Introduction
In a series of articles in Comœdia, the art critic Marcel Sauvage provided an introduction to the foreign artists in Paris, grouping them by nationality. One of the articles, published in 1927, was devoted to Greek artists. Sauvage argued that even though there were many Greek artists in Paris, most of them – such as Michel Economou (1884–1933), Lykourgos Kogevinas (1887–1940) and Stelios Miliadis (1881–1965) – were trapped in academicism. He thus chose to introduce the Parisian readership to Michalis Tombros (1889–1974), Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas (Ghika, 1906–94), and Giorgos Gounaropoulos (Gounaro, 1890–1977), all of whom, after the example of their compatriot Dimitris Galanis (1879–1966), produced art consistent with modern trends.Footnote 1
Following the end of the First World War and the Asia Minor Disaster, Greece experienced political and economic instability, as well as the shock and social transformation entailed by the arrival of huge numbers of incoming refugees from Asia Minor. Such upheaval was bound to have an impact on the art world; state support for artists was limited and the art market very small.Footnote 2 In 1925, there was only one art gallery in Greece, that of Stratigopoulos, while Πινακοθήκη (1901–26) was the only Greek art magazine in the 1920s. Otherwise, texts on art were published in literary magazines such as Νέα Εστία and Τα Ελληνικά Γράμματα and newspapers such as Ελεύθερον Βήμα, Πρωία, and Ελεύθερος Τύπος.Footnote 3 By the turn of the twentieth century, Paris had replaced Munich as the art centre that most attracted Greek artists for training and creative purposes. The ‘happy capital of the arts’Footnote 4 was seen as the present-day heir to classical Athens and hosted quite a number of Greek artists, including emblematic figures such as Konstantinos Parthenis (1879–1967), Konstantinos Maleas (1879–1928), Spyros Papaloukas (1892–1957), and Fotis Kontoglou (1896–1965), who spent longer or shorter periods of time there in order to broaden their artistic horizons, study at the School of Fine Arts or private academies, and exhibit their work in salons and galleries.Footnote 5
For some years now, our artists have been heading to Paris, the city that is now the home of all the arts. And regardless of the fact that the French capital represents what Athens did in ancient times, this Greek nature, this Greek spirit, perhaps still uncultivated, has such an affinity with the French that it can only be moulded through it without [fear of] losing any of its particular character.Footnote 6
Many of the Greek artists who settled in interwar Paris, including those discussed by Sauvage in his Comœdia article, are known to Greek art history as members of the so-called Generation of the Thirties. However, in his recent study on this concept, Evgenios Matthiopoulos has convincingly shown that the term was only established in Greek art historiography after the fall of the military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974, and that such a ‘generation’ never really existed.Footnote 7 Different scholars define ‘generation’ in varying and contradictory ways, while consensus on which artists belonged to the Generation of the Thirties is also lacking: belonging to roughly the same age group and engaging in a quest for Greekness through a modernist approach are the main criteria commonly used for inclusion in or exclusion from the generation.Footnote 8 Nevertheless, artistic contemporaries do not necessarily share perceptions or a common identity, while the quest for Greekness was a field of ideological rather than aesthetic confrontations: as Nikos Daskalothanasis notes, it was issues of identity, history, and social and political change that were at stake.Footnote 9 Furthermore, as Matthiopoulos underlines, unlike writers who grouped around George Katsimbalis (1899–1978) and George Seferis (1900–71) and thought of their generation as a distinct group with shared ideological and aesthetic approaches, artists did not form such a group in the interwar period.Footnote 10 Although recent art historical scholarship has adopted more nuanced approaches to Greek modernism and the notions of ‘Greekness’ and tradition within it, the term Generation of the Thirties persists in art historical discourse. This persistence is due to its utility in grouping together a cohort of artists and thus facilitating the construction of a coherent narrative of modern Greek art history. The present article focuses on Greek artists in Paris during the interwar years and argues that it was networking on the basis of shared aesthetic ideas, professional interests, and cultural identities rather than belonging to a specific generation per se that was the driving force behind the building of groupings with common ideological and aesthetic perceptions and attitudes.
