Yiannis Tsarouchis

Tsarouchis' example of the modern Greek artist, drawing from the rich artistic legacy, indigenous cultural practices, and the teachings of older artists, is an important factor in the comprehension of his canon, as well as the evolution of modern Greek painting. Tsarouchis' work can be seen as embracing native Hellenistic sources while being influenced by avant-garde European trends, accomplished through his travels to Constantinople and Smyrna, and his studies in Paris and in Greece. Meeting Matisse, Laurens and Giacometti in Paris and being under the tutelage of Jakobides, Kefallinos and Parthenis at the Athens School of Fine Arts would prove formative in the scope of Tsarouchis' themes and aesthetic, as would his schooling in Byzantine painting and music under Fotis Kontoglou. As part of the so-called 'Thirties Generation,' Tsarouchis '... drew from Greek and Eastern Mediterranean historio-artistic precedents, 'from Classical vase-painting, Hellenistic portraiture and Byzantine icon-painting, to the folk art of the post-Byzantine era and the Karaghiozi shadow-puppet pictorial conventions' (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. 61). 

In Still Life of blue Irises and Fruit, the sketchy quality of the oil, as well as the flatness of the picture plane, are reminiscent of the work of Matisse, which in turn drew from naïve subjects and works from antiquity. Each brushstroke reduces the details of a petal or a leaf and sprays of delicate flowers into evocative forms, inducing the essence of the object without extraneous visual explanation.