Diamantis Diamandopoulos

From Diamandopoulos' beginnings as a student of Parthenis at the Athens School of Fine Arts and his debut exhibitions at the 'Atelier' and the 'Asylo Technis' in 1930 and 1931, the influence of the French modernists was evident. Commencing his canon in a cubist-surrealist style, Diamandopoulos would move into a style akin to that of Matisse, with thematic nods to his contemporary, Tsarouchis, in their shared support of the new 'Urban Genre' or 'Visual Demotic Greek' movements. 

The influence of Matisse in paintings such as Seated Greek Sergeant is palpable in each of the pulsating planes of colour and in the decorative surface. The figure seems to almost be slipping off the pictorial surface, shadows and depth disposed of and value contrast forfeited in favour of the dynamism of colourful shapes jostling for space. In Matisse's Music of 1939 (fig. 1), the kinship of palette with that in the present work is manifest, and the cool and warm tones contrast and complement the organic and geometric motifs in these modernist scenes and portraits. 

The frontal pose of Seated Greek Sergeant as well as that of Tsarouchis' Two Friends (fig. 2) brings to mind the stereotypical principles seen in the images of traditional travelling photographers. Attention to detail is sacrificed for a realist interpretation of the Greek reality of the artists' time, distinctive in the 'Thirties Generation' canon (fig. 3). This focus on metexis as opposed to mimesis signalled a serious break with artistic tradition, and in both works '... the representation of a uniformed man proclaims cultural and national specificity... [and] addresses issues of patriotic and nationalistic conviction' (Haris Kambourdis and George Levounis, Modern Greek Art of the 20^th Century: The Complete Guide to the Collections of the Rhodes Municipality Modern Greek Art Museum, Athens, 1999, p. 64). This subject would prove its importance in illustrating the aesthetic and ideological preoccupations of the 'Thirties Generation,' and would be the tangible evidence of a newly-developed Greek visual vocabulary that abandoned the Nineteenth Century 'Great Idea.'

FIG. 1, Henri Matisse, Music, 1939, oil on canvas © Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York
208D08100_comp.eps

FIG. 2, Yiannis Tsarouchis, Two Friends, 1938, watercolour on paper
209D08100_comp.eps

FIG. 3, Diamantis Diamandopoulos, Seated Soldier, 1936-37
139D08100_comp.eps