Yiannis Tsarouchis Greek, 1910-89

Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris 
Purchased from the above by the present owner

Tsarouchis' initial training was at the School of Fine Arts in Athens under Jakobides and Parthenis, while also working in the studio of Fotis Kontoglou, a religious painter who introduced him to Byzantine art. In 1935 Tsarouchis left Athens for Paris. It was in the French capital that he was able to study the work of the Renaissance masters and French Impressionists. Immersing himself in Parisian art circles, he befriended painters such as Matisse and Giacometti. By 1936 Tsarouchis had returned to his beloved Athens, organising his first solo exhibition.

Widely acclaimed as a painter of the Greek people, his work attempted a reconciliation of Western and Eastern pictorial traditions. Like many of the Greek avant-garde intellectuals and artists of his time, Tsarouchis became actively involved with the popular art movement and the search for Greekness in art. He travelled extensively in Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor and France, where he studied Byzantine music, painting and textiles, and was particularly inspired by the works of Matisse and Demetrios Galanis.

One of the most important representatives of the Thirties Generation, Tsarouchis embodied in his work the ideal of 'Greekness'. With a multiplicity of influences from Hellenistic and Byzantine art, the art of the Renaissance as well as the work of Matisse, Theofilos and Kontoglou, and the figures of Karaghiozis shadow puppets, he created a unique personal style.   

Tsarouchis himself defined his work as a constant oscillation between the eastern and western painterly styles, the modern and the old. He described the eastern as a painterly method based on colour and its harmonious combinations and in the recreation of forms, inevitably doing violence to perspective, whereas the western, or Greek and Hellenistic method was based on a harmony of lines and colours which endeavoured to render reality objectively, respecting perspective. Rather than combining both techniques, he enjoyed to utilise them separately in order to explore their individual potentials for the representation of reality.

In the present work Tsarouchis is shown from the back painting Dominic, one of his favourite models during the 1970s.  A similar work in pastel, but with Dominic wearing a helmet, was sold at Sotheby's London, 18 October 2001, lot 56. Dominic also modelled for Tsarouchis in 1972 for The Four Seasons.