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Description
Specifications
This edition was published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name organized by the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank at the exhibition space of the Eynard Mansion (from May 7 to July 18, 2015).
Nikos Dragoumis was born in Athens in 1874. He was the firstborn son of Stefanos Dragoumis and brother of the politician and writer Ion Dragoumis. After completing his six-year gymnasium education, he went to Paris in 1891 to prepare for the entrance exams at the Naval Academy. He ultimately failed the exams but remained in France for twenty years. He enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the Sorbonne, from which he graduated in late 1897. However, he abandoned law, which he never loved, to pursue painting.
He attended courses at the private art school Académie Julian for two years (from October 1899 to December 1901). At Julian, he formed a close connection with Auguste Chabaud, and through Chabaud, he likely met his other close friend, the painter Jean Balthus. From 1903, after extensive hiking adventures, he settled for long periods in Gravézon, where he established a unique studio, a kind of brotherhood of painting with Balthus and Chabaud. The majority of Dragoumis's works that have reached us date from his years in Gravézon.
He died in 1933 after a twenty-year confinement in psychiatric hospitals in Geneva and Athens. In February 1941, Jean Balthus noted in his diary: "Nikos Dragoumis, with whom I had the fortune to share a residence in Gravézon, was one of those genuine artists, as authentic as Van Gogh and Gauguin."
"Greek Van Gogh" was how Dimitris Pikionis referred to him in 1963. His brother Philippos Dragoumis wrote about him: "Nikos, a harmless, kind, and lovable person, albeit of a rebellious temperament – and sometimes irascible – is likely the first to introduce the impressionistic technique to Greece." He was a philosopher, stoic, but far from strict; on the contrary, he was cheerful, carefree, and ironic, without malice.
He loved nature and utterly detested the so-called advances of technology and mechanics. He deeply cherished free nature and attempted, with great discipline, to adapt to the laws of nature. He did not care what the bourgeois said or did. He cherished the simple and effortless naturalness of peasants.
Nikos never wished to sell any of his paintings because he believed that true art is sacred and not to be commodified. He also thought that it is wrong for art to seek to prove any idea or theory not strictly artistic. He was a proponent of the principle of L' art pour l' art, meaning that art is merely an expression of the artist's inner aesthetic world and nothing more.
Manufacturer
- Publisher
- Morfotiko Idryma Ethnikis Trapezis
- Language
- Greek
- Cover
- Soft
- Number of Pages
- 221
- Release Date
- 27/04/2015
- Publication Date
- 2015
- Award
- -
- Art Movement
- Modernism
- Art Albums
- Yes
- Subjects
- Painting - Drawing, Cinema
- ISBN-13
- 9789602506417
Important information
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