Footnotes

PROVENANCE:
Private collection, Athens.

Even the most clothed of Tsarouchis's images are always nude.
Andreas Embeirikos

Conveying monumentality, permanence and sculpturesque clarity, this striking torso of a young Greek soldier is striped of its specificity to allow the eternal essence of symbol to stand out alone.¹ Although fully dressed and with its upper part severely cropped, the male body -Tsarouchis's signature subject- manages to fully capture the vitality and pulse of life. "In no other painter's work, the human body is presented with such integrity, purity and open-mindedness than in the work of Tsarouchis. As a result, his pictures are transformed into a truthful language of a never-ending spiritual quest."²

This relentless pursuit is best described by the words of the poet Andreas Embeirikos: "Truth in the work of Tsarouchis is distilled and explosive like thunder, uninfluenced by any sort of dogmatism, either that of a school or of an accepted morality or aesthetic. This fundamental independence is so apparent that even his most 'clothed' images always appear to be utterly 'nude'.³ As argued by D. Kapetanakis, Tsarouchis found the truth of Modern Greece in the bodily forms of Greek youth. In contrast to other cultures, such as the French, which are woman-centred, Greece, both ancient and modern, is mainly expressed through masculine types.⁴ In the same vein, Nobel laureate O. Elytis noted that "Tsarouchis restored the human body in a land whose age-old civilisation has always been man-centred. Thanks to his paintings, the figures of Hermes, Narcissus, St. Georgios and St. Dimitrios started to live and breathe again and circulate among us."⁵ For both Kapetanakis and Elytis, Tsarouchis's male figures are invested with a symbolic and traditional value that carries on the male-centred humanistic ideal of Ancient Greece, while at the same time expressing the spirit and reality of Modern Greece.<sup>6

1</sup>. See D. Kapetanakis, Yannis Tsarouchis, Return to Roots [in Greek], Nea Grammata magazine, 1937 as reprinted in Tsarouchis [in Greek], Zygos, Athens 1978, pp. 7-8. See also preface to the Tsarouchis exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, London, 1951.
². T. Niarchos, A Natural Phaenomenon[in Greek], in Yannis Tsarouchis, It's Good to Confess, Kastaniotis editions, Athens 1986, p. 293.
³. A. Embeirikos, The Triumph of Sensuous Painting [in Greek], Zygos magazine, no. 72-75, November 1961 - February 1962, p. 11. See also Yannis Tsarouchis, Greek Heritage quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2, Spring 1964, p. 92.
⁴. D. Kapetanakis, p. 6.
⁵. O. Elytis, preface to the Yannis Tsarouchis: Fifteen Works and One Original Print 1938-1963 album [in Greek], 1964.
⁶. See E. Florou, Tsarouchis - Painting, [in Greek] (doctoral dissertation) vol. 1, Athens 1989, p. 118.