AuctionPublicity.com - A number of amazing pictures by some of Greeces greatest artists will be auctioned at Bonhams next Greek Sale on December 13 in New Bond Street.

Perhaps the single most powerful evocation of landscape in the sale is lot 62, titled Landscape, painted by Constantinos Maleas (1879-1928), circa 1914-1917. This 65.5 x 90 cm oil on canvas is estimated to sell for £150,000-200,000. Landscape, perhaps more than any other painting by Maleas, begs comparison to Claude Monets famous Norman seascapes. The picture was exhibited at the National Gallery and Alexander Soutzos Museum in Athens. The large-scale format clearly indicates the importance Maleas attached to Landscape.

A masterpiece of landscape painting, this extraordinary canvas of faultless technique and thorough understanding of colourist principles and nature’s geometry, shows Maleas coming as close as any leading European artist to the breakthroughs of the 19th century French avant-garde. Rich in form and strong in colour it is one of the most advanced 20th century Greek paintings in private hands and the largest of Maleas’ works ever to appear in the auction market.

Setting his easel outdoors, Maleas was able to retain the freshness of execution and fidelity to nature’s effects, aiming not only to record a specific location but to investigate and solve pictorial issues beyond the mere treatment of his subject.

In Paris, where he studied under Henri Martin, Maleas became familiar with the groundbreaking work of the leading impressionists, whose exploding canvases were a stark contrast to the more conservative style of his teacher. He was particularly overwhelmed by the work of Monet, who exerted a profound and life-long influence on his work. “For Maleas, Monet stands for what Martin was unable to offer him: the conviction that a work of art shouldn’t rely exclusively on art school formulas and artistic endeavour shouldn’t be indispensably preconditioned by public acceptance.”

Unanimously acknowledged as the greatest visual poet of the Greek landscape and one of the most important figures in Modern Greek art, Maleas was perfectly at home with the work of Cezanne, fauvism and expressionism, drawing from their underlying artistic premises rather than uncritically adopting their formal vocabulary.

Lot 143 by Alecos Fassianos (Greek, born 1935) “The messenger” signed and titled in Greek and dated 1981 oil and golden leaf on canvas 250 x 360 cm. Estimate £80,000-120,000.

A masterpiece of Fassianos’s mature period painted at the height of his creative powers, The Messenger is the most significant work by the painter ever to appear on the auction market. Monumental in scale, magnificent in its simple grandeur and utterly characteristic in style and sentiment, this striking canvas is a tour de force that encompasses all the defining elements of Fassianos’s unique expressive language and confirms his position as one of the great masters of postwar Greek art.

Captured in sharp profile, displaying typical ancient Greek features and set against a solid silvery background that accentuates his heroic scale, the common horseback rider is remoulded into an archetypal figure echoing the timeless symbolism of the ancient Greek vase iconography

Fassianos said: “I simply paint whatever touches me, whatever I feel about life. Golden riders who now live only in our dreams.” According to Koichi Tanikawa, one of Japan’s most vibrant artists, Fassianos’s appeal lies in the fact that his work makes one imagine a life with warm, southern sunshine, a carefree, leisurely pleasure, and the bliss of being satisfied with oneself. And these are the effects also found in Picasso at Antibes, Bonnard at Le Cannet, and Dufy in Nice.

Lot 89 Constantinos Parthenis (Greek, 1878-1967), Orpheus and Eurydice, oil on canvas 100 x 150 cm is estimated to achieve £120,000-180,000

This remarkable mythological composition is set in an imaginary arcadia inhabited by idealised figures and abbreviated shapes translated into evocative symbols.

The work opens with winged Orpheus playing his lyre, while his beloved wife Eurydice, barely defined in the middle of the picture, reclines diagonally from left to right. The two figures seem enraptured by the divine melody, while the trees framing the composition look as if they are dancing, following the sound of music and irresistibly submitting to the hero’s quasi-magical powers. Their melodious curvilinear forms, echoing the graceful lines of the two lovers, are juxtaposed by the vertical motifs of the ancient temple and the slender cypresses, accentuating the picture’s overall feel of spiritual and moral uplift.

Posted: 10|31|07 at 11:49 am. Filed under: Press Release.