Nicos Hadjikiriakos-Ghika

Acquired from the artist by the present owner

The present work's beauty lies in the three-dimensionality of its surface and the jubilant palette, as well as in the distortion of a landscape into decorative and visually-satisfying planes of abstraction. The origami-like quality of a seemingly folding and unfolding canvas adds a strong sense of dynamism, and the reduction in planar shifts and value contrast signals Synthetic Cubism. This rupture with the time-honoured tradition of the Munich School nevertheless was represented by a predominantly Parisian modernist movement, infused in theme, subject or spirit by a distinctively Hellenic character.

Beginning and ending his life in Greece, Nikos Hadjikiriakos-Ghika began his artistic scholarship under Konstantinos Parthenis in Athens, relocating to Paris to enrol at the Sorbonne, the Ranson Academy and the studio of Dimitris Galanis. This erudite, well-travelled and sophisticated background would nourish a hungry mind, open to the concept of an analytic and mathematical form of modernism. This visual vocabulary owed much to the methodical teaching of Parthenis, with its emphasis on geometric principles, the Byzantine art that Ghika cherished, incorporating its 'strictness, the geometric, hierarchy,' and the work of artistic luminaries of the Parisian modernist enclave such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque (in Marina Lambraki-Plaka, ed., Four Centuries of Greek Painting, Athens, 1999, p. 139).

This lot is sold with a pencil study by Nicos Hadjikiriakos-Ghika measuring 21 by 26cm., 8¼ by 10¼in. and dated 1937 (fig. 1).

FIG. 1, Nikos Hadjikiriakos-Ghika, Landscape, pencil on paper, to be sold with this lot
019D08100_3M8J3.eps