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Spyros Papaloukas(Greek, 1892-1957)Monastère des Iviron, Mont Athos
€22,000 - €30,000
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Find your local specialistSpyros Papaloukas (Greek, 1892-1957)
signé en grec (en bas à droite)
huile sur carton
56 x 48cm (22 1/16 x 18 7/8in).
Peint en 1924
signed in Greek (lower right)
oil on cardboard
Footnotes
Provenance
Sotheby's London, European Paintings, 11 June 2012, lot 114.
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner.
Littérature
Spyros Papaloukas, Sojourn in Mount Athos, Mount Athos Gallery - Agra editions, 2003, no. 73 (illustrated).
Papaloukas's output during his one-year sojourn in Mt. Athos is a key chapter in the development of Greek art in the early decades of the 20th century. As perceptively noted by art critic A. Kouria, these works provided a daring answer to some of the period's foremost issues concerning tradition and cultural identity.1 The painter himself once questioned how an artist can create the Greek future if not thoroughly familiar with the Greek past? Here, he treated his subject2 by fusing the rich Byzantine tradition of town description with the doctrines of modern art. As if he were making a Byzantine mosaic, he emphasized the flatness of the surface and endeavoured to liberate colour from its obligation to describe reality, a perception which was also of pivotal importance to the art of the Nabis, Cezanne and the early 20th c. cubist experiments.
1 See A. Kouria, "Spyros Papaloukas's Athos" in Spyros Papaloukas, Sojourn in Mount Athos [in Greek], Agra editions - Mount Athos 2003, p. 22.
2 Built in the early 980s by Georgian monks, the Iviron Monastery preserves precious icons, manuscripts, books and liturgical scrolls, as well the relics of canonized saints.