Akhvlediani Yelena
(b Telavi, 18 April 1898; d Tbilisi, 28 Dec 1975).
Georgian painter.
From 1922 she studied at the Tiflis (now Tbilisi) Academy of Arts,
where her talent was noted by the patriarch of Georgian realist
painting, Georgy Gabashvili. She visited Italy and France, attending
Colarossi’s academy in Paris. She painted both Tiflis and Paris in
similar style using brown, red and grey half-tones, somewhat
reminiscent of the work of Albert Marquet, as in Paris: Working
Class Area (1926; Tbilisi, Yelena Akhvlediani Mem. Mus.). After
several successful exhibitions in Paris, where she mixed with the
small Georgian community and was close to Lado Gudiashvili, in 1927
she returned to Georgia, holding several exhibitions there to mark
her progress. For some time she was unable to find an application
for her art, and from 1930 she worked as chief artist for the
Detskaya Literatura (children’s literature) publishing house,
producing pen and ink and watercolour illustrations to the works of
Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, Il’ya Chavchavadze and other writers. In
1928 she started working at the theatre of the director Kito
Marjinashvili, and she also designed numerous theatre productions
and films in Russia and the Ukraine as well as Georgia. In each work
she sought to vary the means of building up the scenic space, using
both traditional and avant-garde forms, in particular those of
Constructivism. She gained the highest praise from the critics for
her designs for Z. Antonov’s play Zatmeniye solntsa v Gruzii (‘Solar
eclipse in Georgia’; 1932–3; production by Marjinashvili). For it
she created mock-up buildings that fused with the painted backdrop
as they got further away from the viewer. From the end of the 1950s
she again took Tbilisi as her theme, creating a series in
watercolour, pencil and ink called Old and New Tbilisi (1961–7).
