Metro Girl: The Alliance of Art and Architecture in the Visual Aesthetics of the Modern Georgian City of the 1960s

Abstract

This article explores the way a new specifically Georgian post-Stalinist art form (cheduroba, metal engraving) that emerged in the 1960s became a commonly encountered emblematic feature of the equally new urban spaces of the rapidly changing modernist Tbilisi cityscape. This new, and yet seemingly old, art form, which frequently featured the face of a traditional Georgian girl, usually a Khevsur girl from the mountains, came to be a diagnostic part of the modern urban assemblage of Tbilisi in the 1960s. This traditional face from the Georgian past became a paradoxical figure for the alliance of art and architecture in the visual aesthetics of the modern Georgian city in the 1960s, and the art form became the stereotypical “face” of a specifically Georgian post-Stalinist “traditional-modernist” public urban art. This art form soon became diagnostic of modern Georgian urban spaces, like the Tbilisi metro, which also opened around the same time in the 1960s. The recurrent distribution of this face across newly-created modernist urban spaces together formed a Georgian version of “socialist modernism,” producing a visually-experienced “brand of socialism” for urban spaces, a procession of images traditional or national (in style or theme) in socialist modernist spaces connecting the traditional architecture of the city to the modernist architectural spaces of the new socialist city of the 1960s.