Elena Akhvlediani, just as the other artists of her generation - David Kakabadze, Lado Gudiashvili and Keto Magalashvili - started her works in the early decades of the twentieth century. These masters' achievements, based on the legacy of national and European cultures, have largely determined the distinctive features of Georgian art and have not lost their importance to this day.

The interests of Akhvlediani were diverse and included painting, drawing, stage and costume design, and book illustration. But she has gone down in the history of Georgian art as, above all, a master of genre and lyrical landscape painting. Especially prominent in her artistic legacy are the views of Tbilisi, the city in which she had lived many years, which she loved as her own, and to the preservation of whose historical peculiarities she had given much of her energies.

The artist's studio, in one of the Tbilisi twisting streets, was indeed a cultural center. The place where artists, actors, musicians, poets and her numerous friends often gathered.

The character and inclinations of Akhvlediani had formed in her childhood and had little changed with the passing of time.

Her parents were people out of the common. Her father, Dimity Akhvlediani, born in a poor family, in his youth earned his living by giving private lessons. After finishing secondary school in 1884, he became a student of the Kharkov university medical department. His participation in students' disturbances, arrest and the subsequent expulsion and blacklisting would have deprived him of the opportunity of completing his education, if not for the protection of one of the professors, who supported the talented student. Dimity Akhvlediani entered the Odessa university, this time the natural sciences department. His works as a student on the structure of the Odessa granite and the origin of oil were met with much interest among specialists and opened up bright prospects to the young man. Nevertheless the love of medicine proved stronger, and, having finished the university, Akhvlediani entered the St. Petersburg military medical academy. Again years of study followed under the guidance of such most prominent specialists as S. Botkin, I. Pavlov and I. Tarkhanov. His studies at the academy completed, he returned to Georgia and wholly devoted himself to his favourite occupation. Purposefulness and will in Dimity Aklvlediani were combined with his natural subtlety, feeling and imagination. We still have his poems which he dedicated to his wife, Elizabeth Eristavi. They were an excellent couple. Elizabeth, a princess by birth, shared her husband's democratic views and helped him in all his undertakings, including the establishment of a free outpatient clinic. Elizabeth also had to shoulder the family cares: the education of five children, singing lessons, and book reading in the evening. One could often hear Georgian songs sung in their home. Elena Akhvlediani had a beautiful voice. As it was her dream to become a singer, she intensively studied singing. Having chosen the profession of an artist, she did not give up music. "Indeed, I love music more than all other arts, even my own, " she wrote in one of her letters. But that was later.

Until 1910 the family lived in Telavi. The artist's childhood passed in that quiet, cozy town buried in greenery, which still preserves its somewhat patriarchal aspect. The narrow streets paved with cobble-stone turn and twist among the houses. Little shops and workshops with amusing signboards crowd near the market-place.

In the centre of the town, quite near the place where the parents' house stood, one's attention is attracted by two-storeyed buildings, familiar from the artist's early drawings, with the columns in the neo-classical style below and typically Georgian galleries above them. Old fortress walls rise on the slope of the hill. From there opens a view of the Alazani Valley veiled with light mist, and of the snow-covered peaks of the Caucasus. In her work the artist would repeatedly turn to the town of her childhood.

In Telavi Elena became acquainted with pictorial art. Later on the artist recalled with much warmth her first teacher: "I have known Shalva Kartvelishvili from my childhood. Our families lived close to one another and were very good friends. <...> Shalva was my first teacher <...> and inspirer in drawing. He was the first to teach me to love and see nature, our people, our monuments and folklore."

When the family went to live in Tiflis, lessons in pictorial art became systematic. The city where the Akhvlediani family now settled was amazing in many respects. The location of Tiflis - in the ravine with tire Kura flowing along its bottom - accounted for its inimitable appearance admired by many.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the features of the Eastern and Western, of the old and new cultures naturally coexisted in Tiflis. That was in evidence everywhere. The strains of the zourna and French chansons were to be heard in the streets. Symbolist and futurist poets recited their poems in artistic cafes, while in the old town one could attend a contest of folk poets and singers. The new ways and styles, increasingly, ousting the traditional elements of culture, made at the same time ever more obvious the necessity of a careful attitude to the latter. A movement for the revival and enrichment of the national Georgian culture, of national art was growing among the progressive Georgian intelligentsia, especially among the youth. Many of the artists and men of letters that matured at that time saw almost a programme in the poem of the young Titian Tabidze:

The rose of Hafiz

I set in the vase of Prudhomme

And in Bessika's garden

Plant the Baudelairian flowers.

