Footnotes

Painted in 1937.

PROVENANCE:
Private collection, Athens.


Reviewing the artist's 1928 exhibition at Barchfeld's in Leipzig, Dr. H. Hofmann argued that Bouzianis's watercolours stamp him as one of the greatest artists of his time¹, while, on the occasion of the painter's 1932 show, the art critic M. Schwimmer noted: "Employing the most frugal means, the artist conveys powerful and insightful impressions, a sense experience of form and colour more intense than any offered by even the best watercolours by Nolde or Kirchner."²

Demonstrating fluid line, translucent colour and swift rendering of the female figure -one of Bouzianis's favourite subjects especially after 1926- Portrait of a woman is a beautiful painting by a master expressionist who believed that art shouldn't be a process of beautification but, instead, a vehicle for emotional states -a purely anti-academic perspective which provoked a strong reaction when he first showed his work in Athens in the mid 1930s. Here, he treats his subject in a frank and direct expressionist manner, yet the element of distortion, which informs much of expressionist art, is kept on a very tight rein. The artist avoids sentimentality or any theatrical device which might charge his portrait with too obvious a pitch of heightened feeling. There is no grotesque excess, no falsification whatsoever of the subject's essential integrity. Yet, the work is full of strong feeling, marvellously disciplined by artistic intelligence and continuously subordinate to aesthetic demands, achieving unity in such a masterly way that it's meaningless to distinguish between design, colour, material and space. They are all one.

As perceptively noted by the painter C. Botsoglou, "the intensity in Bouzianis's work does not derive from the expressiveness of faces and bodies, a fact that differentiates him from the mainstream of German Expressionism. His figures are emotionless, showing no expressive facial contortions. The expressive thrust of this type of painting relies exclusively on pictorial means."³ Likewise, Y. Psychopedis notes that although they assimilate the radical extremities of expressionism, Bouzianis's figures never lose their identity, becoming abstract forms or nightmarish masks. Instead, they emanate a nostalgia for the classical, a nostalgia for a lost and constantly sought balance.<sup>4

1</sup>. H. Hofmann, Leipziger Abendost daily, 6.9.1928
². MS, Leipziger Volkszeitung daily, 23.12.1932.
³. C. Botsoglou, Reflections on the Work of G. Bouzianis - A Confession [in Greek], Anti journal, no.302, 25.10.1985.
⁴. Y. Psychopedis, The Militant Introversion, Expressive Lyricism and Critical Spirit in the Work of Bouzianis [in Greek] in Nostos, Kedros publ., Athens 2009, pp. 228-229.