Networks in Paris
The concept of ‘networks’ in art emphasizes the dynamic nature of interactions whose nodal point may be an individual, an institution, or a magazine. It is thus more accurate than ‘generation’ when it comes to representing the complex, nuanced, and highly mobile links and relationships between actors in the art world (artists, intellectuals, art critics, publishers, dealers) with shared ideologies, aesthetic ideas and interests.Footnote 11 As Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have argued, the establishment of networks in a ‘networked world’, and above all their dynamic evolution and reconfiguration, should be attributed to the coexistence of relations of qualitatively different types. These include cooperation in defending and promoting common ideas and interests; competition, when members are dissatisfied with the established balance of power; and hierarchy, since the position of each actor in the network determines their power and influence over other actors and their interaction and interdependence.Footnote 12 In the 1980s, and more systematically from the 1990s, art historians adopted the concept of ‘network’ from sociology of artFootnote 13 in order to examine and interpret the production, legitimization, and diffusion of modern art.Footnote 14
Interwar testimonies suggest that, during the 1920s, at least two distinct networks of Greek artists emerged in Paris, formed around shared ideologies, aesthetic principles, and artistic interests.Footnote 15 On the one hand, there were those who rejected the academicism of the Munich School but replaced it with styles within the confines of impressionism, post-impressionism and symbolism, which were also considered to be academic in interwar Paris. Their approach was in line with the ideas promoted by Zacharias Papantoniou (1877–1940), director of the Greek National Gallery, professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts, and a regular columnist for the newspaper Ελεύθερον Βήμα (1926–40). Papantoniou championed the indissoluble relationship between ethics and aesthetics but condemned the doctrine of ‘pure art’ and ‘art for art’s sake’.Footnote 16
Artists such as Gerasimos Vokos (1868–1927), Pavlos Rodokanakis (1891–1958), Thanassis Apartis (1899–1972), Aristotelis Vassilikiotis (1902–72), Kogevinas, Economou and Miliadis, to name but a few, participated in the Association des artistes et gens de lettres hellènes de Paris, founded in 1925 in order to ‘bring together the Greek intellectuals in Paris, to create a sense of solidarity among them, to assert their artistic and literary activities, [and] to defend their interests, both material and moral’.Footnote 17 The Association’s membership included painters, sculptors, writers, architects, musicians and decorators. It was presided over by Costas Dimitriadis (1881–1943), an aesthetically and ideologically conservative sculptor, who embraced Camille Mauclair’s reactionary nationalist discourse and rejected modern art and its representatives.Footnote 18 The Association organized three group art exhibitions in 1926, 1927, and 1928, in addition to concerts of Greek music and lectures.Footnote 19 The conservative aesthetic tendencies of the group were so evident as to be commented on in the press from the very first exhibition, which included 35 artists and over 150 exhibited works of art. As was noted in one review: ‘Upon examination, the works have a common trait: most, if not all, belong to a tame and conservative tendency’.Footnote 20 Following Dimitriadis’ return to Greece in 1928, the Association continued its activity for a short while under the presidency of Aramis (Periklis Aravantinos, 1854/59–1932) and then Kostas Pangalos (1890–1950),Footnote 21 but disbanded in 1929.
The second network of Greek artists in Paris consisted of those who refused to join the Association des artistes et gens de lettres hellènes de Paris, rejecting its aesthetic and ideological orientation. Artists such as Galanis, Ghika, Gounaro, and Tombros espoused new visual trends; together with the art critic and publisher Christian Zervos, the art critic Tériade, the writers George Katsimbalis, Kostas Ouranis, Kostas Varnalis, and George Seferis, as well as the psychiatrist and art lover Angelos Katakouzenos, to name but a few, they formed the modernist community of Greek artists and intellectuals who frequented the famous cosmopolitan cafés of Montparnasse (Fig. 1).Footnote 22 In the newspaper Πρωία in 1926, Tombros criticized the Association des artistes et gens de lettres hellènes de Paris on the occasion of its first exhibition, expressing his dissatisfaction with Dimitriadis’ personal aspirations and ambitions. He went on:
in the city of artistic lights there are inclinations towards various trends and manifestations of great art, and thus some Greeks valued their independence and abidance within the international spirit of our time, and others rushed to this Greek refuge. The Greeks outside this Association [. . .] feel obliged to make known to their Motherland that Greek art is not represented exclusively by this group and most of the exhibitors will not contribute to demonstrating the great potential of our race.Footnote 23
From left to right: Christian Zervos, Angelos Katakouzenos, Tériade, George Katsimpalis, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas (Ghika), and Michalis Tombros in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, 1925. © Angelos and Leto Katakouzenos Archive - Katakouzenos Foundation.