Whate'er will catch my eye

On the way unknown

Will find its response and measure

In the Georgian verse.

Archaeological expeditions, which laid the foundations of scientific study of ancient monuments, were being sent. At the same time the first article appeared about the remarkable twelfth-century Georgian goldsmith Beka of Opiza, founder of the Opiza style; it was written by the artist David Kakabadze. The Zdanevich brothers and Michel Le. Dentu discovered in 1912 for the artistic public Niko Pirosmanashvili.

The people with whom the future artist associated in Tiflis were in one way or another connected with this movement, contributing to the preservation and development of traditions of Georgian culture. In the Tiflis gymnasium, of which Akhvlediani was a student, drawing was taught by N. Skli- fosovsky. He noticed the gifted girl and offered her instruction in his studio. The talented teacher enjoyed general respect. At different times he acted as an instructor of the future masters of Georgian art: the painter Alexander Bajbeuk-Melikyan, the stage designer Irakly Garnrekeli, the draughtsman Sergo Kobuladze, and many others. Attentive and tactful, he knew how to protect and develop the young artists' individuality. But even he was sometimes amazed at the 'obstinacy' of his new pupil, who, listening attentively to her teacher's criticisms, agreed that the colour of the jug in her work was quite different from what it was in reality but continued to do as she wished. Thus her early independence of artistic thinking, the habit to be guided, above all, by the inner feeling, which seldom deceived her, became one of the important features of Akhvlediani's art. While at the studio, she drew from nature, making sketches of city landscapes and funny street scenes. Later on it became one of the invariable components of her creative method. Along with the constant drawing

from nature, the pupils studied the classical artistic heritage and contemporary Russian art. One of the most striking impressions were for Akhvlediani the works of Verbal, which she saw in Moscow.

Studies under the guidance of Sklifosovsky proved to be an excellent professional training. Akhvlediani began teaching drawing at the secondary school, and in 1919 her works were first exhibited in Tiflis together with the pictures of Gudiashvili and Kakabadze.

In 1922 Akhvlediani entered the painting department of the Tiflis Academy of Arts. The class was conducted by Gigo Gabashvili, the acknowledged master of genre and portrait painting, who had received education in Russia and followed the traditions of Russian realistic painting. He loved Ids native Tiflis and created an interesting series of images of its typical inhabitants: artisans, butchers, hawkers, as well as men and women of the wealthy sections. Akhvlediani, however, was attracted not so much by portrait as by genre and urban landscape painting. While studying at the Academy, she continued sketching in the Tiflis streets under the direction of Boris Fogel. "<...>The northerner, keenly sensitive of the rich colours of the south," lie as many others, was charmed by the inimitability of the city, and that could not but influence his students' attitude to work.

Akhvlediani watched with interest the everyday life of Tiflis and of the Georgian provinces, the range of her favourite subjects gradually taking shape. They were the cosy quiet Telavi, the seaside Batumi with its tearooms and bazaars, the interior of the old houses, and architectural monuments. Her attention was attracted by the peasants from Kakhetia in their national costumes, the musha por- ters carrying with the perseverence of ants most di- verse loads over the Tiflis pavements. One can feel in the pencil drawings and in the water-colours of that time free use of the material and the ability to generalize and to convey what is most typical. Unfortunately, few drawings made in Tiflis itself have been preserved. These few sketches proved very

useful abroad, where Akhvlediani, a first-year student who showed considerable abilities, was sent in 1922 as a scholarship-holder of the Academy of Arts.

She spent about two years in Italy. Rome, Milan and especially Venice stunned her by their beauty. Akhvlediani tried to see as much as possible and deeply to understand the culture of the wonderful country. She studied the Italian language and was drawing a great deal. She did not have, of course, time enough, and, regretting it, the artist left this characteristic inscription on one of the books: "Oh, what an idiot I am, God forgive me! I am sitting at the tailor's and waiting for my jacket to be ready, reading this book and, overjoyed because I understood almost everything. I was about to kiss the tailor! On the one hand, I want to see things and, on the other, how exasperatingly fast time passes, and I am doing nothing, though sometimes my fingers itch to work...".

