1980s Original Large Poster, Offset Print, Theophilos, The Beautiful Adriana of Athens
150.00€
The Beautiful Adriana of Athens is playing her guitar, seated underneath a cherry tree laden with fruit, in a garden adorned with plants in bloom in which a peacock goes about. Adriana’s hair is loose, and she is wearing beautiful, colorful clothes. The scene is enclosed in a painted red frame. There are some drawing mistakes, yet the qualities that made critics and painters consider Theophilos a modern artist are here to admire. The folk painter rejects the third dimension, just like modern painters. The image develops without perspective, on the surface. Note for instance how each flower pot is painted one behind the other. The most distant pot is simply placed higher up. Not smaller, neither rendered in perspective. The clear outlines define the boundaries of color.
Theophilos’ treatment of color is admirable. Every color is vivid and kept within the same dense tone. It is this that gives the surface its unity. The ocher on the ground and the girl’s blouse, tinged with red shades, the blue skirt, the light blue socks with blue shades, the blue sky, all create a lush harmony enchanting the viewer.
Description
Original 1980s Large Poster
Offset Print from Oil on Canvas
of Greek Artist
Theophilos
The Beautiful Adriana of Athens
Language: Greek / English
Dimension: 50 cm x 100cm
National Gallery and Alexandros Soutzos Museum Athens, Greece
Theophilos Chatzimichail (Greek: Θεόφιλος Χατζημιχαήλ or Θεόφιλος Κεφαλάς – Theophilos Kephalas;
1870 – 1934), known simply as Theophilos, was a Greek folk painter and major contributor in modern Greek art. The main subject of his works are Greek characters and the illustration of Greek traditional folklore and history.
From a humble Lesbiote family, he showed an inclination for painting at a very early age. He left the island in 1883 and settled in Smyrna until 1897 when he returned with the aim of enlisting as a volunteer at the front of the Greek-Turkish war. Not being able to return to Turkish-occupied Smyrna, he remained in Thessaly, and specifically Volos, and the villages of Pelion, where he decorated shops, cafes and inns with paintings, but without being accepted by the residents of the area because of his eccentric behavior and appearance. In 1927, Theophilos returned to his birthplace in disappointment where he continued to work until his death. A few years earlier, the art critic Stratis Eleftheriadis, known in the artistic circles of Paris as Teriade, at the recommendation of Fotis Kontoglou and Georgios Gounaropoulos, arranged a meeting with Theophilos and ordered works from him for an exhibition in Paris. The exhibition was at last presented in 1936. In 1965 the Theophilos Museum was opened in Vareia, a gift of Teriade.
In Theophilos’ works — wall paintings, painting on objects or cloth — his world is caught with the ingenuousness and innocence, but also the freshness, of folk painting, a world equally of gods, heroes and everyday human beings, which coexists with elements and images from familiar reality and landscape.
Additional information
| Languages | Greek |
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