In February 2022 Cosmote TV, a digital television platform, released a fifteen-episode series, The Unsurpassed Generation of the Thirties. A docudrama, it presented the members and the dynamics of the most famous generation in Greek letters and art. The subject was obviously of interest to the public, since a television company had invested in an expensive production. The press releases made clear that this generation is still Greece’s pride and glory, still holds the imagination of a mass audience, is still important cultural capital for Greece.Footnote 1 It is indeed, as Dimitris Tziovas has put it, an imagined community’s ‘myth’.Footnote 2
It led me to reflect on my years of high school and university education, only to realize that I too grew up with this ‘generation’. When I was studying for the national entrance examination to Greek universities, the daunting Panhellenic Examinations, one of the readings my tutor suggested to inspire me for the essay paper was Seferis’ translation of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1936. Today it seems strange that this revolutionary but pessimistic poem might help a high school student in the late 1980s, get ideas for writing good essays. However, Manos Hadjidakis’ album The Cruel April of 1945, inspired by Eliot’s opening verses ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land’, helped me to connect the poem to my tasks and to what I had been taught about the precious gifts the Generation of the Thirties brought to Greek letters. I realized that my tutor’s efforts were concentrated on familiarizing me with modernity, the current canon in Greece as it stood in the late 1980s. But when was this canon constructed, and with what aims?
As a student of History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki I understood the vital issues, political, social, and scientific, raised by Greece’s peripheral modernity. The Generation of the Thirties was included in every syllabus on modern literature and art. Our readings on modern art history were mainly texts by Eleni Vakalo (1921–2001), Tonis Spiteris (1910–86), Alexandros Xydis (1918–2004), Marinos Kalligas (1906–85), and Chysanthos Christou (1922–2016), in which the authors tried to interpret how European (and especially Parisian) modern styles were appropriated by Greek artists. Modernity seemed to me a path Greeks had to follow —a difficult task, since ‘Greekness’ had to be preserved and promoted at all costs. But what was meant by ‘Greekness’? And how could it encompass modern artistic expressions? I soon realized that it was perhaps easier to comprehend the problem through imaginative literature. A celebrated literary generation held a hegemonic position in our university classes and in everyday life. And so I returned to Eliot and Seferis.
Leaving aside my personal experience, there is no doubt that the Generation of the Thirties is the most studied group of writers, and artists in Greece. There is not one scholar specializing in twentieth-century Greek art or literature who has not discussed it in some context. Literary analyses dominate discourses on the subject, as language has been a more powerful tool for the definition of national identity than art and thus more open to political readings. Art historians face different challenges. Identifying ‘Greek’ elements in a painting has been certainly a more difficult task than in a novel or a poem, where language itself is a marker of ‘Greekness’. Moreover, unlike the use of the label in literary studies, where it denotes a specific cohort with shared characteristics, the ‘Generation of the Thirties’ in art was rather belatedly applied and vaguely described. Thus, I begin this paper by challenging the use of the term’s application to Greek art. In the next two sections, I argue that the artists later referred to as the ‘painters of Greekness’ or the ‘Generation of the Thirties’ came to be shaped and deeply influenced by Cold War cultural politics, at a time when cultural constructs and concepts were consumed as stereotypes and images. In the final section, I discuss the use of the label in relation to the Metapolitefsi (post-1974) shifts in cultural identity and propose an explanation for why the famous Generation in art possessed such appeal when the use of the term seemed historically outdated.
The ‘Generation of the Thirties’ in art: a non-existent ‘generation’
The very existence of a ‘Generation of the Thirties’ in Greek art has recently been called into question at conferences and in publications by Evgenios Matthiopoulos, whose argumentation I take up here.
