Pericles VYZANTIOS Greek, 1893-1972
Pericles Vyzantios was born in 1893 in Athens and died in 1972 in the Greek capital.
In 1911 he began his studies in Munich, only to abandon them in the same year. He then relocated to Paris and continued at the Academie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1917 he returned to Greece.
Between 1920 and 1922, he participated in the Asia Minor campaign as a war artist together with Spyros Papaloukas and Pavlos Rodokanakis. The works were exhibited in 1922 in the Zappeion Hall, to the great admiration of art critics and the general public alike. A year later the government decided to transfer the exhibition to Smyrna, and the works were lost in the city’s demise.
Together with Constantinos Parthenis, Konstantinos Maleas and Nikolaos Othoneos, among others, he was a founding member of the avant-garde, art group ‘Ομάδα Τέχνης’ that introduced the international contemporary art movements to Greece.
His artistic oeuvre was characterized by the consistency and continuity of his pursuits. In his most important efforts, there was a transition from realism and impressionism to a purely personal idiom characterized by the role of light, emphasis on the atmospheric, bright colours and the poetic interpretation of visual reality. In his landscapes influenced by French impressionism, the work of Paul Cezanne, and post-impressionist tendencies, he reached a pure personal language.
In his later work, he was influenced by the mature works of J.M.W. Turner, while still retaining his purely personal elements; the painting surface appears as a meeting of static and kinetic between sky and sea or land and sky. Everything changes under the eyes of the spectator into poetic sets dominated by the originality and immediacy of colour.
In 1984 the National Gallery staged a posthumous large-scale retrospective of his work.
His work is present in many public and private collections, but most notably: The National Gallery of Greece, the Athens Municipal Gallery, the Rhodes Municipal Gallery, the Leventis Gallery, the Averoff Gallery, the Koutlides Collection and the National Bank of Greece collection.
