Antiquity and Modern Art

The National Gallery of Greece in collaboration with the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, organizes the exhibition "Antiquity and Modern Art. Reminiscences of Antiquity in Modern Greek Art" at the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna. The exhibition is under the auspices of the Greek Embassy in Vienna in the context of the official visit, of his Excellency the President of Hellenic Republic Mr. Karolos Papoulias to Vienna.

This exhibition, which is going to comprise 53 works of art, aspires to present the reception of the classical spirit of ancient Greece (ideas, themes, figures) by modern Greek artists, the ways in which they have been inspired by it, as well as the ways in which they represented it in their art during the 20th century.

Antiquity’s time in Greece was destined to arrive during the period between the wars, following a turn of art towards tradition throughout Europe. A great number of artists, with Pablo Picasso at their lead, turned towards classical antiquity during the years immediately following the First World War.

Encouraged by this European turn of art, Greek artists would re-affiliate themselves with their ancestral heritage. However, Greek tradition was not limited to classical antiquity: Byzantium, in addition to folk culture, constituted for them a single, uninterrupted continuity. That is why the return to tradition frequently mingled together many sources, creating a fascinating hybrid, the catalyst being the formal experience of modern art. Thanks to this alchemy, the works of Greek painters guaranteed the unity, which threatened to be subverted by the variety of stylistic sources. This alchemical amalgam of ancient and Byzantine sources can be traced, particularly during the Thirties, in the works of Konstantinos Parthenis (1878-1967), an illustrious Greek painter.

With the exception of Parthenis, who belongs to an older generation, the major painters of this exhibition are representatives of the famous Thirties Generation and its spirit: Ghika, Tsarouhis, Moralis, Nicolaou, Engonopoulos, Vassileiou, as well as Fassianos, a younger inheritor of the same tradition. Writers and artists of this generation (among whom one finds two Nobel-prize winning poets, George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis), rejuvenated the style, expression and aesthetic of Greek art; their starting point and guiding principle was a common goal: to Hellenize the European avant-garde, to give it Greek nationality. This common goal housed under the same roof personal idioms and techniques apparently very different from each other. Most of these artists shared the general interest of the Thirties Generation for anthropocentricism, a permanent feature of Greek art through the ages.

The abstract trends, which dominated Greek art throughout the Fifties until the middle of the Sixties, interrupted its contact with tradition. The critical realism of Greek artists returned to antiquity during the military dictatorship imposed in Greece on 1967, in order to ironically comment on the propagandistic handling of the ancient heritage by the regime. After the end of the dictatorship and the political change-over in 1974, the reference to antiquity by Greek artists is dictated either by existential considerations or by the broader preoccupations inherent in historical and artistic circumstances.

Professor Marina Lambraki-Plaka
Director of the National Gallery of Greece