 Of great importance is the
presence of Giorgos Bouzianis in the Gallery. The three
oils (Portrait of Seated Man and Female Figure) are some
of the paintings in which all the exploration and the
development of this important Greek expressionist are
apparent. G. Bouzianis (1885-1959) completed his
apprenticeship in Munich and from an early age found
himself in close contact with the evolution taking place
in German expressionism, managing to achieve a
distinguished European career in the 1920’s. With
the rise of nazism, he returns to Greece where he
continues his quest in isolation, producing his most
significant works. In Portrait of a Seated man (1917),
the treatment of the subject remains conventional,
despite the fact that the function of color and the brush
arerelatively free, according to the expressionist models
of the decade. However, in Portrait of Waldmuller, we
have the intense appearance of those details of form
which with the passing of time will become the personal
trademark of the artist: the intensity of the brush-work,
and the violent spiritual relationship between the artist
and the theme of the painting. This is crystal clear in
«Female Figure», where the woman portrayed is merely as
a pretext since the main creative work of the artist is
to be found in his spiritual relationship with the
artistic surface and his means of expression. To these
violent brush strokes are now added other intense
elements such as rapid finger painting, other chromatic
lines with no clear reproductive role, bright colors, so
that in the end one has the impression that the picture
is the field of expression of the internal spiritual
world of the artist and
not of the original optical stimulation. The keynotes of
this latter work by Bouzianis are also characteristic of
postwar American expressionism (De Kouning, Pollock.
Rothko, etc.), indeed this great creator could be
considered the forerunner of the movement. |