In contrast to the many ‘generational’ features of the literary group, in art the situation is different. The painters to whom the label usually applies have certain shared stylistic elements in their works. However, they lack all the other supposed constituent elements of the Generation: they did not have a leader, or common activities, and, above all, never claimed the title ‘Generation of the Thirties’ for themselves, whether in the 1930s and 1940s or later. Yannis Moralis (1916–2009) and Yannis Tsarouchis (1910–89), in particular, never accepted the ‘honour’ of being taxonomized as painters of ‘Greekness’,Footnote 3 and Nikos Engonopoulos (1907–85) declared in an interview that he did not ‘belong to the non-existent “Generation of the Thirties”’.Footnote 4 They all came to prominence mainly after the Second World War (in fact, after the Civil War of 1946–9) and did not have a clearly stated or implied common mission, although some of them, such as Fotis Kontoglou (1895–1965) and Nikos Engonopoulos, were also important writers and intellectually aligned with their literary peers.
Nonetheless, the term ‘Generation of the Thirties’ took hold in discussions of art as it did in literature. When I was a university student, we used it in classes, in exams and essays, invariably for the literary and the art ‘generation’. Until the 2000s, students of modern Greek culture read about the famous generation (without quotation marks) in their textbooks, which included it as a separate chapter associated with ‘Greekness’.Footnote 5 From the late 1990s onwards PhD dissertations were written on individual members of the art ‘generation’, for example on Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas (1906–94) Footnote 6 and Nikos Engonopoulos,Footnote 7 and numerous articles on the subject appeared in art history conferences and journals examining various aspects of their work and career.
Not only art historical texts, but also exhibitions followed this questionable historical grouping. The National Gallery in Athens, and especially its long-term director (1992–2022), Marina Lambraki-Plaka (1939–2022), promoted it systematically, using it not only in popularizing texts, but also as a taxonomic category for the institution’s collections and exhibition titles. For example, the 2002 travelling exhibition, which moved to municipal galleries (Patras, Metsovo, Florina), entitled The ‘Thirties Generation’ in the Post-war Period and the Conquest of Abstraction,Footnote 8 and the 2012 exhibition in Nafplion The Generation of the Thirties in Quest for Greekness.Footnote 9 The Benaki Museum followed the lead with, for example, the exhibition Fayum Portraits and the Generation of the ‘30s in 1998.Footnote 10 It appears that this ‘generation’ is a kind of passe-partout: it can be associated with almost anything, from antiquity to abstraction.
But which artists are usually included in the ‘Generation of the Thirties’? Not two authors or curators agree. Lambraki-Plaka in the National Gallery’s guide to the permanent exhibition of the collections, first published in 2000 to honour the centenary of its founding, and since 2013 in its third edition, includes the names of thirteen artists.Footnote 11 Yet they can hardly be described as belonging to a single generation, since their dates of birth differ significantly: Aginor Asteriadis (1898–1977), Spyros Vasileiou (1903–85), Dimitrios Galanis (1879–1966), Yorgos Gounaropoulos (1889–1977), Diamantis Diamantopoulos (1914–95), Nikos Engonopoulos (1907–86), Fotis Kontoglou (1895–1965), Yannis Moralis (1916–2009), Spyros Papaloukas (1892–1957), Konstantinos Parthenis (1878–1967), Angelos Spachis (1903–60), Gerasimos Steris (1898–1987), Yannis Tsarouchis (1910–89), Errikos Frantziskakis (1908–58), Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas (1906–94), and Theofilos (Chatzimichail, 1870–1934). Theofilos, a self-taught painter, whose ‘discovery’ in the interwar period was seen as evidence of the existence of a Greek modernism, is listed here as a source of inspiration, or perhaps as the Greek equivalent of Douanier Rousseau.Footnote 12 Apart from him, the oldest in this list is Parthenis (b. 1878), the youngest Moralis (b. 1916). Other authors, however, include other or more artists. Possible candidates are (among many): Theofrastos Triantafyllidis (1881–1955), Yannis Mitarakis (1897/8–1963), Nelly’s (1899–1988), Nikos Nikolaou (1909–86), Valias Semertzidis (1911–83), Kostas Malamos (1913–2007), Diamantis Diamantopoulos (1914–95), Minos Argyrakis (1919–98), Asadour Baharian (1924–90), and even artists who never cared for expressing ‘Greek’ formal values, such as the expressionist Yorgos Bouzianis (1885–1959), the abstract artists Yannis Spyropoulos (1912–90) and Alekos Kontopoulos (1904–75), and perhaps the sculptor Michalis Tombros (1889–1974).Footnote 13 This ambiguity about the members of the so-called ‘generation’ speaks volumes about the vague essence of its construction and calls for explanations.
