Konstantinos Maleas

Private Collection, Athens

The present work was very likely painted during Maleas' visit to Naxos in 1920. According to Antonis Kotidis at this time, `The material character of colour, with marks of his gesture, was abandoned. On the contrary, tonality was adequately strengthened. Then the prime, brilliant colours were placed in a flat, "dry" manner on pasteboard or wood. This was by now a Mediterranean form of painting where flat depiction and the abolition of atmospheric perspective in combination with the vivid colours played the main role. During this period his one and only subject, landscape, underwent a broadening that transformed it into a thematic framework: the symbolist, pantheistic character of his compositions through the anthropomorphic elements of the landscape and their compositional remouldings make his figurative ambiguity all the more manifest. Similar elements of symbolist distortion had already formed a tradition in the works of Van Gogh, Matisse, Lacombe, and Hodler while they were also used during the same period by Parthenis and towards the end of the Twenties, by Papaloukas' (Antonis Kotidis, '20th Century - The First Thirty Years', in Marina Lambraki-Plaka, ed., Four Centuries of Greek Painting, Athens, 1999, p. 123).