The works that make up this major exhibition event reveal the majesty of the painting of a "detached" and introverted artist, his expressive skill, his complete personal idiom and the creative assimilation of different influences.
Konstantinos Parthenis ran with his life and work in the late 19th century and completed his journey in the late 1960s in his house, which no longer exists, at the foot of the Acropolis. Alexandria, Vienna, Paris, Corfu, Athens, are the main stations of his work, which is not yet recorded in its scope, nor absolutely delimited in the history of art. An emblematic figure of domestic modernism, the great painter studied European culture in depth and creatively transformed elements from ancient Greek and Byzantine art, as well as from the Renaissance.
Efi Agathonikou, curator and director of collections of the National Gallery - Alexandros Soutsos Museum, spoke to Euronews about the uniqueness of the work, about the special mark it has left on modern Greek art:
"Konstantinos Parthenis was a visionary painter. From his first Viennese works to his last, although his style changes, we see that the element of vision remains constant. He is a painter who lived in the greatest art centers of Europe and studied European culture, not only of his time, but also of other periods. He transformed all these elements into a new art. He created a new vision, encompassing the entire history of art from antiquity to his own day. He is an artist who did not miss anything: he shared all currents of his time, drawing many elements from them for his own works, transforming them, according to his own needs and artistic pursuits. Virgo composes a new world. A dreamlike world, even when it followed geometric rules, cubism. Even then his work is dreamlike. That, in my opinion, is his characteristic. He is the one who brought modernism to Greece and at the same time taught what Greece means and how Greece can use all these elements of modernism to highlight what is called Greek art".
A Greek of the diaspora, cosmopolitan by origin and education, Parthenis shone in the Greek artistic scene in the first decades of the 20th century. Born in 1878 in the multicultural Alexandria of an Italian mother and a Greek father, multilingual, with a deep Greek education, with musical knowledge, he will complete his personality with artistic studies that are completely consistent with this origin: Rome, Vienna, Paris, three artistic centers with different orientations.
With his appointment to the School of Fine Arts in 1929, he changed the way art was taught and taught a new ethic for art education. His close friendships with intellectuals and politicians, as well as his views on the political upheavals of Greek history in the interwar period, are reflected in his career as well as in his work.
The painter was one of the first artists to impose the groundbreaking for his time views on modernism and put into practice his belief that the artist should have the recognition and support of the state. The tensions his presence caused among his colleagues and his courageous retreat to his home-workshop during the last thirty years of his life contributed to the creation of a mystique surrounding his often elusive painting.
He left behind an original and completely personal body of work, distinguished by its influences from modernism and symbolism, its constant transformations, its deep spirituality and its love of allegory: "The dominant element everywhere is color and line. Sometimes the color plays an important role, sometimes the line becomes too intense. The artist plays with color, dances with color and creates dreamy compositions. Many times they are even overwhelming. Because when the Virgin deals with religious matters, there is a rush. They are very different from his allegorical subjects, where there is an optimism. In the religious subjects there is an intense concentration, which is made more intense by the hard, geometric line he uses" points out Efi Agathonikou.
In his artistic career, he is often concerned with specific topics: "They are mainly topics related to Greek mythology. It is among them that we meet in the exhibition is Orpheus. It is Orpheus himself. He considers himself Orpheus. Hercules also preoccupies him. He is also very interested in Athanasios Diakos. Two of his most important compositions are dedicated to the hero of the Greek revolution. In the age of Parthenis, Athanasios Diakos had taken the form of the holy hero of the struggle. So the painter turned him into a Saint who has been exalted and has ascended to the heavens. It is becoming the symbol of freedom and of Greece" points out the curator and director of the collections of the National Gallery.
The monumental Apotheosis of Athanasios Diakos (1933), located on the second floor of the building, away from the rest of the retrospective exhibition due to transportation difficulties, confirms beyond the enormous talent of its creator, the deep spirituality and the power of his technique. As part of the retrospective exhibition, another, smaller Apotheosis of Athanasios Diakos, made before 1927, is presented from the private collection of Dimitris Maris, who bought the amazing work through an auction.
At the same time, the painter's precious notebook, where he takes handwritten notes in French, is on display for the first time. In it, his thoughts on Byzantine art and the aesthetics of painting unfold.
Marina Lambrakis – Plaka points out in her text in the catalog of the exhibition: "Parthenis occupies a special place in the collective unconscious of the average Greek. He is identified with a visionary Greece, which embraces a debased space, inhabited by its myth and history. The catalyst of the final alchemical state, which brings together and merges the peculiar eclecticism of the Alexandrian artist, and which ultimately constitutes the quintessence of his style, is an ideal upper homeland of myth, history and art, as seen by an educated Greek of dispersion from perspective distance. In exactly the same way that Cavafy saw and transformed in his poetry the history and myth of a philately idealist and timeless Greece with nostalgia, from afar. Because in reality Parthenis remained forever in voluntary self-exile and non-integrated, a citizen of his own utopian Greece".
The National Gallery is the custodian and owner of most of the works, drawings and documents of Konstantinos Parthenis. They mainly come from what he inherited from the painter's two children. For the first time, selections from the museum's collections are complemented by important works from private and public collections. They present with detail, clarity and simplicity the course and evolution of his painting work.
The exhibition "Konstantinos Parthenis. Painting an ideal Greece" outlines in detail the entire course and evolution of the distinguished Greek artist's work. It is hosted at the National Gallery until November 28, 2022.
Source:
https://gr.euronews.com/2022/06/29/i-oramatiki-zografiki-tou-konstantinou-partheni-anadromiki-ekthesi-sti-ethniki-pinakothiki?fs=e&s=cl&fbclid=IwAR2JFwbv5lv_X9cqPvVLmDXbqHdo8T4gMdey4Pq6rJalTHHdWplF2qyYmGM