This edition was published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name organized by the Educational Foundation of the National Bank at the exhibition space of the Eynard Mansion (December 15, 2016, to February 25, 2017).

Memnos Makris was one of the most significant sculptors of the second half of the 19th century. Makris spent his most creative phase in exile in post-war Hungary, during a historical period in which the Eastern European country was an integral part of the so-called Eastern Bloc. The significance of Makris within the context of Hungarian art remains enormous.

He was a foreigner from distant Greece who unexpectedly found himself there in 1950, exiled not from his homeland but from democratic France, where he had been studying on a scholarship from the French state since 1945. Yet, there, in the "motherland," Makris managed to express the vision for a better, socialist world.

The vision of socialism, international and universal, knowing no borders or homelands, became for the sculptor an artistic language, with the human being as the central and unique theme. A human being as a value and as an ideal. Thus, the "foreigner" managed to become one of the most important "Hungarian" sculptors of the 20th century, even though he never obtained Hungarian citizenship, remaining a stateless Greek.

But with what qualifications did Makris arrive in Budapest in 1950? What were his studies, experiences, and influences? The aim of this publication is to shed light on the early artistic creation of Memnos Makris, during the period of Athens and Paris, namely the fifteen years from 1934 to 1950.

The impetus for the publication was the discovery of a series of drawings by Memnos Makris from the years of the Occupation, with which the sculptor was connected from his student years until 1948. The significance of the corpus of twenty-eight sheets in the collection is crucial for Makris's work, given that these are the only surviving drawings of his.

Alongside the few drawings, the publication also gathers the sculptures of Makris that have survived or were identified in photographic documents, a collection that constitutes the first phase of his creation. This creation is defined both by his studies at the National Academy of Fine Arts and primarily by the example of Thanassis Apartis.

In Paris, his creation is characterized by the influence of his teachers and the abundant stimuli of the artistic metropolis.