Michalis Economou

Michalis Economou (Greek, 1888-1933) Resting under the olive tree signed 'M. Economou.' (lower right) oil on canvas 54 x 65 cm. PROVENANCE: Private collection, France. A true find and a soulful rendition of nature distinguished by the charm of its uncontrived composition, this exceptional canvas reveals Economou's penchant for painting the quiet corners of the landscape, while displaying his ability to transform ordinary subjects into evocative visions of humble monumentality. In a peaceful olive orchard, the aged trees shaped by time and the elements become the real protagonists, offering a delightful variety to the artist's observing eye. Economou pays close attention to all the irregularities that establish their individual characters. The bark of the massive olive tree in the foreground and the moss attached to it are composed of countless quick touches of thick impasto suggesting the trunk's rough texture, while the varied angles and gnarled curves of the tree branches create a vivid surface pattern. At the same time, the pronounced triangle in the centre opens out the composition to reveal the landscape beyond, while large areas of cast shadows animate the ground and contribute to its weightiness. As noted by art historian A. Kouria who prepared the artist's monograph, "in certain works of Economou, the shadows, along with the shapes and visual effects they create, actively contribute to the compositional structure, endowing the picture with a vibrating pulse that's akin to the Nabis, art nouveau aesthetics or even Van Gogh." 1 The artist, however, is concerned not only with the physicality of natural forms and the visual effects produced by the interplay of light and shadow but also with the harmonious incorporation of the human presence into the whole -the two female figures that ease themselves under the thick shade of the olive tree. He is interested in the spatial relationship between figure and surrounding space, and the pictorial unity of the figure and its environment. This need to unite figures and surroundings into a whole (a lifelong preoccupation of the artist) dictated a uniform handling of energetic brushwork throughout the picture plane in the vein of many Pissaro landscapes (compare 'Chestnut Trees at Louveciennes', private collection, New York.) Highlighted by bold animating touches -note the emphatic daub of pure red pigment at the seated woman's headscarf- the figures blend in with the environment, suggesting that human beings, just like trees, are part of a universal natural order. Such an interpretative approach to the landscape charges the painting with symbolic, even spiritual overtones and invests it with a higher order of meaning, echoing van Gogh's celebrated olive orchards. 1 . A. Kouria, Michalis Economou [in Greek], Adam, Athens 2001, p. 113.

Michalis Economou (Greek, 1888-1933) Houses with boat signed 'M. Economou' (lower left) oil on flannel 61 x 50 cm. Painted in 1927. PROVENANCE: Private collection, Athens. EXHIBITED: Athens, Parnassos, Economou One Man Show , 1927 (possibly). LITERATURE: Proia newspaper, 30.11.1927 (possibly). Afroditi Kouria, Economou , Adam Editions, Athens 2001, no 77, p. 132 (illustrated). Demonstrating Economou's capacity to distill a mood of tenderness and poetry from an ordinary subject, Houses with boat has a resonance that makes it one of the artist's finest and most satisfying works. Exquisite in colour and tone, faultless in design and execution and ethereal in its pure poetry and melodious lyricism, this vision of 'humble monumentality' shows him in full command of his artistic powers which flowered after his return to Greece from France in 1926. Reviewing Economou's 1927 one-man show in the Parnassos exhibition hall in Athens, which according to art historian A. Kouria, who wrote the artist's monograph, most probably included the Bonhams picture, the prominent scholar Dionysios Kokkinos noted: "Economou's recent work is not only a splendid nature seen by an eye with a strong, perceptive lens, with the dominance of technique. It is the emotional response of a powerful temperament to external phenomena. It is the projection of images captured in colour and form by an inner disposition, an aesthetic moment. His latest works are true works of poetry, but so masterfully rendered that their significance as paintings prevail." 1 Suspended between real time and memory, this seaside landscape with two adobe dwellings delightfully rendered in curvilinear forms becomes an image of subjective truth -a screen on which the artist has projected the wonderland of his inner world. The eye is invited into the picture through the wonderful reflections on shallow still waters in the foreground, while a single note of red on the bargeman's vest echoed faintly in the skirt of the woman standing at the doorstep warms the composition, contributing to the harmony of the whole. Although the man-made structures, designed as monolithic cubes carved from solid volume, have a sculptural quality that articulates a sense of stability and permanence, the whole subject is transformed into a highly evocative image, generating an atmosphere more like a distant, vague recollection than an actual sense experience. This distilled mood is accentuated by an ambivalent sense of presence/absence in a poetic timescape where human presence, rendered in a lighter fashion than the architecture, is suggested rather than actually depicted. The motif of the house reflected on water, a recurrent theme throughout Economou's oeuvre echoing distant memories and early experiences, creates a binary scheme finely balanced on the peaceful waterline. As noted by Professor A. Kotidis, "The element of reverse symmetry introduced by the reflection of the solid on the fluid, this coexistence of the man-made/solid with the natural/liquid provides the painter a bipolarity that allows him to express his psychological state. He tries to find a balance between security and uncertainty in his private life, the same way he seeks equilibrium in his pictorial world." 2 As noted by A. Kouria, art critics of the time urged art lovers to hasten and purchase Economou's works from this period, stressing that some of them actually belonged in the National Gallery. 3 In light of the critical and popular acclaim his two one-man shows (1926 and 1927) met with, it's no wonder that the works of this early 20th c. Greek master whose signature style, as noted by Professor A. Kotidis, "is unique in European art," 4 adorned the collections of such major collectors as C. Loulis, G. Stringos and A. Benakis. 1 . D. Kokkinos, Elliniki newspaper, 4.12.1927. 2 . A. K(otidis) in Dictionary of Greek Artists [in Greek], vol. 3, Melissa publ., Athens 1999, pp. 350-351. 3 . A. Kouria, Michalis Economou [in Greek], Adam, Athens 2001, p. 125. See also K. Papalexandrou, Proia daily, 30.11.1927. 4 . K(otidis), p. 349.

