A timeless contemporary on Andros - The Best from Greece

THE HIGHLY influential and multi-faceted art of Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1906-1994), one of the most European artists of the 30s generation and a patriarch of Greek painting, according to some - is at the heart of this year’s summer show at the Basil and Elise Goulandris Museum of Contemporary Art on the island of Andros.

The title of the exhibition, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika: A Timeless Contemporary, refers to a description by close friend, poet laureate Odysseus Elytis. It features over 100 pieces on loan from museums, foundations and private collections - 71 paintings, 21 drawings and 12 sculptures. The majority of the works on display belong to the Benaki Museum-Ghika Gallery and the National Gallery, two institutions whose permanent collections include a large number of the artist’s most significant works.

In addition to being a painter, sculptor, engraver and set designer, Ghika was also a writer, poet and thinker - a humanist in the Renaissance sense of the term.

“I am not a one-sided person, developing in only one direction,” Ghika once said. “I am a universal man. I am not meant to do one thing only. Creativity is a concept that includes all forms of art.” He quoted Greek classical poet Simonides as saying “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.”

Goulandris museum director Kyriakos Koutsomallis describes the artist’s versatility in art forms as “a work of many twists and turns, almost Protean in the variety of its aspects and its bounty of meaning”.

The show traces Ghika’s European influences - be it the Fauvist investigations in the use of colour or the analytic cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque - and how he adapted them to the light and landscape of Greece, particularly Hydra island, which was dear to his heart.

Though he was exposed to Europe’s finest artists, Ghika sought to establish his own place among them by employing a subtle geometric structure in his paintings yet did not hold back when it came to freedom of expression.

Shortly before coming back to Athens in the mid-thirties, Ghika’s painting moved away from the rather austere characteristics of cubism in favour of a more abstract approach.

Ghika’s return to his beloved Hydra rekindled memories of adolescence and family holidays there and marked a new period in his work with regard to his perception of landscape.

Koutsomallis notes a newfound luminosity and emotionality in Ghika’s brushstrokes, as austere cubist drawing makes way for emotion, which steps into the picture. “The arrogant intellect retreats before the impetus of emotion,” he comments.

Hydra landscape

Ghika himself has poetically compared the works of his Hydra period to “soundless symphonies of geometric shapes and bright colours. They are abstract architectural compositions mixing fragmentary views of rock and houses, wall structures and steps, fences, sea and sky, where the only moving things are birds, clouds and kites. In other words, there is a contrast between the weight of the rock and the buoyancy of the feather, between the stillness of the earth and the breathing wind.”

Along with French neoclassical painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Ghika believed that average painters are also average draughtsmen while great draughtsmen are also great painters. He described the role of drawing as a way of delving beyond the surface of things. “It shows the hierarchy of values, reveals the rhythm of lines, rids them of pointless and random details, provides them with direction and corrects whatever time has not yet contrived or had time to correct,” Ghika said.

The exhibition offers art lovers the opportunity to see some of Ghika’s lesser-known drawings. More subtle in their impact compared to Ghika’s instantly striking paintings, they are further proof of the artist’s unique talent.

On at the Basil and Elise Goulandris Museum of Contemporary Art (tel 22820-22444) in Andros’ Hora through to September 25