Moralis Yannis

During his student years he attended the Sunday painting lectures at the Athens School of Fine Arts. In 1931, after successfully completing the entrance examinations, he enrolled in the preparatory section of the school, where he studied under Dimitrios Geraniotis. Later he studied in the workshops of Konstantinos Parthenis and Umvertos Argyros, and starting in 1933 took evening classes at Yannis Kefallinos’ engraving studio. In 1936, the year he graduated, he assured himself a scholarship from the Athens Academy to study mosaic abroad. Thus, the following year he left with his friend the painter Nikos Nikolaou for Rome, but he soon departed and settled in Paris. There he studied at the School of Fine Arts, painting under Charles Guerin and wall painting under Ducos de l’Haille. At the same time he studied at the Ecole des Arts et Metiers, taking lessons in mosaic. He returned to Greece with the outbreak of World War II, and enlisted. In 1947 he was elected full professor at the preparatory division of the School of Fine Arts and ten years later full professor to the Chair of Painting, a position he remained at until 1983. From 1959 to 1962 he designed and executed the engraved composition on the outer wall of the Hilton Hotel in Athens. He has also been involved with ceramics, illustration and set design, working for the National Theater, the Greek Ballet and Karolos Koun’s Art Theater.

Among his distinctions are numbered the bronze medal at the Panhellenio of 1940, the gold medal at the International Handicrafts Exhibition in Munich in 1973, his election as a full member of the International Institute of Arts and Letters (1962), the decoration of the Order of the Phoenix (1979) and the Prize of Arts and Letters of the Athens Academy (1979). He had his first solo show in 1959 at Armos gallery. He participated in group and international exhibitions among which were the Venice Biennale (1958) and the Tapestry Biennale of Lausanne (1965, 1972). In 1988 there was a retrospective exhibition of his work at the National Gallery followed by the artist making a large donation to the museum. In 1996 the Athens Academy organized an exhibition in his honor.

An artist who has had a definitive influence on the field of post-war art in Greece, both with his work in the visual arts and his teaching, he has achieved in painting the yoking of the classical and the modern. Though interested in a variety of thematic categories, such as landscape and still life, his creative work, both in its realistic and geometric stage, is first and foremost anthropocentric, with Eros and Thanatos its axes.