Nicos Hadjikiriakos-Ghika

Christian Zervos, Paris
René Char, Paris
Private Collection, Paris
 

Ghika's Cretan landscapes were conceived during a journey to Heraklion in the summer of 1953 with Christian Zervos, the publisher of Cahiers d'Art.  In his, Spender's and Fermor's monograph on Ghika, Zervos recalled: 'One day at noon as we left the rooms of the Heraklion Museum, we went to the garden gallery... Moved by the perspectives that nature suddenly gave him, Ghika was changed in the depths of his being... using watercolour, he started to create the images which were a new step in his work... his paintings created in Crete and inspired directly by nature... have a style full of enchantment expressed with extreme self-restraint but here or there capable of lyrical accents' (Christian Zervos, Introduction, Stephen Spender and Patrick Leigh Fermor, Ghika: Peintures, Dessins, Sculptures, Paris, 1965, p. 12). 

Executed in January 1954, the present work relates to the oil of the same title now in the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris.  René Char most probably acquired this gouache at Zervos' Cahiers d'Art exhibition of 1954, when the art critic and poet Jean Cassou was arranging the acquisition of the related oil for the Musée National d'Art Moderne.  In a letter from Ghika to Zervos in the Benaki Museum archives, the artist stated that he had painted four gouaches of a large size at this time, of which the present work is one: 'elles ont 57.5cm. de largeur et 39cm. de hauteur.'

Char would have originally met Ghika through Zervos, and later translated Tiggie Ghika's poems into French for publication by Zervos. His conversations with the artist were published in his 1965 monograph, and he also wrote the preface for the Iolas Gallery Ghika exhibition in New York.