Akhvlediani never kept a diary. Instead, there were her sketches, drawings and, as the result, pictures testifying to the ability to reveal the unique features of the cities she had seen, to notice the peculiarities of the crowds in them.

Her numerous albums have almost none of the generally known monuments of architecture. While admiring the ideally beautiful and receiving a creative impulse from it, she remained faithful to her theme and portrayed what was typical and sometimes amusing. She found interesting, for example, little dwelling houses clustering to the walls of an old basilica. She was also attracted by narrow, 'mysterious' little streets and, of course, by the townspeople. Her albums are full of small drawings depicting various personages and scenes witnessed in the streets of Italian cities. The figures are sometimes awkward and sketchy. The artist deliberately simplified the form, reducing it to the simplest geometrical dimensions. There are sketches done in a flexible, vivid line. They reflect the artist's subtle observation and growing mastery. Having spent in Italy about two years, Akhvlediani went to Paris.

Having overcome the hard consequences of the First World War, the city was regaining the reputation of one of the international centres of artistic culture. Artists from all over the world were again gathering there after a brief lull. The Salons des indèpendents and the Salons d'autumne continued their activities. Exhibitions were being arranged in the numerous private galleries and in restaurants and cafés.

Mayakovsky, who visited Paris in the autumn of 1922, wrote: "...Painters of various schools and trends: the Cubists, Les Fauves, the Simultaneists and, of course, a great number of society painters are being exhibited... As always, there is, in addition. the dernier cri. Just now these functions are being performed by the all-asserting and all-denying Dada." The numerous but sometimes short-lived magazines reflect in their articles the passionate polemics between representatives of the various trends in art. The intensity of artistic life was stunning. But Akhvlediani was a painter with the already formed views, with a definite range of themes and images. Though not indifferent to the new artistic theories, she rather gravitated in her art to the masters of the past. Later on Akhvlediani repeatedly recalled that the works of Pieter Brueghel delighted her by the ability to construct a composition and to portray the life of man in natural surroundings. El Greco charmed by his effects of light and the ability to spiritualize inanimate matter. The influence of these masters and some of the artists of the new time are perceptible in her works of the Paris and subsequent periods.

"When I lived in Paris," wrote Akhvlediani, "David Kakabadze, Lado Gudiashvili and Keto Magalashvili were also there. On Sundays we gathered at Datiko's (Kakabadze.- Ed's note) but on other days we saw each other rarely, all working hard." Morning hours were given mostly to visiting museums, and after dinner she pursued her studies. Her natural inclinations made her choose the Academic Colarossi founded back in the 1880s. It was a studio without a teacher, where for a small pay anyone could paint or draw from a nude model. The studio was as a rule crowded and had an atmosphere of complete freedom. When she got tired of drawing from the model, Akhvlediani sketched portraits of her colleagues. The studio was well known in the artistic circles of Paris. It was visited by those who wanted quickly to acquire habits of making sketches. The model often changed poses, and that required concentration, trained to quickly catch the form, the movement, and the proportions, to feel the composition, in a word, splendidly trained the eye and the hand, which is especially important for the artist seeking a life-like and direct representation of reality.

