Nikolai Kandelaki
Kandelaki, Nikolai Porfir’evich
Born Oct. 5 (17), 1889, in the village of Kulashi, in present-day Samtredia Raion; died Aug. 24, 1970, in Sukhumi. Soviet sculptor. People’s Artist of the Georgian SSR (1957).
Kandelaki studied under A. T. Matveev at the Leningrad Academy of Art, graduating in 1926. In that year he became an instructor at the Tbilisi Academy of Art, where he became a professor in 1944. He is the creator of portraits with emphatically strong-willed, energetic characters (the artist L. Gudiash-vili, stone, 1935; People’s Artist of the USSR A. Khorava, bronze, 1948; academician N. Muskhelishvili, bronze, 1954—all in the Museum of Art of the Georgian SSR, Tbilisi), as well as statues (Monument to F. Makharadze, bronze, 1958, in the town of Makharadze). He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor and medals.