Lot 44: Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (Greek, 1906-1994) Dancing school 65 x 91.5 cm.

Dancing school
signed and dated 'Ghika/65'(lower right)
oil on canvas
65 x 91.5 cm.

PROVENANCE:
D. Pieridis Collection.
Private collection, Athens.

EXHIBITED:
Athens, Benaki Museum, N. Hadjikyriakos-Ghika: The Apollonian - The Dionysian, 22 Nov. 2006 - 15 January 2007.

LITERATURE:
Dora Iliopoulou-Rogan, N. Hadjikyriakos-Ghika: The Apollonian- The Dionysian, Benaki Museum, Athens 2006, p. 164, no 272 (illustrated).

In one of the most insightful and thought-provoking essays ever written on Ghika, poet Kimon Friar elaborated on the idea of the artist as composer, discussing his paintings in terms of music and rhythm: "It is impossible to describe a work of art by Ghika without the use of musical terms. In a sense, in looking at his work one seems to hear with the eye. In all his paintings, abstracted or not, the lines and special proportions take on the tonalities and movements, the range of warm and cold tones, the rhythm and, what is more, the timing (duration of the size of one space in relation to another) which is equivalent to the arrangement and orchestration of musical composition. ... The works of Ghika are composed: that is, they contain the elements of both composition and composure. Objectively, whatever emotional or intellectual force they radiate is rigidly controlled into a composure, ...which reveals that the artist is in control of almost uncontrollable material, that he has imposed on the chaos about him a proportion and a meaning, but a meaning that is neither moral nor immoral, and which declares itself only in terms of power and composition. This is what we must mean when we call a work of art, or a way of life, "Classical." And that is Ghika. ...His paintings are all examples of the artist's control over his medium and his meaning, and they are all witnesses of that triple counter-pointing of the verb "compose": they are a designer's compositions in line, colour and space; they are the work of a musical composer; and their final resolution is a composure which the classical artist imposes on the recalcitrant materials of life to create a cosmos for which we all long and dream but which only the artist may invoke."υ1

These perceptive remarks written in 1946 perfectly apply to Dancing school, a pictorially complex exploration of youthful energy painted almost twenty years later. Indeed, rhythm, musical effect, composure, sense of space and proportion, Dionysian movement and Apollonian order all come together in a well thought out, tightly designed and dynamically balanced composition, where spirit is transformed into rhythm and vice versa. As noted by D. Iliopoulou-Rogan who curated the artist's 2006 major retrospective in the Benaki Museum, Athens, "this spirit-rhythm duality is not disassociated from flesh and bodily pleasures, as his works call upon both the senses and the intellect,υ2 as evident by the presence of marble sculpture alluding to lofty humanistic aims and the choice of subject for the easel painting in the centre which refers to more mundane interests. "The whole point is to find the balance," Ghika once told the art critic Dora Vallier. For him proportion was the fundamental condition for a work of art.υ3

Reflecting the artist's long involvement with the design of sets and costumes for Rallou Manou's legendary 'Hellenic Choreodrama' dance groupυ4 and echoing many of Degas' complex multi-figure paintings of ballerinas set in rehearsal studios practicing their steps, Ghika's young dancers inhabit the large space haphazardly, creating casual patterns of movement and gesture that would never be seen on stage. (Compare E.Degas, Ballet dancers, c. 1890-1900, National Gallery, London).υ5 Moreover, demonstrating Ghika's extremely broad and varied range of artistic concerns, while expressing a creative integration of the artist's intellectual and emotional relationship to the world, this exquisite canvas features a host of direct and indirect references to the history of art ranging from Hellenistic and Byzantine conventions to cubist experimentations and surrealism's poetic metaphors and subversively irrational visions. The sculptural figure on the right echoes André Masson's famous Gradiva, while the enigmatic dancer on the left, captured simultaneously as stone and flesh, alludes to mythical Galatea, the statue that came to life and became a surrealist muse (compare Salvador Dali, Galatea of the Spheres, 1952). This compelling duality reflects Ghika's two-sided nature: "the one, that of the methodical man, restrained by reason, the other, the man whom the senses restore to the centre of human life. We would be wrong to imagine that either one is struggling to dominate the other. Rather, they unite his strengths in a spirit of collaboration, not rivalry, to achieve a victory that belongs equally to both of them."υ6

υ1. K. Friar, 'Ghika as Composer', in Paintings by Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, exhibition catalogue, British Council, Athens 1946.
υ2. D. Iliopoulou-Rogan, N. Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, the Apollonian-the Dionysian, exhibition catalogue., Benaki Museum, Athens 2006, p. 60.
υ3. D. Vallier, 'Portrait of the artist', Art News and Review, no. 157, February 1955.
υ4. See Iliopoulou-Rogan, Parallels, N. Hadjikyriakos-Ghika [in Greek], Polyplano publ., Athens 1980, p. 41.
υ5. See D. Bomford, S Herring, J. Kirby, C. Riopelle, A. Roy, Degas, National Gallery Company publ., London, p. 136.
υ6. C. Zervos, article from Cahiers d'Art, December 1952.