Giorgos Bouzianis

Painted circa 1950-56.

In the present group portrait, Bouzianis' treatment of the three subjects reveals his preoccupation with the sitters' characters and inner struggles. Widely recognised as Greece's foremost Expressionist painter, Bouzianis believed that faithfulness to form was subordinate to the expression of human personality and emotion. Vibrant colour and loose brushwork characterise his many portraits, and violent human emotion is highlighted as a counterpoint to the increasingly hostile, mechanised world of the German interwar period.

The human face and figure, which is the subject matter of much of Bouzianis' work, was the one most frequently subjected to experimentation and distortion by the avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century. In the 1920s, Bouzianis became associated with the German Expressionist groups Die Brücke – which counted among its members Kirchner, Schmitt-Rotluff, Pechstein and Nolde – and Der blaue Reiter, whose contributors included Kandinsky, Franz Marc and the composer Arnold Schönberg. Denounced by the Nazis as Entartete Kunst ('degenerate art') in the early 1930s, these Expressionist groups suffered the same censure and condemnation as countless other progressive artists at the time.

In 1934, Bouzanis returned to Greece for good. He represented Greece at the 1950 Venice Biennale and was awarded the first prize for the Guggenheim competition in 1952. The present work is an excellent example of his brooding and psychologically intense portraiture, for which he became known as a major figure in the Expressionist movement.