Leonidas Drossis belonged to the first generation of modern Greek sculptors who studied at the Athens School of Arts and were shaped in the spirit of neoclassicism that was brought to Greece by the German sculptor Christian Siegel. Broadening his education at the Munich Academy under Max Widnmann and with trips to Paris, London, Dresden, Vienna and Rome, where he opened a workshop, he would prove to be the most important representative of Greek neoclassicism.
During his residence in Munich, Drossis became acquainted with the founder of the Academy of Athens, Baron Simon Sinas. In 1860 Sinas decided to offer him the commission for the construction of the four pediments on the Academy as well as all the sculptural decoration of the building later on. In the end, Drossis did only the central pediment, whose theme was the “Birth of Athena”. During that same year he presented the model at the Olympia exhibition along with two earlier models, winning the gold medal.
The seated figure of Zeus commands the center of the composition, framed by Athena and Hephaestus, while a little further on Hera observes everything jealously and at the same time Iris is ready to make her joyful announcement of the birth. The remaining groups are connected with the central composition and the ends are closed off with the figures of the rising sun and the falling night. The composition is done in complete agreement with the spirit of neoclassicism and, just as the rest of the decoration of the Academy, serves as a symbol of Greece reborn, while the sculpture itself constitutes an indissoluble part of the architecture done in agreement with ancient prototypes.
Ioannis Vitsaris was a sculptor who, along with Dimitrios Filippotis, transcended the limits of neoclassicism which then dominated modern Greek sculpture and introduced realism. In the First Cemetery of Athens are to be found certain of his most representative works, such as the “Mourning Spirit” on the family tomb of Nikolaos Koumelis.
The “Mourning Spirit”, the angel of death comes, as an iconographic type, from Hellenistic and Roman tomb sculpture and was a motif particularly dear to the hearts of makers of neoclassicist funerary monuments. It was brought to Greece by the German sculptor Christian Siegel. In the form introduced we see a naked angel, standing in relief, holding a torch upside down, symbol of life that has been extinguished. This original motif was subsequently varied and enriched with other funeral symbols, such as the seeds of the poppy – indication of eternal sleep – and the butterfly – symbol of the departing soul. Fully carved, it represents him seated in a thoughtful pose or fallen face forward and mourning, holding an urn of ashes.
Ioannis Vitsaris based himself on the latter type, but stripped of any supplementary element or symbol. It is thus adapted to the realistic style, which aspires to express emotional situations by means of the work itself without the use of standardized symbols. His “Mourning Spirit”, having grieving “Morpheus” by Jean-Antoine Houdon as its iconographic model, is itself transformed into a symbol of grief and mourning as, fallen on the tomb, with his head on his right arm and his body tucked into a ball, the figure mourns for the dead person.
Manolis Tzombanakis focused on the human figure right from the start of his career. At the same time, he preferred to express himself through representation, but with a non-figurative bent, forming his own personal style from early on. His subjects, taken from everyday life, history or myth, often have an allegorical content or constitute a means of protest on a social or political level.
The compositions with horses or mounted figures, to which “Bucephalus” belongs, occupied him from 1972 to 1979 and despite the fact they can be connected to Greek tradition, in reality they were inspired by the Uprising at the National Technical University of Athens in 1973, against the dictatorship. Tzombanakis wanted to express the burden this dramatic event in recent Greek history placed on him as well as his protest against tyranny of any kind by using symbolic elements from other periods, but with clear allusions. “Bucephalus”, the unruly horse of Alexander the Great that only he managed to tame, is built of geometric volumes and is rendered in an intense and daring movement, expressing the momentary, an element which characterizes the artist’s compositions during that period, and echoes the dynamic movement hidden in the works of the Futurists and especially those by Umberto Boccioni.
Even though he died at the age of forty, Yerassimos Sklavos left behind a rich and comprehensive body of work, largely based on research and on experimentation with the processing of materials. Until 1959, he was mainly concerned with the depiction of the human figure, first in a realistic and then in an abstract and stylised approach, as the artist had an inclination towards abstraction, and therefore his adoption of abstract forms was only a matter of time. From this period comes “Icarus”, made in plaster before 1957, when he left for Paris on a Greek state scholarship. Whereas other figures of the same period are modelled in serene and balanced poses, “Icarus” masterfully combines in a single perpendicular motion the rise and fall through a blurring of the lines between limbs and wings and the dramatic convolution of the body.
Lazaros Lameras was among the vanguard of abstraction in Greece. His stay in Paris in 1938-1939 played a definitive role in this choice.
He created his first abstract works in the period 1945 to 1948, among which was “Penteli”. The work originally carried the poetic title, “Penteli in Ecstasy” and as such was shown in the first postwar Panhellenic exhibition of 1948. In fact, it was the first abstract sculpture to be formally exhibited in Greece.
The inspiration for the piece was the mountain in Attica that had provided the marble for many important works of sculpture dating back to antiquity. Lameras has carved a small composition that combines vertical and horizontal motifs with gentle curves and an almost perfectly smooth surface, thus arriving at a pure form that echoes the enterprise of Constantin Brancusi.