Another member of this network, the writer and entrepreneur Hercule Joannidès, a Greek from the sea of Marmara who organized cultural cruises from France to Greece and published the tourist magazine Le Voyage en Grèce in the interwar years,Footnote 24 gave a more detailed description of the rift between those conservative Greeks in Paris who stressed their Greek identity and those who adopted a more cosmopolitan, European outlook:
It was not a question of ‘art politics’, nor a question of social principles. For these people, it was a question of conscience and finding a solution to each one’s inner problem, inner crisis. The ‘patriotic’ Greeks had then founded an association of Greek artists, trying to find a kind of security and group defence in communal organisation, unlike the so-called ‘modern’ critics and artists who were trying to stay afloat or save themselves as individuals in the artistic turmoil of Paris. Five or six among them, Zervos, Eleftheriadis, Tombros, Galanis, Gounaropoulos, Ghikas, et al. before starting out as units, had fought a group battle against the association of Greek artists in Paris. Of course, this attitude was described at the time as unpatriotic.Footnote 25
Indeed, targeting Zervos and what was perceived to be his network, the right-wing Greek critic and publisher Aristos Kambanis criticized the ‘immigrant intellectuals’ from a nationalist standpoint, for emulating Jean Moréas (Ioannis Papadiamantopoulos, 1856–1910) in forgetting their homeland.Footnote 26
Another major criticism made of the Greeks who had distanced themselves from the Association was their involvement in the ‘corrupt’ modern art market that was anathema to nationalists and conservatives such as Mauclair. The painter Kostas Iliadis, who lived in Paris from 1930 to 1933, recalled:
Back then in Paris, most Greeks, if they saw you straying a little from the traditional mood, would say that you had joined the organized bloc of deception […] of the Jewish modern art dealers, and they would push you aside […] I will never forget how a painter friend of mine, leafing through some magazines in my studio, L’art d’aujourd’hui, Formes, Cahiers d’art, suddenly blurted out: ‘These too are financed by the Jews of the organized fraud bloc.’Footnote 27
The xenophobic and antisemitic climate that prevailed in interwar France—largely a consequence of the economic crisis and the resulting surge in unemployment—was pervasive and inevitably extended its influence into the realm of the arts. Conservative and nationalist factions viewed the Jewish presence in the art world as a destabilizing force, particularly in light of the extensive networks of Jewish artists, dealers, and critics who played a pivotal role in advancing modernist movements.Footnote 28 The anxiety surrounding the presence of the ‘other’—whether Jewish or foreign—was rooted in fears of a dilution of national artistic and intellectual traditions, and of a perceived erosion of the French cultural identity. As noted in the excerpt from Iliadis, such concerns were not limited to French nationals but were shared across conservative circles irrespective of origin.
The modernist approach of the Zervos-Tériade network
Modernist Greek artists in interwar Paris gathered around their compatriots Zervos and Tériade, who were esteemed personalities in the Parisian modern art press and participated in international networks that included both French and non-French artists, art critics, publishers, dealers, and intellectuals. Zervos was an art critic and publisher of the influential modern art journal Cahiers d’art;Footnote 29 Tériade was an art critic who wrote for Cahiers d’art and with Maurice Raynal edited the art column in the newspaper L’Intransigeant, before becoming the publisher of the prestigious art journals Minotaure and Verve and the owner of the publishing house Editions de la revue Verve.Footnote 30 In the 1920s, Zervos, who was a great admirer of Picasso, and Tériade, who shaped his aesthetic ideas under Zervos’ influence, together with Raynal, who shared similar formalist aesthetic principles, were the key figures in a network of their own that promoted post-cubist and post-fauvist artists whose work combined the pure plastic values of cubism, sensitivity to colour and the display of emotion, resulting in compositions of lyrical plasticity. Their network gathered around Cahiers d’art and L’Intransigeant, included figures such as the art critics Paul Fierens, Roger Vitrac, and John Xceron and the art dealers Jacques and Georges Bernheim, and engaged in mediating activities, especially press and book publications and exhibitions, through which they constructed a theoretical framework that shaped the reception of the artists that they supported and significantly enhanced their visibility.
