“Fantastic Tavern: The Tbilisi Avant-Garde”

The book was the default medium for poet Alexei Kruchenykh, but as he began to experiment with illustration, fonts, and the placement of letters on the page, it also became a way to defy philistine expectations of what a book could be. Printing editions was a cheap way to distribute his new visual language. Given Kruchenykh’s interest in replication, he might be pleased that photographs of his books and those of his colleagues in Tbilisi, where he lived from 1917 to 1920, are now displayed in a Manhattan gallery.

“Fantastic Tavern” defies audience expectations, but not by the deliberate coarseness of the books’ type or by their verbal novelties, since the better part of Chelsea traffic is inured to avant-garde shock tactics and can’t read Russian or Georgian. Rather, the surprise is that a site for rare and expensive objects has made room for art historians from Switzerland and Georgia to assert the existence of a little-known tradition using photographs, films, and audio recordings.

The exhibition has a strong ethnographic component—a Caucasian kilim decorates the gallery’s lobby, a shelf in the back has souvenir-stand books on Georgian modernism, and sepia-toned photographs of Georgia and Georgians are scattered throughout. This generous overview of early-twentieth-century Kartvelian culture conspicuously lacks a nod to Niko Pirosmani, the painter of stylized pastorals who was to Kruchenykh’s Moscow circle what Henri Rousseau was to Matisse. But like the theatrical curtains that divide the rear galleries, Pirosmani’s absence from “Fantastic Tavern” underscores historiography’s drama of oblivion and memory, which is here the real object of display.