We have several albums and paper-cases with Akhvlediani's drawings made at Colarossi's. Up to fifteen sketches were made daily. They show that the artist worked very unevenly: depending on her mood the sketch was sometimes good and sometimes went wrong altogether. Nevertheless her mastery was growing. An increasingly picturesque, free and anatomically correct manner was taking the place of a rigid monotonous outline and conventional modeling of the form. The artist was being increasingly captivated by the representation of an individual form of the human body. In her works, whose purpose was clearly training, Akhvlediani did not forget about the imaginative aspect of the drawing. By slightly exaggerating the proportions, she achieved at times a keen expressiveness of the model's image. The drawings were done in pencil, charcoal, sanguine, or Indian ink. The dominating role in all works was assigned to outline. The style of the drawings reveals the influence of various masters, from Ingres to Picasso and Matisse. Intensive work continued outside the studio as well. Thus numerous sketches made in Paris appeared in Akhvlediani's albums, her drawings revived scenes she had seen in cafes, in the parks and in the streets. In Paris was also created a series of urban views which specialists consider to be among the best in the artist's legacy. As previously, in Italy, she did not depict the city's most remarkable sights admired by the tourists. She was inspired neither by the carefree Paris of the Impressionists, nor the tragically languishing Paris of Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud, nor the Paris of the artistic and the- atrical Bohème. She found fascination in the prosaic workers' outskirts, in the humble dwelling areas, where houses with crumbling plaster live, just as their dwellers, a complicated, hard life. Akhvlediani's views of Paris are distinguished by a diversity of composition methods. They were some- times painted from the window, from above, and the artist cut off by the frame of the picture the lower storeys of the buildings. Or the spectator, together with the artist, finds himself in the street and the city surrounds them by the picturesque facades of the small houses or captivates by its far or high perspective. When observing Paris, Akhviediani felt and conveyed in her pictures one of its characteristic peculiarities: the special humidity and luminosity of its air. The same is mentioned in the reminiscences of A. Shchekin-Krotova: "The moist air of Paris, where one feels the remote breath of the Atlantic Ocean, made a miracle of seemingly most ordinary views of the city." The impression of this peculiar light and colour was so strong that it remained in the palette of some views and landscapes done by the artist already after her return to her own country. In France, Akhvlediani also continued painting pictures devoted to Georgia, using sketches made before her journey abroad. The views and genre compositions of that time have something in common with the works of her elder colleagues, the Georgian artists living in Paris at the same time. Thus the personages of her pictures are recognizable as the types of Georgians occurring in her works of Gudiashvili, and the hills covered with patches of fields remind one by their regular pattern the original formula of lmeretian landscape found by Kakabadze.

Several pictures portray the traditional Georgian 'feast'. This theme in Georgian art already had its history. Niko Pirosmanashvili painted 'feasts', imparting a symbolic meaning to the national holiday meal. Gudiashvili most frequently emphasized the tragic frustration of his personages concealed by outward bravado. Akhvlediani's 'feasts' are traditional genre scenes, and the feasting kintos - jesters and merry-makers - are those whom the artist met in the streets of Tiflis. Of considerable importance in these works is landscape. In contrast to the views and landscapes devoted to Paris life, Akhvlediani's pictures on Georgian themes are characterized by certain conventionality of the range of colours based on the combination of warm brown and green tones with small quantities of light blue in the distance. Colour is applied in thin, almost transparent layers in the classical mixed method.

The artist exhibited her views of Paris and compositions devoted to Georgia in the Salons d'autumne and Salons des indépendents. Akhvlediani's work was received with approval by the French art critics. In 1926 her personal exhibition was held with success in the Quatre Chemins Gallery in Paris, and her pictures were bought by Paul Signac. The artist was invited to exhibit her pictures in Holland, but for family reasons she was compelled to return in 1927 to her country. There Akhvlediani at once began actively participating in the artistic life of the Georgia. Reviews of her works were arranged in Telavi and then in Kutaisi. Successfully pursuing painting, Akhvlediani regularly exhibited her landscapes and 'purpose' pictures at different group exhibitions. In those years she began trying her hand as a stage designer. From then on and over several decades her creative activities were in the main determined by her work at the theatre under Konstantin Mardjanishvili. The famous director liked to work with young people and often entrusted the stage designing to artists and actors previously known to no one. Mardjanishvili had a special gift of discovering a person's abilities. At first he gave to the beginner full independence, providing to him an opportunity to try his strength, but he could also direct someone else's creative searches into his own channel. "I trust myself," he answered to those who expressed doubts. Mardjanishvili thus brought to the theatre many talented painters, David Kakabadze in particular. After visiting Akhvlediani's personal exhibition in Kutaisi, Mardjanishvili offered to her cooperation. The stunned artist's timid confession that she had no experience of work at the theatre was brushed aside at once. "You may rely on me in that. I can see better whether you will be able to work at the theatre or not. So you will work with me." "I shall never forget how Konstantin Alexandrovich invited me for the first time to make stage designs for the production of The Rails Are Booming. He first showed the wings, the traps, the sources of light, in a word, all technical equipment that can be used. Then he gave me the play.

"Read it attentively. I want to know your ideas, and to think for an artist means to draw. Bring me the designs in a week. The door of the works is the only thing that is definitely needed, everything else is for you to decide."

The first designs satisfied Mardjanishvili and Akhvlediani received another assignment. She was now to design the scenery for Kaladze's play How. The setting was extremely laconic: for some of the scenes, for interiors in particular, use was made of laths painted white placed on black velvet so as to create the impression of a closed interior or an industrial view. In other scenes the means of the shadow theatre were used. In addition, fragments of films were introduced into the play to show the revolutionary events of 1905. The performance was an innovatory one and with an acutely expressive imagery.