In the context of promoting post-cubist and post-fauvist artists, Zervos and Tériade also supported those Greek artists in Paris whom they considered to have assimilated the French modernist paradigm. In doing so, they aligned themselves with the French cultural patriotism then prevalent in art critical discourse in France. At the same time, they emphasised the enduring values of ancient Greek art that modern Greek artists had ‘naturally’ inherited from their ancestors and their appropriation of the constructive effect of Mediterranean light. One such artist that Zervos and Tériade promoted was Galanis. Especially after his participation in the famous cubist group Section d’Or exhibition in 1912, he had made a name for himself in Paris as an engraver, exhibiting together with artists such as Braque, Chagall, Dufy, Matisse, and Picasso.Footnote 31 In 1925, Zervos, then editor of the journal L’art d’aujourd’hui, published an article by Marcel Arland that presented Galanis’ work as classical in its balance of mind and heart, discipline and instinct.Footnote 32 The following year, on the occasion of Galanis’ exhibition in the Quatre Chemins gallery, Tériade highlighted the architectural balance, order, simplicity, and lyricism of his work in similar vein, pointing to his Mediterranean temperament and describing him as ‘one of the first and best workers of classical revival’.Footnote 33
Zervos, Tériade and their network introduced Gounaro and Ghika to the French art world as post-cubists. In 1925, Gounaro signed a contract for his first solo exhibitions with the Vavin-Raspail gallery, which was regularly advertised in Cahiers d’art.Footnote 34 The following year both Tériade and Fierens wrote laudatory reviews of an exhibition by Gounaro, highlighting the beneficial effect that his apprenticeship at the Academies Julien and Grande Chaumière had had on the evolution of his style, which combined Byzantine and avant-garde influences, and claiming that his stay in southern France had refreshed his palette and the precision of his vision.Footnote 35 In March 1928, Tériade organized the Exposition de la figure at Galerie Zak, which included paintings by Gounaro, and in 1931 he exhibited Gounaro’s works yet again, in an exhibition curated with Roger Vitrac in New Orleans.Footnote 36 On his behalf, Zervos systematically advertised Gounaro’s exhibitions at the Vavin-Raspail Gallery, while in 1928, on the occasion of his solo exhibition at the Jacques Bernheim Gallery, he praised the evolution of his work in terms of formal clarity and smoothness.Footnote 37
Ghika was a close friend of Zervos and Tériade at the time, and was introduced to the Parisian audience as someone who had a fine sense of purity and architectural balance and made exquisite structural use of light thanks to his Greek identity. As with Gounaro, promotion of Ghika combined opportunities to exhibit his work with pieces in the press about him. His first solo exhibition in Paris took place in Galerie Percier, which had close ties with Cahiers d’art. An article that Tériade published in that magazine not long before the exhibition must have aimed at preparing the ground for it, since it was illustrated with works later exhibited in Galerie Percier (Fig. 2).Footnote 38 In his preface to the exhibition catalogue, Raynal reiterated the four basic traits of the artist’s work as listed in Tériade’s article: disinterestedness (recherches désintéressées); creative post-cubism; an exquisite sense of light; and architectural balance. Zervos, Georges Charensol, Fierens, and Raynal all published reviews of the exhibition.Footnote 39 Indeed, Zervos regularly advertised Ghika’s participation in salons and exhibitions, underlining his evolving instinct for plasticity.Footnote 40
Tériade’s illustrated article on Ghika published in Cahiers d’art 6 (1927).
