Georgios Bouzianis

(Greek, 1885-1959)

Frau mit Lederarmhandschuhe

Footnotes

The work is included in the archives of the Busianis estate.
We are grateful to Gerard Busianis for his assistance in authenticating this lot.

Invested with watercolour's sense of immediacy and painted with stark directness, Woman with gloves conveys intense and insightful impressions without losing its pictorial coherence. The frontality of the portrait, set against a barren background and bathed in golden light, is akin to the perception governing icon painting and endows it with a symbolic dimension, as if it were the image of a modern saint.

Here, the element of distortion, a defining trait which usually plays a dramatic role in expressionism, is kept on a tight rein. The artist avoids sentimentality or any theatrical device which might charge his forms with too obvious a pitch of heightened emotion. There are no grotesque excesses, no falsification of the subject's essential integrity. Yet, this work of unforced clarity is full of strong feeling, disciplined by artistic intelligence and subordinate to aesthetic demands.¹ As noted by painter C. Botsoglou, "Bouzianis's work does not derive from the expressiveness of faces and bodies, a fact that differentiates him from the mainstream of German Expressionism. His figures are emotionless, showing no facial contortions. The expressive thrust of this type of painting relies exclusively on pictorial means."<sup>2

1</sup> See G. Mourelos, preface to Bouzianis-Watercolours, exhibition catalogue, Greek-American Union, Athens, February 1965.
² C. Botsoglou, "Reflections on the Work of G. Bouzianis - A Confession" [in Greek], Anti journal, no.302, 25.10.1985.