Constantinos Parthenis

(Greek, 1878-1967)

Harmony 125 x 50 cm.

Footnotes

The artwork bears 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
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).
A. Kafetsi, Drawings by Constantinos Parthenis in the National Gallery, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery - Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Athens 1989, p. 58 (mentioned).
E. Mathiopoulos, The Life and Work of Costis Parthenis, K. Adam editions, Athens 2008, no. 283, 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.

Harmony² is personified by a young woman in a knee-length dress and pleated cape standing on a short pedestal like an ancient Greek kore and playing the violin against a starry night sky. Her body posture and overall compositional design echo Maurice Denis's La Damoiselle élue, a 1892 work inspired by the namesake cantata by Claude Debussy and based on a text by Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti.³ Once in close contact with symbolist circles, Parthenis was thoroughly familiar with the work of Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon and, especially, Maurice Denis, who sought to reinvest art with a deeper, more spiritual meaning. The idealistic atmosphere of the French painter's works, and the highly stylised rendering of the human figure, had a strong impact on Parthenis throughout his career.

In this evocative setting, the young violin⁴ player takes on an allegorical meaning, identified with the idea of music as a symbol of universal order, harmony and peace. As noted by Z. Papantoniou, "by dematerialising form and giving shape to ideas, Parthenis creates a musical quality; in other words he lifts painting to the realm of music, the most immaterial of all arts.⁵ Parthenis himself was an ardent lover of classical music and, accompanied by his wife, he often attended Sunday concerts and recitals by great performers at the Municipal Theatre, the Olympia and the Kentrikon music halls.<sup>6


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 A pencil drawing in the collection of the National Gallery - Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Athens (no. 7843).
³ See A. Kafetsi, Drawings by Constantinos Parthenis in the National Gallery [in Greek], exhibition catalogue, National Gallery - Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Athens 1989, p. 66.
⁴ Compare Dawn (Aurora), Bonhams Greek Sale, May 19, 2009, lot 29, and Still life with violin, Bonhams, Greek Sale, December 12, 2006, lot 85.
⁵ Z. Papantoniou, "The Art of Parthenis" [in Greek], Patris daily, January 19, 1920.
⁶ K. Iliadis, The World of Art in the Period Between the Wars [in Greek], Athens 1978, p. 101.