Lot 15: * MICHALIS ECONOMOU (1888-1933) Fishing boats at sunset

* MICHALIS ECONOMOU (1888-1933)
Fishing boats at sunset
signed ‘M.Economou’ (lower right)
oil on board
70 x 98.5 cm.

Provenance
The Antonopoulos collection, Patras and Athens.
Thence by descent to the present owner’s private collection, Canada and United States.
We are grateful to Mrs Afroditi Kouria for her assistance in authenticating this lot.
An evocative work by Economou, a master of early 20th century Greek art, Fishing boats at sunset, possibly from the later phase of the artist’s career, beautifully depicts the peaceful floating of boats in shallow waters. Although the seascape is easily identified as such, the artist’s loose handling of paint, abbreviated curvilinear forms and lack of descriptive detail transform it into a highly poetic image. Here an atmosphere more like a distant, vague recollection than an actual sensory experience is generated to great effect.
Fishing boats at sunset prioritizes atmosphere and lyrical feeling above realistic depiction. The poetic mood that pervades is introduced by the water reflections in the foreground that lead the viewer’s eye to the centre of the composition,1 creating a suspension between real time and memory. “The landscape, no longer just a pictorial space, becomes an expressive-symbolic field recording the artist’s emotional and intellectual response to the stimuli offered by the natural environment.
Light, colour and line become the main vehicles of the artist’s feelings.
An ambivalent sense of presence/absence suffuses these silent images in a poetic ‘timescape’ where human presence is suggested rather than actually depicted.”2 This is achieved through the soft forms of the seascape features on the heavily worked surface, particularly in the boat and the sail. Note how the fisherman on the main boat is so integrated in the poetic atmosphere that he dissolves into his natural surroundings, partaking in the ethereal vagueness and lyrical uncertainty of space. Economou is interested in the spatial relationship between figure and surrounding space, and the pictorial unity of the figure and its environment. This need to unite figures and surroundings into a cohesive and meaningful whole -- a lifelong preoccupation of the artist -- dictates a uniform handling of energetic brushwork throughout the picture plan.
In 1927, D. Kokkinos noted that the works by Economou were true works of poetry, but so masterfully rendered that their significance as paintings prevailed.
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.
2. A. Kouria, Michalis Economou [in Greek], Adam editions, Athens 2001, pp. 106-116.