Georgios Bouzianis

(Greek, 1885-1959)

Femme nue au chapeau rouge

Footnotes

Provenance
The artist's estate.

Exposition
Brussels, Centre Culturel Mutualiste, Europalia 82, Giorgos Bouzianis, retrospective exhibition, September 1982.

Littérature
D. Deliyannis, Yorgos Bouzianis 1885-1959, Adam editions, Athens 1996, no. 191, p. 290 (catalogued), 140 (illustrated).

"Bouzianis expressed a sensual joy in colour and form and a profound love for humanity which at first reminds one of the great Renoir. Whilst one can see the influence of the German expressionists, especially of Kokoschka and Jawlensky, Bouzianis was gentler and more compassionate. Most of his paintings are of single form, usually a partly clothed woman.
In his draughtsmanship and handling of form he reveals his German inheritance. His colours, however, are entirely non-Teutonic. They sing their lovely gay hues, and it is a Mediterranean, Grecian song, full of sun and golden light. There is also a less easily defined pathos in the colour, for all its glowing beauty. In this mingling of joy and sadness, of sensuality, of movement and form, Bouzianis is a richly rewarding and complex artistic personality."
Charles S. Spencer, Studio magazine, London, 1960.¹

The nude woman in red hat, with her voluminous limbs and corporeal presence, fills the surface of the painting with a statuesque calm, generating tension between bodily volume and pictorial space in the vein of Picasso's 'classic phase', where the artist's predilection for plastic volumes in the treatment of the human figure was revived by his exposure to Greco-Roman sculpture. As keenly noted by Y. Tsarouchis, "there is something classical in the works of Bouzianis, because for a Greek the classical is a natural state of mind."² Elaborating on this remark, Y. Psychopedis notes: "Though he had assimilated the radical extremities of expressionism, Bouzianis transformed their pronounced gothic metaphysics to a discourse regarding the living human subject. His figures are tied to reality; they are not alienated as formless matter neither lose their identity becoming abstract, archetypal forms or nightmarish masks... His work emanates a nostalgia for the classical, a nostalgia for a lost and constantly sought balance."³

A modern-day incarnation of eternal Venus or archetypal Eve, this starkly represented kore emerging from a shimmering ground of greens and purples becomes both a reflection of the sitter's inner life and the artist's intense response to the subject. Treated in a frank and direct manner and rendered explicitly in all its glory, the female nude—one of Bouzianis's favourite subjects after 1926—reflects the artist's firm belief that art should be a vehicle for emotional states rather than a process of beautification. Leaving clear traces of a vigorous painting process, the picture pulsates with strong feeling and crackling energy, yet is continuously subordinated to aesthetic demands and disciplined by artistic intelligence. This inexhaustible vitality and incessant pulsating rhythm animate every part of the canvas, making it look like a vibrating star bathed in its own light.<sup>4

1</sup>C.S. Spencer, "George Bousianis", Studio magazine, London, vol. 159, no. 806, June 1960, p. 206.
² Y. Tsarouchis, preface to Bouzianis-Watercolours [in Greek], Agra-The Friends of Bouzianis edition, Athens 1982, p. 12.
³ Y. Psychopedis, "The Militant Introversion, Expressive Lyricism and Critical Spirit in the Work of Bouzianis" [in Greek] in Nostos, Kedros editions, Athens 2009, pp. 228-229.
⁴ See G. Mourelos, "Bouzianis's Technique" [in Greek], Kathimerini daily, Epta Imeres, October 27, 1996, p. 28.