Nicos Hadjikiriakos-Ghika

Lefèvre Gallery, London
Private Collection, Paris (purchased from the above); thence by descent to the present owner

By the 1920s European Modernism had opened up a huge variety of aesthetic directions. For Ghika, however, it was the synthetic Cubism of Picasso and Braque that proved decisive. Here he recognised the same principles that underlay the Byzantine art that he cherished: "strictness, the geometric, hierarchy" (quoted in Marina Lambraki-Plaka, ed., Four Centuries of Greek Painting, Athens, 1999, p. 139). Upon this correspondence he built a uniquely Hellenic form of Cubism that fused traditional Greek heritage with Parisian avant-garde, as exemplified by the present work. Painted in white, black and brown the houses stand out against the warm brown landscape and blue sky. By confusing the reading of space the painting takes on the role of pure representation: the analysis and synthesis of the observer's view of objects in space.

Ghika left Greece in 1922, enrolling at the Sorbonne and later the Ranson Academy in Paris. In France he participated in the Salon des Independants, and from 1930-1934 took part in the Salon des Surindependants.