Michalis Economou (Greek, 1888-1933) Houses by the beach signed 'M. ECONOMOU' (lower right) oil on flannel 23 x 57 cm. PROVENANCE: D. Pieridis collection. Private collection, Athens. LITERATURE: Afroditi Kouria, M. Economou , Adam Editions, Athens, 2001, p. 170-171, no 123 (illustrated). Suspended between real time and memory, a seaside landscape with three adobe dwellings delightfully rendered in abbreviated curvilinear forms becomes an image of subjective truth and poetic beauty -a screen on which the artist has projected the mystical wonderland of his inner world. Everything is designed by means of the curvilinear, while the presumed solidity of the man-made structures, instead of being consolidated and finalised through a series of verticals and horizontals, is actually undermined by the buildings' elliptical shapes. As a result, a simple, ordinary subject is transformed into a highly evocative image, generating an atmosphere more like a distant, vague recollection than an actual sense experience. Houses by the beach probably dates after 1926, the year the artist returned to Greece from France, and was most probably completed in 1927, when he had his second one-man show in Athens and first showed his oils on flannel. Most of the works included in this exhibition were Greek landscapes revealing a magnificent vagueness and poetic uncertainty of space. With his oils on flannel - his 'fuzzy' canvases as he himself called them - which allowed him to better capture the iridescent greys, light blues and precious bright blacks, "Economou proceeded to a more subjective interpretation of the natural environment. His vision changed. The landscapes, houses and trees, rendered in an elliptical, abbreviated manner without descriptive details, with flat surfaces on which his brushwork was invisible and his colour scheme non-naturalistic, assumed the semblance of visions. To realize his inspirational zeal, the artist used white or coloured flannel that softened the tones and whose nap endowed the surface with a peculiar, velvet-like texture, while lessening the definition of outlines. The houses, rendered in curvilinear forms, lost their volume. His works betrayed his appreciation of the expressive capacity of abstraction and simplification, a key principle of modern art." . See A. Kotidis, Modernism and Tradition [in Greek], University Studio Press, Thessaloniki 1993, p. 201. . A. Kouria, Michalis Economou , Zygos magazine, no. 56, Nov.-Dec. 1982, pp. 14, 15, 50. See also Kouria, Greek Painters and the Nabis Movement in Metamorphoses of the Modern, The Greek Experience , exhibition catalogue, National Gallery - A. Soutzos Museum, Athens 1992, pp. 379-385; Z. Papantoniou, Eleftheron Vima daily, 29.11.1927.

