Lot 34: Michalis Economou (Greek, 1888-1933) Landscape with farmhouse 30 x 49 cm.

Landscape with farmhouse
signed 'M. Economoy' (lower right)
oil on canvas
30 x 49 cm.

Painted before 1926

PROVENANCE:
Private collection, Athens.

LITERATURE:
Afroditi Kouria, M. Economou, Adam Publications, Athens 2001, p. 103, fig. 69.

Sought after as early as the late 1920s by such major Greek collectors as C. Loulis, G. Stringos and A. Benakis,υ1 Economou's landscapes display the artist's ability to transform ordinary subjects into evocative visions of 'humble monumentality', while offering him the opportunity to elaborate on some key pictorial and formal issues raised by the modernist avant-garde. Here, he used a tree's trunk and branches as a means of flattening the pictorial space and juxtaposing foreground and background, in the vein of similar works by van Gogh and the Nabis. Moreover, whereas Cezanne taught him compositional discipline, Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School encouraged him to maintain the expressive use of line and elevate the horizon, extending the pictorial surface to the limits of the canvas without the illusion of receding space.

In her monograph on the painter, art historian A. Kouria uses Landscape with farmhouse as an example of Economou's employment of tree branches (mainly olives) for compositional reasons to establish a spatial relationship with the structure in the background.υ2 "In some of his paintings, Economou employs the cropped tree theme as an element instrumental in articulating the painting's compositional structure and planar arrangement of space. Economou adopts the rejection of the confines of the canvas -a fundamental modernist convention that clearly affects the unfolding of the subject- the handling of pictorial space on a two-dimensional surface and the viewer's visual perception of the resulting image."υ3

Judging from the predominance of the tree form in relation to the farmhouse in the background (note the energetic drawing, highly textured surface, emphasis on outline and sculpturesque treatment,) as well as the evident tendency of its branches and foliage to escape from the boundaries of the canvas - as if the pictorial field was but a fragment of a far greater reality, it can be argued that the painter intended to submit the man-made environment to a natural order, implying that human creations are finite and transient, while nature is infinite and eternal.υ4 Such an inspired interpretation of the landscape borders on the poetic atmosphere of symbolism and is akin to Maleas' magnificent View of the Acropolis / Acropole vue entre des pins et aloes, 1918-1920, painted a few years earlier than Economou's Farmhouse and sold by Bonhams in 2009.

υ1. A. Kouria, Michalis Economou [in Greek], Adam editions, Athens 2001, p. 125.
υ2. Kouria, p. 123.
3. Kouria, p. 122.
υ4. A. Kotidis, Constantinos Maleas [in Greek], Adam editions, Athens 2000, p. 155.