In cooperation with Mardjanishvili Akhvlediani was the scenery and costume designer of many plays (The Whites by Shengelaya, Kvarkvare Tutaberi by Kakabadze, Solar Eclipse in Georgia by Antonov, A House on the Bank of the Kara by Kaladze, Shakespeare's Othello, and others). Not all was of the same quality. Akhvlediani, however, could critically appraise the results of her work. "I remember how delighted I was when the scenery for the play The Rails Are Booming was ready. But, alas, my joy did not last long. Less than six months had passed when I began insisting that it should be altered because I considered it overdone. God alone knows how many times the scene-shifters cursed me for the scenery being so cumbersome... When he heard my opinion, Kote grinned and said: 'Fine I did expect that. Now you see your sins. ' It was then my turn to be surprised. 'But why did you say nothing when I gave you the sketches?'

'There were no major mistakes, the general line was correct, and the complicacy of the scenery was for the artist herself to perceive. I like the stage designer to find his own way in the process of work. If he does everything on the director's instructions, nothing good will come of it. That will fetter him, and an artist must feel freedom...'.". There was much that impressed Akhvlediani in Mardjanishvili's creative principles. Without being professional musicians, both loved and subtly felt music. Music usually ran through the whole of the play in harmony with what was taking place on the stage. In the late twenties, Mardjanishvili's scenery was very laconic. "Light worked equally with the setting's, and each performance was a fairy-play." Working with light captivated the artist. "It was wonderful how the 'magic ray' imparted to any, seemingly most prosaic object, a romantic tone. To see his rehearsals was a delight, and as to the light rehearsals, I don't even know how to call them. As a rule Mardjanishvili made them together with the artist before the first night." During these the artist could see how the scenery she made (Mardjanishvili always insisted on it) would live in the performance and could eliminate mistakes. The producer was able and loved to work with the artist, sometimes under the latter's influence he partially changed his intentions.

Attaching much importance to the graphic aspect of the performance, Mardjanishvili stressed that the actor is aided in the creation of the image by everything: the scenery, light, music, props, and costume.

In Akhvlediani's designs, the colour of the costume, its cut and the choice of the material - all helped to disclose the nature of the personages and their place in the play. Especially interesting in the artist's interpretation are character and comic parts. Both the costume designs and the costumes themselves, in the making of which, according to the best theatrical traditions, the artist herself took part, making during the fittings the necessary corrections, contain elements of an interesting plastic outline of the role and at times also of the true inner state.

During her work of several decades, Akhvlediani made stage and costume designs for over seventy plays. She cooperated with different stage directors but her association with Mardjanishvili and his profound and precise criticisms and advice were of special importance to her. , From the mid-thirties and then in the fifties Akhvlediani made a great deal of drawings for books. She illustrated works of foreign classics and Georgian writers, mostly for children and the youth. Not every interpretation of book illustration can now be accepted but mention must certainly be made of the graphic culture and mastery of execution of most of the works and Akhvlediani's striving to find her own way in art.

A comparison of the books illustrated by the artist shows, above all, the diversity of manners and styles. Illustrations for Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer are pen-and-ink drawings. They include both swift line drawings and scenes drawn in detail. The illustrations for the Georgian fairy-tale A Woman Butterfly arouse admiration by the finesse of the pen drawing and the impressive contrast of large black and white surfaces. Illustrating Pshavela's tales, Akhvlediani in her pen-and-ink drawings approached more than in other books, the style of woodcut, while in the illustrations for Ninoshvili's short stories, made in gouache, her style was close to that of linocut.

