Constantinos Parthenis

(Greek, 1878-1967)

Prosperity 125 x 50 cm.

Footnotes

The artwork bears the artist's son signature on the reverse and the date 26/7 /67 on the stretcher.

Provenance
N. Parthenis collection, Athens.
Private collection, Athens.

Literature
L'Art Contemporain et le Monde Grec, Actes du XVIIIe Congres de l'Association Internationale des Critiques d'Art (AICA), Athens 1984, p. 151 (mentioned).
A. Kotidis, On Parthenis, University Studio Press, Thessaloniki 1984, p. 36 (mentioned).
E. Matthiopoulos, Greece's Participation in the Venice Biennale, 1943-1940, doctoral dissertation, University of Crete, Rethymno 1996, vol. 3, p. 748 (mentioned).
E. Mathiopoulos, The Life and Work of Costis Parthenis, K. Adam editions, Athens 2008, no. 285, p. 427 (catalogued), p. 343 (illustrated).

In 1939, the Minister-Governor of Athens Kostas Kotzias and Mayor Ambrosios Plytas, wishing to complete the City Hall's decoration program, decided to commission the great Parthenis to decorate the spacious southwest room on the first floor. The painter negotiated and agreed to be paid 800,000 drachmas—a huge amount for the time. Following a vote by the city council, the contract was signed on April 18, 1940, providing a period of twenty months for the delivery of twelve independent canvases. While Parthenis kept his end of the agreement, the Municipality of Athens, due to the outbreak of the Greek-Italian war and the German occupation that followed, was unable to honour the contract. After the war, in the early 1950s, the Municipality of Athens, under Mayor Kostas Kotzias, showed a renewed interest in acquiring the canvases at the cost agreed before the war. However, especially after the dramatic devaluation of the drachma on April 9, 1953, the agreed upon amount had lost almost all of its real value. Parthenis saw the proposed deal as a mockery of his work and turned it down without hesitation. As a result, the works remained in his workshop and out of public view until the artist's passing in 1967.¹

Translated into evocative symbols, these highly idealised and allegorical works are absorbed in a world purified of any kind of brutality, a world that soars loftily in the heights of ideals, while their sensitive lines, translucent colours and abstractive formal vocabulary endow them with a highly poetic and spiritual content. Through a sophisticated formulation of style, which fully utilised the entire Greek aesthetic tradition while reading elegantly like a piece of undiscovered mythology, Parthenis managed to create a work of visual poetry, a world as much Greek as universal.

Engulfed in melodic curvilinear forms and absorbed in a world of pure form, the elegant personification of Prosperity² introduces a "dialogue" between the present, as indicated by the modern-day architectural structure in the lower left, and the past, as suggested by the Ionic column in the upper right; between the ephemeral, represented by the perishable fruit in the tray, and the eternal, symbolised by the ancient Greek heritage.

Here, all compositional elements are rendered by means of the painter's distinct formal vocabulary, while the limited palette, the dilute and translucent application of paint and the dematerialised quality of the objects create a suggestive atmosphere of elegance and diffuse idealism. Furthermore, Parthenis' austere, delicate line, which echoes the simplicity of ancient Greek vase painting, does not frame or confine but rather supports with straight and curvilinear forms the basic compositional structure. These elements, drawn not only from ancient sources but also from Byzantine art, European symbolism, Art Nouveau, the Jugendstil and Cubism, while preserving a distinctive Greek character, formulate an eclectic artistic language that claims the eye and provokes the viewer's emotional and spiritual participation.

¹ See E. Mathiopoulos, The Life and Work of Costis Parthenis [in Greek], K. Adam editions, Athens 2008, pp. 91, 97-98; A. Kotidis, On Parthenis [in Greek], University Studio Press, Thessaloniki 1984, pp. 21-22; A. Kotidis, "The Dialectic of Power in the Case of Costis Parthenis" [in Greek] in Constantinos Parthenis (1878-1967), exhibition catalogue, Vafopouleio Cultural Centre, Thessaloniki 1984, p. 43; A. Kotidis, "The Influence of Hellenic Art in the Work of C. Parthenis", L'Art Contemporain et le Monde Grec, Actes du XVIIIe Congres de l'Association Internationale des Critiques d'Art (AICA), Athens 1984, p. 151.
² A pencil drawing in the collection of the National Gallery - Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Athens (no. 7844).