Spyros Papaloukas, Coffeehouse at Mytilini, 1929, oil on linen cloth, 100 × 121 cm

Spyros Papaloukas was born in Desfina in 1892. He studied at the ASKT (School of Fine Arts in Athens) and continued his studies on a scholarship in Paris. Returning to Greece he accompanied the Greek army to the Aegean shores of Turkey as a war painter of the campaign. The entire body of artworks from that period was lost on the train that transported them to Athens when it toppled in Izmir. In Athens he continued his painting while at the same time getting involved with religious painting. Amfissa’s cathedral is his most significant artwork. Together with the author Stratis Doukas, Nikos Hatjikyriakos Ghikas, Dimitris Pikionis, and the director Socrates Karantinos he edited the magazine The Third Eye. He worked as artistic consultant for the civil service of the Ministry of Administration and in 1940 he became director of The Municipal Gallery. He was also a professor at the Sivitanidios School, at the Industrial School, at the School of Architecture, and for a short time at ASKT. He died in Athens in 1957.

The retrospective exhibition is being presented at the Vassilis Theocharakis Foundation. A gift of Papaloukas’ daughter to her father’s student of five years enables the foundation to have the greatest part of the painter’s work in its possession. The works are exhibited in conceptual units on the three floors of the foundation and are accompanied by captions relevant to comments by the painter. The exhibition was curated by the art historian Takis Mavrotas who also prepared the catalogue. I found the exhibition space small and non-functional for the number of works on view and I would have preferred their presentation in two parts in order to become more clearly defined. I also disagreed with the use of similar gold frames and glass for most of the works. It would have been better if the framed works remained the way they were — even if some of the frames were in bad condition — and if special care was provided to each of the rest. However, it is important that the works are well conserved and that at last we have access now to the whole of the painter’s work.

From his earliest works — those that we are used to calling student works — Papaloukas was serious. With enviable draftsmanship, insuperable accuracy of colour and consciousness, artistic instinct in relation to what is meant by model study after the impressionists; his early works are the first masterpieces of one of the most important European painters of the twentieth century for the breadth of his plastic solutions to the better or lesser known problems of painting regarding figurative representation and because nowhere in these or later works are there signs of self-complacency. The artworks are — as early as his student years — shocking due to the directness and the unrivalled acumen of the young Papaloukas. These characteristics would never to abandon him.

The end of its adventure in Asia Minor finds Greece defeated and Papaloukas back in Athens again — I suppose deeply hurt by the historical crisis. However … the artist turned his attention to the wounded country where he saw and painted light that does not create high contrasts and dramatic shading. Light that not only does not cast shadows but rather illuminates the light and dark of the landscape. Papaloukas was to give meta-representational versions to places that no one had ever perceived before in that dimension — even though there is a deep artistic relationship with Maleas, Economou, and Lytras. Striking versions of places without preconceived ideas (Papaloukas never painted with fixed ideas), places that appear perpetual through his vision.

In other words, Greek places; locations from the painter’s homeland which he looked at as if seeing them for the first time — with his only motivation being the need to look at them and with the only outcome being a wealth of paintings that are always infused by a universal light. Papaloukas sees without theatricality (compare, for example, how Papaloukas uses the paper’s ochre color with the way Tsarouchis does the same), without the frivolity and byzantinism in which other painters of this period took pleasure, without traces of boasting. He sees places that he loves, he sees the faces of familiar people, he sees himself. And because he sees he does not need either to conceptualise (except, perhaps, in the case of his early works) or to flatter the wounded selfishness of those with ideas of grandeur and to pretend to be virginal before the pose regarding a pure Greek culture — even when he paints Amfissa’s cathedral he does whatever he thinks is right and, in this respect, he is unique.

Art historians are probably better suited to finding and telling us by whom he was influenced, who he met and who he spent time with. Nevertheless, it is interesting that, contrary to other artists (such as Diamantopoulos, Economou, Bouzianis), Papaloukas was not marginalised from his generation and society. As we saw in his biography he taught at many schools for a very long time and played an active role in the artistic life of Athens. But the whole of his work does not embrace the dominant conservative modernism of his generation. His work defends the attempt of a man to paint, not to argue or to convince anyone of the correctness of his sayings, since by painting he understands and is understood. And therein lies his importance.


Ilias Papailiakis is an artist.

Translated by Evangelia Ledaki.