Constantinos Parthenis

(Greek, 1878-1967)

Double Axes 125 x 40 cm each.

Footnotes

Both artworks bear the artist's son signature on the reverse and the date 26/7 on the stretcher.

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

Literature
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, pp. 748-749 (discussed).
E. Mathiopoulos, The Life and Work of Costis Parthenis, K. Adam editions, Athens 2008, no. 289, pp. 427-428 (catalogued), p. 344 (illustrated).
Mnimon magazine, no. 31, 2010, p. 221 (mentioned).


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

A potent motif that harks back to the dawn of the Greek civilisation, the double axe² was an important sacred symbol in Minoan Crete, accompanying female goddesses and symbolising the supernatural origins of creation. Parthenis is perhaps the first Modern Greek artist to draw from prehistoric art, adopting elements from Minoan and Mycenaean seal engraving, which often features the double-axe motif. In the late 1930s, when Parthenis painted his double axes for the Athens Municipal Hall, this age-old motif was used as a state symbol of power and strength, and an emblem of both secular/regal and religious/divine authority, denoting the timeless might and grandeur of the Greek world.<sup>3

1</sup> 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 Two charcoal and pencil drawings in the collection of the National Gallery - Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Athens (nos. 7764, 7840).
³ See T. Sotiriou, "At the Cool Sources of Primal Art" [in Greek], Mnimon magazine, no. 31, 2010, p. 221; Y. Hamilakis, The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology and National Imagination in Greece, Oxford, 2007, p. 179.