While working as a book illustrator and stage designer, Akhvlediani continued giving much of her energies to easel painting and drawing. The artist travelled Georgia, collecting material for her pictures. Her works were regularly exhibited. Landscapes, however, remained her artistically most important works. In the works of the Parisian period already, several different stylistic and thematic lines of development made themselves felt in her art. With some modifications they remained in the artist's productions in the subsequent years as well. Thus the landscape Telavi (1927), just as the views of Montmartre, seems to radiate an especial warm light. These works also reveal the use of brush drawing, conveying with its soft movement the wavy texture of the tiled roof of a house or the trembling lines of the powerful crowns of the trees. One cannot but feel, when viewing the canvas, the pleasure with which the artist applied the plastic oil, enjoying every touch of the brush on the canvas. The works of this group are distinguished by a special harmony and noble quality of colour. However, in the landscape Old Tbilisi. Maidan, painted in the same year and in the same technique, colour relations are more strained and the soft luminescence characteristic of the earlier canvases disappears. Several pictures continue the series of Georgian landscapes begun in Paris. The Alazani Valley (1937) is apparently one of the last in this group. Just as in the composition The Old Belfry (1926), the artist paints here a dark foreground and, without any transition, a sunlit background, the very interpretation of which also has certain similarity with the picture painted almost a decade earlier. But it is more strict and geometricized, more logically constructed. The desire to transform life rationalistically is especially noticeable in the group of such graphic works as Fairy-tale (A Joke) and Bolnisi (both 1927), A Paris Café (1929), and others. Human figures, architecture, and various objects incorporated in the composition are turned here into ideal geometricized volumes. The space surrounding them is divided by planes and looks fragile. The artist herself regarded these works as experiments. The most of the above-mentioned pictures and drawings are signed by the author in Latin letters as the works done in Italy and France, which sets them apart from other works of the same years. They can be assumed to have been conceived and possibly begun abroad. Later, in Georgia, they might have been finished and dated. As recalled by her relatives and friends, the artist could paint a picture with interruptions, sometimes for several years. That was a peculiarity of Akhvlediani's creative method, which had formed back in the early years and remained unchanged throughout her life. At first the artist made a sketch in charcoal or pencil from nature, sometimes even indicated the colour of the objects. Then in the studio she completed the work, often altering the composition and introducing in it new details. Pieces painted from nature from beginning to end are rare in her work. The more interesting are several drawings made in Guria in the late twenties and early thirties and based on direct impressions of nature. Lyrical and picturesque in their manner, they represent a separate group in the artist's creative work.

In the same years Akhvlediani's paintings show an increasing graphic element. They are done, as a rule, in a traditional range of colours with the prevalence of black and green. Rigid outlines and lines forming acute angles when crossing impart to the landscapes tension and dramatism formerly alien to them. In her easel drawings she uses some of the stylistic peculiarities of medieval Georgian painting, and sometimes miniature: conventional lighting, elaborate decorativeness of the folds of garments, and clear outline. Now and then figures are flattened and transformed to make them more expressive. The drawing Old Men is a sort of a limit of stylization in the artist's work in those years. Later on the legacy of national culture would form a more integral part in her art.

In the late fifties and the early sixties the artist experienced a new creative uplift. In Akhvlediani's painting the role of colour had grown again. As against the restrained, almost monochrome landscapes of the previous decade, the works of that lime dazzled by their brightness achieved, first of all, through accords of complementary colours: red and green, orange and violet. The artist paints large planes without trying to moderate colour relationships.

Akhvlediani's rich colouring has its own character and its own sources to be found in the peculiarities of her creative work. The impact of the theatre is undoubtedly felt here. The influence is evident in the compositional aspect of such pictures as Kakhetia (1960) and Approaching Storm (1971), in which space is dealt with as a stage. A sunbeam piercing the clouds illumines like a spotlight the central part of the picture, whereas the foreground and the background, as frequently also the sides are plunged in semi-darkness. On the whole Akhvlediani's landscapes are characterized by diversity of spatial constructions. They contain various series of compositions emphasizing the depth. Space can be develop upwards or diagonally. Sometimes on the canvas the artist combines various fragments of landscapes. The desire to diversify compositional and spatial solutions is especially evident in the landscapes of the sixties and the seventies. At that time the artist travelled a great deal in Georgia, together with a group of painters and graphic artists she had organized. The works she created as the result of these journeys show little towns and mountain villages, architectural monuments, and landscapes of splendid harmony. One of Akhvlediani's interesting landscape cycles is devoted to Djvari, a superb monument of medieval Georgian architecture. In her pictures the temple appears in different aspects: now it severely and powerfully comes forward from the folds of the hills and then looms against the sky as a fantastic mirage.