In 1927, Tériade introduced the term ‘new fauvism’, creating an aesthetic platform in which he included those young artists who had in his view escaped from phenomena that he considered to be the consequence of postwar crisis. These included worn-out formal solutions, academicism and the ‘literary invasion’ of surrealism.Footnote 41 He discerned in the compositions of the ‘new fauvists’, among whom he listed Ghika and Gounaro, an emotional dynamism and a liberated expression in line, colour, light and volume, which had replaced cubism’s cerebral approach and architectural balance, resulting in a poetic harmony that he himself sought in art. In a text from 1928 Ghika recognized himself as belonging to this group of artists:
I personally have as my work programme not to depart from the basic principles of cubism, but to use them only as a means for a broader [understanding of the] art of painting, expressive and figurative. This aesthetic is also followed by others, such as Bores, De La Serna, Cossio, Viñes. This group, to which I belong, is quite related to the art of Marcussi and Lurçat, who are the generation immediately after Picasso and Braque, and have some tendencies in common with others, such as Beaudin, Langlais, Suzanne Roger.Footnote 42
With regard to Tombros, the Zervos-Tériade network highlighted how he had substantially simplified volumes in his work, in a quest recalling that of Aristide Maillol for pure plasticity, opening up a European direction for contemporary Greek sculpture.Footnote 43 In 1928, Tériade published a piece about Tombros and Galanis in the first issue of the Greek-language magazine Σύγχρονη Σκέψη published in Chicago. As he stated, his aim was to give them the place they deserved in the consciousness of Greeks; one may assume that this included promoting their marketability among Greek-Americans in the pre-Depression United States.Footnote 44 Zervos and Tériade included Tombros’ sculptures in the international exhibitions of contemporary sculpture they curated in the art galleries of Jacques and Georges Bernheim in 1927 and 1929.
Another artist who was greatly appreciated and promoted by the same network, and who is thus often listed among the Generation of the Thirties artists, was Theophilos Hadjimichael, better known simply as Theophilos.Footnote 45 The appeal of Henri Rousseau’s work among modern artists and collectors in ParisFootnote 46 encouraged Tériade to establish the framework for the posthumous reception and promotion of Theophilos (d. 1934) as the ‘Greek Rousseau’. Since his work fitted the theoretical constructions and cultural claims of both the proponents of the ideology of Europeanisation and those who adhered to Greek folk tradition as the genuine expression of Greek national identity, Tériade,Footnote 47 together with Raynal and Le Corbusier,Footnote 48 emphasized the instinctive and primitive value of Theophilos’s art on the one hand, and the Byzantine and folk modern Greek elements that gave his paintings their authentic Greekness on the other. The features they appreciated in his work included its simplicity, the sense and sensitivity of colour, imagination, plasticity and, above all, a creative naivety that connected with primitive and thus with modern art (Fig. 3).
Le Corbusier’s article on Théophilos in Le Voyage en Grèce 4 (spring 1936).
The promotion of the so-called naïve painters in France was consistent with both modernism, which asserted that aesthetic sensibility did not depend on academic training and that its highest expression could be found in less favourable social and cultural milieux,Footnote 49 and traditionalism, which valorized folk art as an expression of the nation’s cultural history and heritage and as a determinant of national identity.Footnote 50 The case of Theophilos fitted the positive reception of naïf masters in France. It also met the theoretical constructions and cultural claims of the two sides in the Greek art world and intelligentsia, the proponents of the ideology of Europeanization and those who treated folk tradition as a crucial constituent element of Greek national identity.Footnote 51 In an attempt to take advantage of the ideological conjuncture in France and Greece, Tériade announced a Theophilos exhibition in Paris, but it never took place.Footnote 52
However, the active promotion of artists by Tériade, Zervos and their Parisian network provoked reactions from artists, critics and dealers with differing aesthetic preferences and agendas. As noted above, Kambanis voiced pointed criticism from a Greek perspective. Another particularly illustrative case—one that also highlights the fluidity of networks—is that of the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg. Initially a proponent of post-cubism aligned with Zervos and Tériade—collaborating with the former in Cahiers d’art and publishing articles by the latter in his magazine Bulletin de l’Effort Moderne—Rosenberg later shifted his focus towards promoting abstract artists such as Valmier, Herbin, Picabia and Metzinger. Disapproving of his shift in artistic taste, Zervos and Tériade gradually grew apart from Rosenberg. In a series of letters to Francis Picabia written in 1930, Rosenberg adopted a sharply polemical tone, denouncing what he referred to as the ‘syndicate’, ‘gang’, or ‘clique’ of Cahiers d’Art, Zervos, Tériade, Raynal, and the proponents of new fauvism.Footnote 53 The inherent fluidity of networks became even more apparent a little later, in 1931, when a rupture occurred at the core of the Zervos–Tériade network, as its two central figures ended their professional collaboration—likely due to personal disagreements.Footnote 54 It seems that it was this personal rupture, rather than any fundamental aesthetic divergence, that prompted Zervos in 1934 to voice retrospectively a critique of new fauvism and of artists his publications had previously championed.Footnote 55 Following their split, Tériade rarely involved himself with Greek artists, with the exception of Theophilos, while Zervos maintained a close and enduring association with Ghika.
