Nicos Hadjikiriakos-Ghika

In the present work, Ghika shows all of the articles for sale in a market stand  - all the elements of a toyshop and haberdashery, selling small articles for sewing and the seemingly trivial but important hardware needed for daily life. Ghika's needles, pins, buttons, wheelbarrow, bicycles, balls and awnings seem to almost slide off the canvas, a quintessential example of the artist's take on the traditional still life and genre scene. Devoid of human presence, the interplay of Ghika's distinctive angles further mechanises the scene, a suggestion of the complicated structures of every facet of modern life.

By the 1920s 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 trends, as exemplified by the present work. The objects in Haberdashery II, painted with a rich, bright palette, are defined by colour and the shadows cast by the overlapping forms. 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.