Elguja Amashukeli

Biography

The first “Mother of Georgia” was made of wood. It was assembled from planks on Mount Mtatsminda in 1958, and the city noticed the slender female figure above the rooftops at once: people argued about it, and then decided it had worked. Wood does not last, so a few years later the sculpture was recast in a more durable material. It is hollow inside and faced with aluminium plates on the outside; this version is dated 1963.

Amashukeli was born on 22 April 1928 in Tiflis, as Tbilisi was still called then. By other accounts his birthday falls in June or August, and the date is hard to verify reliably. He studied at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts under Nikolai Kandelaki; sources place the start of his studies in 1947 or in 1950, and the end in 1954 or 1955. Then came postgraduate study in 1958–1959, during which he worked on a project for a monument to Vakhtang I Gorgasali. In those same years he also worked on books. For Georgian publishers he illustrated and designed “The Song of the Nibelungs” (1960) and the five-volume collected works of Vazha-Pshavela (1962–1964). The series of paintings “Fantasy of the Forest” dates from the same time, and he made medallions as well. Judging by this list, his easel and book work ran in parallel with his monumental work, although he is known almost only for his monuments.

For “Mother of Georgia” he received the Shota Rustaveli State Prize in 1965, together with the title of Honored Artist of the Georgian SSR. For the Tbilisi metro station Rustaveli Square he made bas-reliefs (1966). In 1967 an equestrian monument to Vakhtang I Gorgasali, the founder of the city, was set up on the slope above the Kura. The proportions of the figure are fitted to the scale of the hill and to the old church beside it, and to my mind this is his best piece, the one monument that does not quarrel with its landscape. His symbolic monuments had little in common with official Soviet monumental sculpture. In Poti, for the square in front of the theatre, he made the Monument of Glory: on a tall, narrow plinth stands a woman holding a sword, which at the same time reads as a cross. In 1979 a memorial to the heroic sailors was unveiled there too. In Gori, in the same year, the Victory monument was erected, in which a youth rides a lion and the sword is wound with a grapevine. For the Gori monument and the Poti memorial Amashukeli received the USSR State Prize (1982). There is also the “Wounded Eagle” in Zestafoni (1968–1969), conceived as a gravestone for fellow townsmen who did not return from the war.

He worked for about five years on the monument “Bell of Knowledge” (Deda Ena), dedicated to Yakob Gogebashvili, beginning in 1983 in a public garden on the bank of the Kura. There is no customary plinth: forms like palms rise from the ground, with sheets of Georgian script in place of palms, and between them stand the figure of a youth and a working bell. In 1975 he put up a monument to Niko Pirosmani in Tbilisi, and in 1994 an equestrian statue of David IV the Builder in Kutaisi.

From 1981 to 1996 Amashukeli chaired the board of the Union of Artists of Georgia, and in 1984–1989 he was a secretary of the Union of Artists of the USSR. In 1988 he became People’s Artist of the USSR and a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Arts, and from 1996 he was a corresponding member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences. He has been an Honorary Citizen of Tbilisi since 1981. He wrote two books: “The Seventh Sense” (1981) and “Art Letters” (1984).

He died in Tbilisi in March 2002, on the 10th by one account and on the 16th by another. He is buried in the Didube Pantheon.