The effect of the Parisian experience: 20όs αιώνας and Το 3o μάτι
Tombros returned to Greece in 1928, as did Gounaro in 1931 and Ghika in 1934. Their Paris experience imbued their art with the modern trends with which they had familiarized themselves in France, while it also allowed them to build a network within the Parisian modern art world and press that included Greek émigrés. In Greece, the time they had spent in Paris served as a guarantee of the quality and modernity of their art, while the positive reviews published about it by Zervos, Tériade, and their network constituted an important source of cultural capital for them within Greek art circles. The impact of their Parisian experience was also reflected in Tombros’ and Ghika’s short-lived art journals – 20όs αιώνας and Το 3o μάτι respectively – the only magazines of their kind published in Greece in the 1930s, in addition to the art newspaper Τέχνη, modelled on Comœdia.Footnote 56 Their close relationship with Zervos and Tériade, as well as their overall experience of art diffusion and promotion in France, had made the two artists aware of the usefulness of the art press in promoting and diffusing aesthetic ideas and boosting individual works and careers.
Following his return to Greece, Tombros kept in touch with his network in Paris, including Joannidès, with whom he shared the view that Greek intellectuals and artists were trapped in the country’s past and in a barren localism, and that it was necessary for them to overcome their ethnocentrism, isolationism and passive imitation of European cultural developments in favour of creative cultural communication, reciprocity, interaction and exchange with Europe. Joannidès, who appreciated Tombros’ talent, noted in his diary: ‘Tombros will be a lever in my effort to set the Greek spirit in motion.’Footnote 57 In 1931, Joannidès organized a cruise from France to Greece on the occasion of the unveiling of Tombros’ statue of the English poet Rupert Brooke on the island of Skyros,Footnote 58 while in 1935 he commissioned Tombros to create the cover for his book Γύροι.Footnote 59 Comœdia continued to publish illustrated articles on Tombros’s art years after the latter’s departure from Paris; the newspaper’s director Gabriel Boissy was connected with Joannidès.Footnote 60
In his letters to Joannidès, Tombros voiced not only his dissatisfaction with the situation in the Greek art world, especially at the institutional level, accusing Dimitriadis, then director of the School of Fine Arts in Athens, of conservatism, but also his plan to publish an art magazine with a pronounced international outlook:
[…] the publication of a rationalist magazine that is missing in Greece and which I told you about […] Apart from portraits of excellent artists, my magazine will not deal with Greek issues […] My ideal is to show the boorish Greek nationalists (Ελληναράδες) here how a group (συντροφιά) like ours is capable of the greatest deeds and decisions: because it has within it the power and sense of realities…You must help me (publication of a magazine, publication of a manifesto, moral assistance and [undecipherable]) so that we retain from this conference (of modern architecture [i.e., CIAM IV]) what is most essential for Greece – but also to support our projects and ideas in the future with some authority (κύρος).Footnote 61
An ideal occasion for Tombros to launch his magazine came in the form of the Fourth International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM IV) mentioned in the letter, which was held on board Joannidès’ cruise ship with the participation of prominent figures in the international avant-garde of architecture, as well as artists, art historians and critics, including Greek representatives of modernist trends. Appropriately titled 20ός αιώνας, the magazine used Cahiers d’art as its model. The lavishly illustrated first issue, published in French, bore evident signs of the network to which its creator belonged: it hosted articles by Le Corbusier, Siegfried Giedion, and Zervos, praised Joannidès’ crucial role in making the Congress possible and featured advertisements for the archaeological, art and literary cruises organised by him (Fig. 4).
