Lot 14: View of Galatsi 55.5 x 35 cm.

View of Galatsi signed in Greek (lower left) oil on canvas 55.5 x 35 cm.

55.5 x 35 cm

Athens, Zappeion Hall, exhibition of Paintings by Nikolaos Lytras 1902-1927, April 1929 (illustrated in an exhibition photograph).

Nikos Lytras, Painting with Light and Colour, Exhibition catalogue, National Gallery - A. Soutzos Museum, Athens 2008, p. 294.

Given by the artist to Othon Pervolarakis thence by descent to the present owner.

Considered long lost, known only through a black and white photograph of Lytras's 1929 posthumous retrospective at Zappeion Hall where it hung next to the famous Portrait of a boy now at the collection of the Athens National Gallery, View of Galatsi captures the inner rhythm, eternal structure and timeless canon of the age-old Greek land, seeking not only to identify its unique character but also to interpret its very soul. Rocky terrain, rolling hills and distant mountains, rendered in broad, long, continuous brushstrokes, are handled as powerful means of communicating the artist's acute perception and intense experience of their primordial volumes. The fluid rhythm of the execution becomes the means by which the artist not only records but shares in this field of energy in search of a deeper pictorial truth. The powerful, pronounced diagonal of the hillslopes, the large, triangular shapes and the overall development of oblique, undulating lines build up a rhythmically articulate series of formal elements, welding the image into such a compelling entity that even the artist's signature on the lower left seems organically integrated in the pictorial surface, as if it were an 'indigenous' part of the landscape. The simplified surfaces with their syncopated rhythm, the Cezannesque corporeality of the picture plane and the sweeping, energetic brushwork in the vein of van Gogh betray the sure hand of a master expressionist and assert the freedom of his pictorial gesture, while conveying to the viewer a sense of immediacy and an impression of a first-hand experience. As noted by A. Kouria and D. Portolos, who prepared the artist's monograph¹, Lytras's landscape views are stripped of the often idealised descriptiveness of traditional naturalistic renderings. His landscapes are rugged, frugal, without beautifying tricks or decorative framings, lending the Greek landscape a new formal identity and meaning. ¹.See A. Kouria, D. Portolos, Nikos Lytras, Building Form with Color and Light [in Greek], exhibition catalogue, National Gallery - A. Soutzos Museum, Athens 2008, pp. 107-109, 113.