Footnotes

Provenance
The artist's collection, London until 1989.
Private collection, Athens.

Expositions
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Ghika: Paintings 1934-1968, July 11 - August 18, 1968, no. 95 (listed in the exhibition catalogue, p. 16).

Littérature
K.C. Valkana, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, His Painting Oeuvre, Benaki Museum, Athens 2011, no. 380, p. 302 (illustrated).


It often seems to me that the night
is much more alive and richly coloured than the day.
Vincent van Gogh

A silent symphony of geometric shapes, this evocative night view¹ of the port of Hydra is one of a handful of canvases Ghika painted on the island following the devastating fire that completely destroyed his family house in 1961. Tightly designed and visually mesmerising, it is an outstanding picture of throbbing energy and relentless rhythm that captures a sense of perpetual movement, showcasing Ghika's abstractive use of intertwined designs and stylised motifs to saturate the pictorial space.² Bold shapes, dynamic lines and rhythmic patterns float with confident dance moves, building up a composition of pure form and recalling the words of Pericles Yannopoulos, this theoretical forerunner of Greekness: "The Greek line creates beautiful, rounded shapes, occasionally soaring upwards with vigorous, adolescent agility only to return with a seagull's lightness to a gentle rhythm." Everything here seems to be subject to a transcendental pulse and steeped in an air of suspense, revealing the potent forces of nature.

From approximately the late 1950s on, Ghika's angular geometry and ordered architectural structure of his landscapes gave way to a whirlpool of interwoven lines and a rhythmically orchestrated nexus of planes and forms.³ During that period he visited the USA with his wife Barbara at the invitation of the State Department and returned to Greece by way of the Far East. Inspired perhaps by Japanese calligraphy's constant flow of brush and pen, his landscapes became denser and more mystical, reflecting his perception of nature as a cosmogony invested with pantheistic rituals and age-old myths. Prefacing the artist's 1968 showing at London's Whitechapel Gallery, which included Nocturnal port ΙΙ, art critic Bryan Robertson noted that "Ghika paints Greek landscape and his background is Greek, but what is chiefly remarkable about his work is the form, the strength of the vision; its absolute and concrete reality in imaginative terms; and the deliberate craftsmanship; all of which are intensely his own."

¹ The effets de soir is part of an honourable 19th tradition, particularly among the painters of the Barbizon School.
² See K.C. Valkana, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, His Painting Oeuvre [in Greek], Benaki Museum edition, Athens 2011, p. 227.
³ See M. Achimastou-Potamianou, "Ghika's Art" [in Greek], in Greek Painters - 20th Century, Melissa editions, Athens 1975, p. 340.