Cover and illustrated pages from the first issue of 20ός αιώνας (1933).
Between July 1933 and autumn 1934, Tombros published a total of six illustrated issues, with a layout similar to Cahiers d’art.Footnote 62 In the first issue, in an introductory editorial titled ‘Why I am publishing a magazine’, Tombros criticized contemporary Greek intellectual life and the official art institutions for recycling the art of the academies in the West. He advocated a new beginning, resting on a meaningful connection linking the values of modernism – purity of form, rationality and harmony, which drew on the principles of pre-classical and classical Greek art – to folk art and Greece’s Mediterranean landscape.Footnote 63 In subsequent issues the magazine continued to publish pieces by Zervos, Le Corbusier, and Giedion, as well as by the Greek-origin Xceron, who promoted modernist Greek artists through his articles in the European edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune. It also featured illustrations of modern architecture and art including works by Tombros, Gounaro, and Ghika, while it advertised Cahiers d’art, Minotaure and Joannidès’ cruises. Tombros also published numerous essays on the functioning of institutions and the commissioning of monuments. Their critical tone is revealing of his rivalry with Dimitriadis. Otherwise, Tombros’ essays on art reflect his alignment with the aesthetic views expressed in Cahiers d’art: he focused on the timelessness of simple and pure formal values that did not reject representation, expressing his appreciation of primitive forms of expression.Footnote 64 Ghika contributed theoretical texts in the same spirit, acquainting the magazine’s readers with the principles of modern art: ‘Art must rediscover plasticity and plasticity must suffice as a means of expression in art […] By clashing with Romanticism, new art unavoidably became classical and Mediterranean […] The primitifs of the 13th and 14th centuries became Derain’s first teachers. Byzantine art influenced Matisse. The African idols [influenced] Picasso.’Footnote 65
Ghika further elaborated his ideas on the subjective interpretation of the natural landscape and the value of form and plastic language in his writings in Το 3o μάτι, an art and literature magazine published between 1935 and 1937 that he edited together with a ‘group of friends’.Footnote 66 The author Stratis Doukas was the director and Ghika, together with the architect Dimitris Pikionis and later Tombros, were the editors responsible for the pages dedicated to the arts and the magazine’s illustrations. In their editorial in the first issue of the magazine, the editors describe it by stressing, like Tombros, that the Greek cultural scene lacked a clear direction on ‘all intellectual issues – national and international’, as well as ‘information on contemporary developments abroad’, demonstrating ‘hesitancy towards anything new’.Footnote 67 Their aim was to fill the gap and present ‘every unfeigned (πηγαία) and innovative (πρωτότυπη) event, whether it belongs to TRADITION or the AVANT-GARDE […] the YARDSTICK for selection will be the work’s QUALITY and not the type of its form’.Footnote 68 The editorial was illustrated by six black-and-white photographs: a Cycladic figurine; an urbanist drawing by Le Corbusier; a painting by Picasso; a photograph taken by Ghika; a detail from a Byzantine icon; and a folk art figurine (Fig. 5).
Cover and illustrated pages of the editorial in the first issue of Το 3ο μάτι (1935).