Michalis Economou (Greek, 1888-1933) 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 Greekcollectors as C. Loulis, G. Stringos and A. Benakis, Economou's landscapes display the artist's ability to transformordinary subjects into evocative visions of 'humble monumentality',while offering him the opportunity to elaborate on some keypictorial and formal issues raised by the modernist avant-garde.Here, he used a tree's trunk and branches as a means of flatteningthe pictorial space and juxtaposing foreground and background, inthe vein of similar works by van Gogh and the Nabis. Moreover,whereas Cezanne taught him compositional discipline, Gauguin andthe Pont-Aven School encouraged him to maintain the expressive useof line and elevate the horizon, extending the pictorial surface tothe limits of the canvas without the illusion of recedingspace. In her monograph on the painter, art historian A. Kouria uses Landscape with farmhouse as an example of Economou'semployment of tree branches (mainly olives) for compositionalreasons to establish a spatial relationship with the structure inthe background. "In some of his paintings, Economouemploys the cropped tree theme as an element instrumental inarticulating the painting's compositional structure and planararrangement of space. Economou adopts the rejection of the confinesof the canvas -a fundamental modernist convention that clearlyaffects the unfolding of the subject- the handling of pictorialspace on a two-dimensional surface and the viewer's visualperception of the resulting image." Judging from the predominance of the tree form in relation to thefarmhouse in the background (note the energetic drawing, highlytextured surface, emphasis on outline and sculpturesque treatment,)as well as the evident tendency of its branches and foliage toescape from the boundaries of the canvas - as if the pictorialfield was but a fragment of a far greater reality, it can be arguedthat the painter intended to submit the man-made environment to anatural order, implying that human creations are finite andtransient, while nature is infinite and eternal. Suchan inspired interpretation of the landscape borders on the poeticatmosphere of symbolism and is akin to Maleas' magnificent Viewof the Acropolis / Acropole vue entre des pins et aloes ,1918-1920, painted a few years earlier than Economou's Farmhouseand sold by Bonhams in 2009. A. Kouria, Michalis Economou [in Greek], Adameditions, Athens 2001, p. 125. Kouria, p. 123. 3. Kouria, p. 122. A. Kotidis, Constantinos Maleas [in Greek],Adam editions, Athens 2000, p. 155.

LOT 20 MICHALIS ECONOMOU GREEK, 1888-1933 THE HOUSE THAT HE DREAMS OF (HYDRA) signed lower right oil on flannel 100,000—150,000 GBP 45 by 54cm., 17¾ by 21¼in. We are grateful to Aphrodite Kouria for her assistance incataloguing this lot. Acquired by the mother of the present owner This rich work demonstrates Economou's talents as a colouristand observer of light, with the intense and variegated orange andyellow hues sensitively combined with pinks and blues, the wholereflected in the calm waters. The whole shimmers, mirage-like, atthe foot of the soft, earthy hill. Economou initially went to Paris in 1906 to study architecture,but soon changed his mind and enrolled at the Académie desBeaux-Arts instead. The twenty years during which he lived andworked in France had a profound influence on his oeuvre. Inparticular the work of Manet and Matisse and their modern theorieson composition and colour were adapted by the artist to suit hisindividual artistic vision. While Manet maintained that the flat,two-dimensional surface of a painting was a pictorial space in itsown right, Matisse advocated the value of colour as aself-sufficient means of expression. However, as Aphrodite Kouriahas pointed out, 'Whatever the artistic affinities Economou mighthave had with Western European artistic trends, the basic andessential characterisic of his art is his intensely personal style,the hallmark of a genuine temperament which sought to transform thefacts of the perceptible world into images of inner truth.'(Aphrodite Kouria, Michalis Economou: An IndividualisticInterpreter of Greek Landscapes, Athens, 1983, p. 44).''All the subjects of Economou's work are taken from nature. In hisearliest paintings - landscapes mainly from the South of France butalso from Greece - the weathered walls of the houses and mills, thearches of the old bridges and the rocks are 'structured' with dullor greyish tones, splashed uninhibitedly but with a masterful touchon card, linen or canvas, sometimes almost sculpted, at other timesas if wiped smooth.' (Aphrodite Kouria, Michalis Economou: AnIndividualistic Interpreter of Greek Landscapes, Zygos, Athens,1983, p. 44). In the present work, the use of this technique aswell as the blending of colours and contours lends the painting ahazy, ethereal quality. Within Economou's often almostmonochromatic compositions, colour, as a vehicle to convey feelingsand create atmosphere, took supremacy. 'Even those subjects whichcould be used as narrative elements appear in his paintings in apurely chromatic role. Thus the human figures in his paintings -when they do appear - breathe no spark of life into the work: theyare merely an excuse for a small area of colour or a patch ofbrushwork' (ibid.).