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Greek, 1902-1985
Strymon
oil on wood
signed and dated 66 lower left
titled with a label on reverse
76 x 160 cm
Provenance
private collection, Greece
Note
This is 1 of the 12 depictions of rivers commissioned to decorate a pavilion of the International Exhibition of Salonica.
Spyros Vassiliou is one of the most popular Greek artists of the 20th century, a student of N. Lytras, a follower of Kontoglou and an admirer of Flemish art, he painted subjects and faces of familiar daily life in the midst of an ever-changing Athens and Greece.
An old house turning into a building site of the "modernized" Athens, furniture of another era being destroyed, the old habits that were disappearing, all this fascination with the commonplace which recalls images of Flemish art, were figures scattered on his canvases.
He is the artist who turned the visual ethography into a unique urban genre, incorporating the problems and worries of the modern era. This is the reason why he became "papa-Spyros", the artist who recorded in our memory the fading images of the humble, the trivial every-day objects that were dying, as Greece was becoming westernized.
In 1930, he was commissioned to decorate the church of St. Dionysios Areopagitis, patron saint of Athens, a project that was often criticized for the introduction of secular elements in religious art. In the 1960s and 1970s he was the most prolific artist in Greece.
An old house turning into a building site of the "modernized" Athens, furniture of another era being destroyed, the old habits that were disappearing, all this fascination with the commonplace which recalls images of Flemish art, were figures scattered on his canvases.
He is the artist who turned the visual ethography into a unique urban genre, incorporating the problems and worries of the modern era. This is the reason why he became "papa-Spyros", the artist who recorded in our memory the fading images of the humble, the trivial every-day objects that were dying, as Greece was becoming westernized.
In 1930, he was commissioned to decorate the church of St. Dionysios Areopagitis, patron saint of Athens, a project that was often criticized for the introduction of secular elements in religious art. In the 1960s and 1970s he was the most prolific artist in Greece.