The selection of illustrations followed the approach of Cahiers d’art, Documents and Minotaure, which suggests that the magazine’s art section was conceived from the outset as a ‘musée imaginaire’Footnote 69 that would bring into dialogue works of art from different eras, mediums and styles and, most importantly, foster interaction between Greek and international art. Indeed, the the magazine brought the Greek readership in contact with many ideas presented in Cahiers d’art, especially the one highlighting the eclectic nature of modernism, which entailed a more inclusive redefinition of the pictorial tradition with primitive art, ethnographic objects, handicrafts, and the decorative arts as components. The magazine’s illustrations served the same goal. The last issue, for example, aimed to highlight relationships and links between art objects and ‘technical’ objects through geometry. Its illustrations included a Cycladic figurine, architectural plans of prehistoric houses, Egyptian temples, a house by Le Corbusier, photos or sketches of traditional houses in Japan, Polynesia, Cameroon, Pompeii, the Greek island of Aegina, and an Eskimo house, but also ceramics from the geometric and classical ages, Coptic art, Byzantine and post-Byzantine icons, Australian aboriginal painting, as well as paintings by Fra Angelico, Van Eyck, Giorgione, Picasso, Klee, Ernst, Miró, Kandinsky, and Ghika.Footnote 70
The magazine also featured pieces translated from Cahiers d’art, such as a lecture by Juan Gris,Footnote 71 as well as reproductions of modern paintings taken from it. However, it should be noted that although Το 3ο μάτι functioned as a medium of cultural transfer, the ideas and images it borrowed from Cahiers d’art and other Parisian magazines of the period, such as Georges Bataille’s Documents or Tériade’s Minotaure, were not transferred intact but often adapted so as to evoke and provoke new comparisons and associations, references and interpretations, especially with regard to contemporary Greek art. In fact, in conformity with the views of Zervos, Tériade, and other members of their network, Το 3ο μάτι actively sought to acquaint its Greek readership with an alternative route to conceiving modernism, one that would not be trapped in the cul-de-sac of Greekness, but would treat Europe and the world as indispensable points of reference.
Conclusion
In contrast to the abstract, idealistic, and rather static concept of ‘generation’, which can be misleading, the concept of the ‘network’ allows us to study the dynamic formation, evolution and dissolution of connections among individuals, based on specific perceptions, ideas, interests, priorities and goals. In the art world, mediators play a crucial role in increasing the visibility and value of the artists within their networks. They do so by shaping the critical discourse surrounding the artists’ work, facilitating its reception and interpretation, and leveraging their own cultural and relational capital to promote them. In turn, mediators benefit from the artists’ success, both financially and in terms of symbolic capital.
Put differently, the concept of ‘network’ allows us to trace the practical mechanisms underlying the clustering and interaction of actors within a professional field such as the art world. In this light, the present article has proposed a network-centred alternative to the generational model for conceptualizing the Greek proponents of modern art in interwar Paris. Although there were also other networks with which they associated, many Greek artists, authors, intellectuals and art world mediators in Paris identified with either the Association des artistes et gens de lettres hellènes de Paris or with the modernist literary and art network which centred on the art critics and publishers Zervos and Tériade. In neither of these networks was age or ‘generation’ a criterion for inclusion or exclusion. On the contrary, individuals of roughly the same generation were members of one or the other of these groups, which espoused markedly different ideas. What ultimately served as a unifying force within each of these groupings was their members’ shared perception of their cultural identity. As shown, a key objective of the modernist network of Greeks in interwar Paris was to distance themselves and their work from a narrowly conceived Greek cultural identity, embracing instead a more cosmopolitan outlook which had Europe and the West as its conceptual mainstays.
This article has argued that art historical scholarship would benefit from moving away from the concept of the Generation of the Thirties and focusing on a network-based approach. Such a perspective promises a more nuanced understanding of groupings of Greek artists and other figures of the interwar art world, as well as of the motives, ideas, interests and aspirations that brought them together. It will also illuminate the complex processes of art production, diffusion and reception, while it will shed new light on questions of cultural identities and belonging, not only for the human actors involved, but also with regard to their vision of Greece and the art produced there.
Poppy Sfakianaki is a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH and an adjunct professor at the University of Crete. Her research interests and publications focus on modern art, particularly art press and publishing, cultural mediation and cultural transfers. From 2021 to 2023 she was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, researching Hercule Joannidès as a cultural mediator between France and Greece in the interwar years. She is currently working on a book about Tériade, the Greek-born modern art critic and publisher based in Paris.
