pirosmani stack001

Text :

Almost every morning I came to spend
a moment in the little Pirosmani museum
in Tbilisi. I was most often alone. There were
few tourists at that time, and the
city's inhabitants were already familiar
(or in some cases, would never know)
those silent galleries peopled with attentive
beasts and distracted humans, all related
by their gaze. When, in the early nineties,
Georgia in its turn began to sink into the
maelstrom of battles and murders that
greeted the post-perestroika period, I
used to wonder if the little museum was
still open, if the attentive animals and
their humans had been left in solitude,
without even a single visitor coming to
tell the shade of Nico Piramanachvili that
for him, the eyes of a blue giraffe came
from the same "different world" as a
certain patch of yellow wall.