It is not only the deep comprehension of Georgian nature, however, that determines the national peculiarity of Akhvlediani's work. No less deeply did she know the character of the Georgian people vividly expressed in their imitative and decorative art. Suffice it to see with what attention and love she portrayed the traditional objects of everyday use - saddle-bags, peasants' costumes, rugs and carpets, and domestic utensils. Her few still lifes have become classic in Georgian fine arts. In the mid-sixties this interest found its striking and original expression in a series of landscapes painted in gouache on black paper. The colour scheme and the principle of forming of a light linear design against a dark background are inspired, in part, by Georgian carpets. Akhvlediani was an ardent collector of woven baskets, old pottery, textiles, and articles of Georgian metalwork. She was guided not by the desire to make a unique collection but to gather and preserve things having' the imprint of the time, of human hands and of human destinies.

Without leaving painting, Akhvlediani in the last decade of her life was paying ever more attention to drawing. The technique of her graphic works of that time is of special interest. In one sheet use is made simultaneously of lead pencil, water-colours or gouache, which the artist does over with pastel, crayon or wax chalk, Indian ink or felt-pen. Each of these material has its structure, its own unique quality and, frequently, its strictly definite colour. But when applied to white or coloured paper, it has a different quality. Experimenting with materials, laying one over another and combining in one work the transparency of watercolour, the silvery quality of the lead pencil and the velvety quality of pastel, the artist achieved complicated pictorial and structural effects. Its city views began losing their former decorativeness and became more subtle as regards their colours. In Tbilisi landscapes, there appeared a wonderfully delicate silvery-grey tone, in the opinion of many who know this city, its characteristic dominant colour. The views of Tbilisi, the work of several decades, make up a sort of a chronicle of the city. In the sixties and seventies, the theme of the old Tbilisi ever more frequently appeared in Akhvlediani's art. With special pleasure the artist finds picturesque details of the life of the old streets and houses pressed by the new buildings. Now and then she as though reconstructs the recent past of her native city, portraying a row of carpet stalls or an old dukhan (a Caucasian inn). But behind the amusing details of the outgoing life, noticed with such subtle humour, one can feel excruciating nostalgia for the city of her youth becoming a thing of the past, for the simple and somewhat patriarchal relations between neighbours that had developed in the traditional Tiflis home, where each one of the inhabitants is seen through by the other. The outgoing, rapidly changing city meant, moreover, the departing friends, to whom Akhvlediani was infinitely devoted. The artist's life is inconceivable in isolation from the people who surrounded her. People attracted her and she attracted people, although her temper could not be called easy. She was an uncompromising person who could not tolerate duplicity in relations. "Awfully just," as one of her friends put it, she was sometimes very harsh in her words, appraisals and actions but that was because she was invariably pained by her friends' mistakes because she loved them so much and had a truly kind and generous heart. Those who were closely acquainted with her invariably realized that. Her studio less of all resembled a temple of art where masterpieces were created in silence and seclusion. Someone of the friends or colleagues would always drop in. A student of architecture, who happened to enter the house in search of lodging for the period of his studies in Tbilisi, lived several years in the attic of her flat. Akhvlediani took care of him and strictly controlled his studies. The studio was frequented by her neighbours' children. To children the artist gave special attention. It was in her studio that the city's first exhibition of children's drawings was held. The artist also helped to create the children's picture gallery in Tbilisi, which has now become one of the most interesting centres of aesthetic education named after her. In her studio the artist often arranged personal exhibitions of works of her colleagues: V. Beletskaya, V. Shukhayev and, of course, report-back exhibitions of the members of the team of painters she organized for the tour of the republic, which had played a considerable role in the development of Georgian landscape painting: Natalia Pilavandishvili, Pyotr Bletkin, Eteri Andronikashvili, Anna Shalikashvili, Klara Kvess, and others. A festive, unconstrained atmosphere prevailed on the opening days. There were so many people that the floors of the old house seemed to be about to give way. There were held also musical and literary soirees, the performers including such outstanding musicians of our time as Neigauz and Richter.

The studio was a cultural centre of the city, and it has remained one after the opening in 1978 of the Akhvlediani Memorial House. As in the artist's lifetime, it is always crowded. The staff of the museum carefully preserve the interiors of the studio ingeniously furnished by Akhvlediani herself, and also books and collections. They carry on important research work, collecting material about the life and work of Elena Akhvlediani, and are compiling a full catalogue of her productions. It is remarkable how its special atmosphere has been preserved in this wonderful house, where today, too, one can often hear poetry, music and Georgian songs and where friends of the artist come together.