YIANNIS MORALIS

(1916-2009)

Grande érotique

Footnotes

Provenance
V. Fotopoulos collection, Athens.
Private collection.

Exhibitions
Athens, Benaki Museum, I. Moralis, Angels, Music, Poetry, October 24 - November 30, 2001, no. 314 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, p. 241).

Literature
Aiginea magazine, no. 7, January-February 2003, p. 43 (illustrated).


Glowing like a classical statue brought to light in a Greek garden, Moralis's male nude imparts a sense of Doric dignity and Ionian elegance. Slender, stylishly elongated, with gentle forms, serene expression, fluid lines, and graceful pose, he bears testimony to the artist's personal reinterpretation of the classical.

Balancing his formal vocabulary on a human scale, Moralis revives an archetypal universe of serene and ideal rhythms. His vision is guided by the values of classical sculpture, which sought the essence of things, stripping away details and uncovering the purest ideal of the human body and the perfect balance between flesh, spirit, and intellect. While the artists of the East tried to find truth by distancing themselves from the physical world and delving into the mystical, the Greeks studied the real and the natural in their search for truth and wisdom.1 In its yearning for the essential and dependence on ideal rhythms, harmony, and beauty, classical Greek art became a timeless manifestation of an era that sought to conceive a world as much Greek as universal.

The classical male nude, at once ideal and erotic, has provided a pattern of perfection for the Western imagination since the Renaissance.2 As noted by feminist art historian M. Walters, "the history of Greek art is often told in terms of its evolving naturalism. For the first time in human history, the body escapes the bonds of archaic abstraction and comes to life. Sculpture and vase painting show an ever-increasing understanding of the structure of the body, and ease and subtlety in suggesting movement. And 'the laboratory in which the Greeks worked out their naturalistic art was the standing male nude.'3 It is the male body that is observed in such close and loving detail."4

True to his classical Greek heritage, Moralis has always been committed to transforming the human figure into a monumental form. At no time in his career has he been attracted by the idea of capturing the fleeting instant; never do we find a reflected glint giving a momentary glow to the colour, nor are the bodies and objects ever lit by the light of day. Instead, his figures are imbued with their own light, the same eternal light of Byzantine art which does not derive from a specific source but emanates from within.5 As noted by C. Christou, "Moralis's paintings are at once erotic, profoundly sentimental and poetic. In them one may trace a progress from earthly to heavenly love, from the sensual aspects of the subject to the universal and eternal, to the metaphysical and transcendental."6

In his Le Grand Erotique, by ingeniously placing his ancient-statue-like youth against a golden background that resembles the mesmerizing mosaics of Byzantine art, Moralis underlines the continuity of the Hellenic spirit through the ages.

1. See N. Cage, "Introduction" in The Greek Miracle, Classical Sculpture from the Dawn of Democracy, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1993, pp. 17-20.
2. See K. Clark, The Nude: a Study in Ideal Form, London 1960.
3. G. Richter, Kouroi, London and New York, 1970, p. 4.
4. M. Walters, The Nude Male, a New Perspective, Paddington Prees, New York and London, 1978, p. 35.
5. See M. Chatzidakis, "Yannis Moralis", Zygos magazine, no. 80, July 1962, p. 6; M. Chatzidakis, "Yiannis Moralis", The Charioteer Review, vol. 1, no. 1, Summer 1960, pp. 56-62.
6. C. Christou, Moralis, Adam editions, Athens 1993, pp. 20, 33, 34.