Chryssochoidi Titsa

In 1920, still a school pupil, she enrolled in the Athens School of Fine Arts and in 1924 was admitted to Thomas Thomopoulos’s sculpture workshop, in which she studied until 1928. Two years later, she left for Paris, where she studied at Thanassis Apartis’s workshop first and then at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere with Robert Wlerick. Returning to Athens in 1934, she established her first workshop, which was destroyed in air raids during the German Occupation. From 1941, she taught plastic, pottery and history of art at the Papastrateios Applied Arts State School and from 1960 free drawing at Hill School. She received the Silver Medal of the City of Paris in 1966, and in 1980 the Bronze Medal of the International Women’s Education Federation.

She had solo exhibitions of her work and participated in group exhibitions, including Panhellenic exhibitions, various Salons d’Automne in Paris, the Cairo International Exhibition (1947), the Alexandria Biennale (1963 and 1965), the Budapest Biennale (1971) as well as exhibitions of the Greek Women Artists Association, of which she was member.

Her familiarity with the Greek plastic tradition and her acquaintance with the work of the post-Rodin French school, especially that of Aristide Maillol, were major factors which helped shape her style, characterized by a restrained realism with idealistic or romantic tendencies. Having as their exclusive subject the human figure, her works are busts, but above all standing, seated or half-reclining female figures. These female figures, with their rounded forms, their well-delineated outlines and calm postures reflect Maillol’s plastic approach, which Chryssochoidi adapted to her own temperament. Apart from free sculptures, she also produced medals and reliefs on subjects including fish, birds, plants, insects and boats.