Diamantis Diamantopoulos

Through the imagery of the menial labourer, one of his most idiosyncratic and celebrated subjects, Diamandopoulos expressed his intense dissatisfaction with the socio-political situation of Greece. He developed a personal expressive idiom using subjects taken from everyday life, depicted in a manner inspired by realism and cubism, and like Tsarouchis, focused almost exclusively on the human form.

Diamandopoulos' focus centred on man involved in toil, and he thus repeatedly depicted workers in action, as in the present work. Impoverished for most of his life, he worked in a variety of different occupations in order to survive, but never stopped painting; his choice of unskilled labourers as subjects of his works was thus imbued with familiarity and very personal. The expressive force of works such as Workers was achieved by a combination of stylisation and primitivism, modelled yet simplified features, which are typical of Diamandopoulos' mature works.  

Diamandopoulos was an integral member of the Thirties Generation, a term coined for those artists who lived and worked in Greece between the two World Wars. This group of artists was preoccupied both with the assimilation of diverse artistic currents, and the formulation of an independent Greek cultural identity.

From 1950 onwards Diamandopoulos disappeared from the Greek artistic scene. His wartime activity with the resistance made him a persona non grata in a period of right-wing political oppression in Greece, and he made a living working as a teacher, painting in isolation in his spare time. It was not until the 1970s that Diamandopoulos reappeared on the Athens art scene. His retrospective at the National Picture Gallery, Athens in 1978, in which the present work was included, was highly acclaimed by the critics, and established him as a leading figure on the contemporary scene.