Antonios Sochos was one of the first sculptors to distance himself from neoclassicist doctrines and turn in a completely different direction. His study of archaic plastic art from the 7th and 6th century BC, of Cycladic figurines, as well as Gothic art, coupled with his initiation into the long tradition of folk sculpture on Tinos in combination with an acquaintance with the avant garde movements in Europe were the sources of his inspiration.
“Girl” is a work that makes a clear reference to early archaic sculpture, to effigies and even to Egyptian art. The pose assumed by the young figure, frontal and static, practically without depth, points to a distant model in the “Lady of Auxerre” from the 7th century BC and “Hera by Cheramyes” from the 6th. The right hand, holding the folds of the garment, is the only element breaking the absolute immobility, while the surfaces are for all intents and purposes flat, with the exception of the emphasis on the chest, the light grooving suggestive of drapery and the engraved decoration on the bottom part of the tunic. The carving was done directly on eucalyptus wood. The use of wood in a large number of Sochos’ works is a further indication of the artist’s innovative thrust and connects him both to the folk sculptors who made figureheads for ships and the primitivist perceptions which then held sway in Europe.
Ioannis Vitsaris studied at the School of Arts and completed his education in Munich. Despite his neoclassical education, returning from Munich in 1871, he engaged in realistic compositions, both in terms of content and style, often much bolder than those of Dimitrios Filippotis, who was the first to introduce realistic themes into modern Greek sculpture.
“Christos, the Black Guy” belongs to this category. Christos was a characteristic figure of Athens, who lived mainly on the streets and died in 1886. He was especially beloved, while he was a model in works by the painters Nikephoros Lytras and Nikolaos Gyzis.
Vitsaris made the work in 1874, with a very realistic style, which is reflected in the posture of the body and the rendering of details, while the painted plaster creates the impression of dark skin. In 1875 he presented it at the Olympia exhibition, where he won the bronze medal. But despite the award, it was described by the critics as an “unfortunate idea”. Despite the negative reception, however, “Christos, the Black Guy” is an exceptional, and early, sample of realism in modern Greek sculpture, without concessions in the neoclassicist direction.
Ioannis Vaptistis Kalosgouros belongs among the Ionian island artists who revived the art of sculpture in the Ionian, creating the first works of modern Greek sculpture.
The bust of the illustrious Hellenist and Philhellene Frederick North, Count of Guilford (1776-1827), who in 1824 founded the Ionian Academy on Corfu and with whose financial assistance a number of later to be illustrious Greeks studied abroad, is almost a faithful copy of the bust Pavlos Prossalentis had made in 1827. The English Philhellene is depicted wearing the specially designed ancient-style uniform of the Lord of the Ionian Academy. His mature age is expressed by the wrinkled cheeks and the stringy but at the same time rather loose neck while his gaze is fixed, in keeping with the neoclassicist model. The thin hair on his head is framed in relief by a decorative band with an owl in the center, the symbol of education. The imposing rendering of the figure expresses self-confidence and satisfaction and stresses the count’s dynamic personality.
The work is inspired by C.P. Cavafy’s poem “Artificial Bloom”
C.P. CAVAFY
Artificial Bloom
I do not want real narcissi – neither lilies
Nor real roses appeal to me
They only adorn platitudinous and common gardens
Their flesh inculcates bitterness, weariness and grief to me
Their perishable beauty bores me
Give me artificial blooms – glories of porcelain and metal –
That do not wither and rot, with images that do not age
Blooms of the marvelous gardens of another land,
Where Theories, Rhythms and Knowledge reside
I love blooms made of glass or gold,
True gifts of faithful Art
Painted with colours more lovely than the natural,
Elaborate with nacre and enamel,
With ideal leaves and branches
Their grace taken from wise and purest Elegance
They did not grow dirty in dust and mud
If they have no scent, we shall pour fragrance
(And) We shall burn sentimental scents before them
Translated by Yannis Kaloudis
from the exhibition catalogue
C.P.Cavafy “Pictured”. 40 Contemporary Greek Creators
A sculptor who centered his attention on the human figure, faithful to representation but with a strong tendency toward the schematic and the abstract, Memos Makris studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, and then attended lessons in the studios of Jean-Paul Laurens and Marcel Gimond in Paris, where he lived for five years, settling in Hungary in 1950. Busts, female figures, nudes, and monuments designed for public spaces, made up the core of his work, which drew elements from both archaic art and his French teachers and, occasionally, abstract and expressionist models.
In 1965 he began working on a number of naked figures. These figures are rendered very schematically, with oval heads and sometimes with the characteristics of their physiognomy simplified, and other times without any characteristics at all, with the bodies all worked the same way, with rounded volumes and elongated forms. The “Spring Dance” follows along these lines, but the abstract rendering is even greater, while the two figures hover in the air in a laudatory dance in honor of spring, recalling scenes from the three Graces in compositions of European art.
Giorgos Zongolopoulos worked with figurative depiction centered on the human being for a considerable period of time before moving on to completely abstract compositions. The realistic portraits he did, by and large before 1940, were succeeded by full-bodied figures with a steadily growing intensification of the simplified and schematic forms, particularly apparent in the Fifties.
In 1956 Giorgos Zongolopoulos represented Greece at the Venice Biennale with the work “Composition for a dramatic subject”. Still working within the framework of representational art, but with an equally intense schematization evident, this time concentrated in elongation, he created a composition with two standing figures, one dressed as a female, erect, frontal and taller, and a nude male, who is about to fall but is held up by the woman, who embraces him protectively. This composition, with the flat rendering of the surfaces and the incorporation of geometric shapes without volume, would be the forerunner of non-figurative works that would follow during the Sixties, done from a constructivist point of view. The composition that belongs to the National Gallery is a variation in a smaller scale of the work exhibited at the Venice Biennale and is a gift of the Ministry of Education in 1967.
Yannoulis Chalepas was a uniquely gifted artist. But his life and artistic development were marked by the manifestation of mental illness that led to confinement in a psychiatric hospital on the island of Corfu and a forty-year hiatus in his artistic production. The first symptoms of aberrant behavior presented in 1878, the same year that he completed his first body of work, referred to by historians as the “first period.”
“Satyr’s Head” is among the last works of Yannoulis Chalepas’ first creative period. A realistic, highly modeled figure, it is a virtually psychographic, personal portrait of a mature man. The vivid, penetrating gaze and enigmatic smile establish the figure’s personality. The smile appears at once sarcastic or demonic and melancholy, depending on the angle from which it is regarded. In fact, this piece caused Chalepas such emotional distress that he tried to destroy it by scratching and throwing clay at it.
