Georgios Bouzianis

Dimitris Deligiannis, Bouzianis, Athens, 1996, p. 138, no. 176, illustrated

The frenzied brushwork and discordant lines of Girl with Hat have a psychographic quality, through which '... the summarised representation of the object, its suggestive content and quick execution became the means for a spontaneous expression, and the pure colour previously used for representation of the natural light was transformed into an expressive dynamic medium' (Dimitris Papastamos, Painting 1930-40, Athens, 1981, p. 191).

The immediacy that Bouzianis learnt to capture in interacting with German Impressionists such as Max Liebermann is invested with an acute emotional content, making his portraits an expression of the artist's state of being while placing the sitter within the realm of subjective interpretation.

After studying at the Munich Academy under Otto Seitz and Max Liebermann, Bouzianis became associated with the two dominant groups of German Expressionist painters: Die Brücke, which counted among its members Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde, and Der Blaue Reiter, led by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. These painters explored the passage to a more spiritual existence and the expression of human experience in the light of what they perceived as an encroaching destructive industrial civilisation.