David Kakabadze

David Kakabadze was a leading Georgian avant-garde painter, graphic artist and scenic designer, as well as an art scholar and pioneer in early cinematography and photography. Born to a poor peasant family near Khoni, he studied natural sciences at St Petersburg University while attending painting classes, then lived in Paris from 1919 to 1927, fusing European modernism with Georgian national traditions. On his return to Georgia he taught at the Tbilisi Academy of Arts and designed sets for Kote Marjanishvili's theatre, before being dismissed from his professorship in 1948 under pressure to abandon Formalism.