Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika

(Greek, 1906-1994)

Family afternoon 23 x 18 cm.

Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, Athens.

Exhibited
Athens, The British Council, Pictures by Ghika, November 15-25, 1946, no. 33 (listed in the exhibition catalogue).

Literature
Angloelliniki Epitheorisi, vol. 2, no. 11, January 1947, p. 363 (discussed).
K.C. Valkana, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, His Painting Oeuvre, Benaki Museum edition, Athens 2011, fig. 140, p. 281 (illustrated).

Triggering opposing pairs, such as interior-exterior and naturalistic-abstract, Family afternoon is a well thought out, tightly designed and dynamically balanced composition that draws from indigenous sources and contemporary genre to explore the complex issue of Greekness. Prefacing the catalogue for the artist's 1946 one man show at the British Council in Athens, which included this lot, art critic Derek Patmore noted: "Ghika is the most remarkable of the younger Greek painters. Each of his pictures is the result of a long meditation and a carefully evolved technique. Essentially an intellectual, his use of line, form, and colour has a carefully built-up design which gives his work a unique intensity of colour and the visual pleasure of a perfectly conceived work of art."

The 1946 exhibition catalogue was also prefaced by poet Kimon Friar, who elaborated on the idea of Ghika as composer, discussing his works in terms of music and rhythm: "Ghika's paintings are all examples of the artist's control over his medium and his meaning, and they are all witnesses of that triple counter-pointing of the verb "compose": they are a designer's compositions in line, colour and space; they are the work of a musical composer; and their final resolution is a composure which the classical artist imposes on the recalcitrant materials of life to create a cosmos for which we all long and dream but which only the artist may invoke."