Henryk Hryniewski

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Kartlis Deda - "Mother of Georgia", an iconic depiction of a Georgian woman by Henryk Hryniewski

Henryk Hryniewski (Georgian: ჰენრიხ ჰრინევსკი; Russian: Генрих Викторович Гриневский) (1869 – 1937) was a Polish-Georgian painter, graphic artist, and illustrator also known as a scholar of traditional Georgian architecture and educator. He was arrested and put to death during Stalin’s Great Purge while most of his originals were destroyed.

Hryniewski was born into a family of an exiled Polish patriot in the western Georgian city of Kutaisi, then part of the Russian Empire. From 1895 to 1898, he studied arts and architecture at Florence and Karlsruhe. In 1898, he settled in Tiflis (Tbilisi) where he painted and taught. He directed the Tiflis arts school from 1918 and 1921 and helped transform it into the Georgian Academy of Fine Arts of which he became a professor in 1922 and vice-rector in 1927.

Hryniewski was energetically involved in all major cultural projects of that time; he was instrumental in organizing a museum of the history of Tbilisi and was a member of a special commission for protection of cultural heritage. He studied Georgian folk and church architecture, and produced an album of aquarelles "Old Architecture of Georgia," as well as a comprehensive analysis of traditional Georgian ornate art and a textbook on linear perspectives and theory of shadows. Hrynievski’s illustrations regularly appeared in the Georgian press and in the editions of leading Georgian writers, especially Ilia Chavchavadze. He also created an iconostasis for the Kashveti Church of St. George, and coauthored the project of the Georgian Bank of Nobility office (presently the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia). He opposed a program of ideological reforms in the Arts Academy pushed for by the Soviet authorities. Hryniewski was arrested and shot in a 1937 repression wave. His studio was destroyed by the NKVD officers and a large number of his works was irretrievably lost. Hryniewski’s wife Maria Perini (1873-1939), an Italy-born dancer and a founder of the first ballet studio in Tbilisi, was exiled from Georgia immediately after her husband’s arrest.^[1][2]

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