Adjara Art Museum

The art museum is where Batumi goes quiet for an hour. The collection was formed in 1998 from works transferred out of the state funds in Tbilisi, and now runs to roughly two thousand items. What hangs at any one time is small — perhaps fifty canvases — and that restraint is the point. The core is twentieth-century Georgian painting. Niko Pirosmani is here, along with Lado Gudiashvili, David Kakabadze and Elene Akhvlediani: the generation that put European modernism and the flat, frontal tradition of Georgian icon painting into the same frame. Kakabadze's Imeretian landscapes read particularly well in Adjaran light — the same low cloud, the same deep green outside the window. The remaining rooms divide roughly into: - European and Russian graphics — nineteenth-century etchings and lithographs, modest but genuine - Adjaran painters — a local twentieth-century school that is rarely shown anywhere else - Temporary exhibitions, often contemporary, sometimes student work from Batumi's art school The building deserves attention too: an early twentieth-century townhouse with high ceilings and a wooden staircase, later converted to galleries. The light is natural, the rooms are usually near-empty, and nobody hurries you. An hour covers it. This is not a museum you drive to Batumi for. But if you are already here, if it is raining, or if you simply want a break from the boulevard and the noise of the seafront, it is one of the most civil rooms in the city, and the Pirosmani alone justifies the walk.

Gallery