Footnotes

Provenance
Estate of the artist.
Private collection, France.

An inspired synthesis of curves flowing gently in an unbroken stream of movement, this etherealised nude is transposed into a timeless melody of ideal beauty. As Nobel Laureate Odysseus Elytis once noted, "Moralis was always driven by a longing for the monumental, bestowing even on his most sensual conceptions a feeling of mystery and a Biblical sense of the sacred."¹

Celestial yet humanly touching, with the flexible form of old-master venuses and graces, Moralis's tall and beautiful kore is a precious ornament of translucent simplicity and grace. Captured in delicate colours, weightless forms, and rhythmic linear patterns, she seems to occupy a world of dream-like visions. Slender, stylishly elongated, with tender, heaving forms set against a perfectly balanced geometric edifice of austere verticals and horizontals, she bears testimony to the painter's inspired leap of imagination and personal reinterpretation of the classical.

Since 1974 Moralis has been giving us images of woman in her new, emancipated status. This recurrent figure, either sitting or reclining, is always treated in a progressively reductive manner"², without, however, losing its recognizable form. As N. Hadjikyriakos-Ghika once noted, Moralis's youthful females, closely attuned to the idealism of ancient Greek art and endowed with grace and tenderness, are created by the Muses and the Hours.<sup>3

1</sup> O. Elytis, preface to the Moralis exhibition catalogue, Iolas-Zoumboulakis Galerie, Athens 1972.
² D. Papastamos, "Yannis Moralis the Artist", in Yannis Moralis, Commercial Bank of Greece, Athens 1988, p. 26.
³ Nea Estia magazine, no. 1245, May 15, 1979.