Michalis Economou

(Greek, 1888-1933)

Maisons et bateaux

Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, Athens.
Bonhams London, The Greek Sale, 9 April 2014, lot 7.
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner.

Littérature
A.Kouria, Michalis Economou, Adam editions, Athens 2001, no 132, p. 106 (illustrated), p.180 (illustrated), p.257 (listed).
Chrysanthos Christou, Greek Art – Paintings of the 20th Century, Ekdotiki Athinon, Athens 1996, p. 53 (illustrated).

An idyllic landscape of seaside adobe dwellings and moored boats peacefully floating in shallow waters is surrendered to the artist's subjective interpretation, demonstrating Economou's capacity to distil a mood of tenderness and poetry from an ordinary subject and transform it into a vision of 'humble monumentality'.

Although the adobe structures, designed as monolithic cubes carved from solid volume, have a sculptural quality that articulates a sense of stability and permanence, the whole image generates an atmosphere more like a distant recollection than an actual sense experience. This poetic mood introduced by the water reflections in the foreground and heightened by the dark volumes of the two boats that lead the viewer's eye to the centre of the composition¹, is further accentuated by an ambivalent sense of presence/absence where the human form is suggested rather than actually depicted.

¹ For a discussion of the boat motif in Economou's work, see A. Kouria, Michalis Economou, Fifty Years from his Death [in Greek], Zygos magazine, no. 56, November-December 1982, p. 15.