Evgenios Matthiopoulos has studied thoroughly the use of the term ‘generation’ in European history of literature and art as a taxonomic tool.Footnote 14 He rejects altogether this categorization when it comes to Greek art. As he has recently shown, it should not be applied to the visual arts, because it lacks historicity.Footnote 15 In fact, he has found no evidence in published texts or in archives of the use of the term ‘Generation of the Thirties’ before the first post-war decades. And even then, the meagre evidence is sporadic and inconsistently used. It is important to note that, in contrast to the visual arts, George Theotokas (1905–66) first referred to the literary ‘génération de 1930’ as early as 1937.Footnote 16 Matthiopoulos traced the term’s first appearance in art criticism in texts by Angelos Prokopiou (1909–67) and Manolis Hadjidakis (1909–98) in 1948–50, who used it sporadically to refer to the art group Armos.Footnote 17 This group was formed in reaction to the authoritarian administration of the Arts Chamber of Greece, the hostility to anti-academic ideas in Greece and the lack of an art market or of any kind of state policies for contemporary art,Footnote 18 but its members did not share any of the aims of the literary Generation of the Thirties. Some of the Armos members (Ghika, Tsarouchis, Engonopoulos, Moralis and Nicolaou), eventually became the protagonists of what later was named the ‘Generation of the Thirties’. Matthiopoulos locates another early (and random) mention in a text by Tonis Spiteris in 1955, as well as a mention by Xydis in 1961.
It appears to be the case that before the 1970s both artists and art critics (Xydis, Kalligas, Vakalo), had no knowledge of the term.Footnote 19 In his seminal text Matthiopoulos also points out that the ‘Generation of the Thirties’ begins to ‘exist’ in the field of visual arts in the Metapolitefsi after 1974, when ‘references and attempts by art critics and art historians to define it became more frequent and when the history of modern Greek art actually began to be written’.Footnote 20 After Matthiopoulos’ essay, there is no room for doubt that the term ‘Generation of he Thirties’ is of limited use when it comes to the visual arts.
A post-war modern Greek style
No matter how we approach the phenomenon, and apart from any terminological issues, the fact remains that modern art had to acquire specific ‘Greek’ characteristics to be accepted by local art pundits. Novelists and poets had a lead in that direction, simply by virtue of writing in Greek. But paintings presented a more difficult task, as modern visual elements, unlike language, lacked any inherent or immediately recognizable Greek markers. This is why the first modernist painters of the period 1915–30, such as Konstantinos Maleas (1879–1928) and Nikos Lytras (1883–1927), turned to landscape or to ‘Greek’ (Attic) light to tag their works as ‘Greek’. For Antonis Kotidis, landscape as a subject for painting became an early vehicle to achieve a Greek modern art.Footnote 21 For Dimakopoulou, the connection between ‘Greekness’ and landscape was the response of Greek artists to the demand of, especially, French art critics for an emphasis on a couleur locale. Geography could only be a local element, and the choice of subject therefore prevailed within the context of yet another hetero-definition of the identity of Greek art.Footnote 22
After the Asia Minor Disaster, and especially in the 1930s, ‘Greekness’ acquired a different and highly ideological content, and painters, sculptors and architects strived to produce ‘Greek’ works by referring stylistically or thematically to elements drawn from the age old Greek cultural heritage.Footnote 23 This ethnocentric trend, labelled by Tziovas the ‘aesthetics of nationality’,Footnote 24 fuelled the Generation of the Thirties in literature. In art, however, it is difficult to trace today stylistic references to a heritage spanning several millennia. It presupposes the existence of a linear national historical narrative, it flattens historical facts, and it depends on the reception of this over-simplified past in a given timeframe. Chrysanthos Christou, one of the first professors of art history in Greece, avoided addressing ideological issues in art and preferred to classify Greek artists simply by date of birth. In his writings, artists were classified by generation, but, interestingly, he never mentioned a Generation of the Thirties. In fact, he divided those later labelled by this name into the ‘Generation of 1881–1897’ and the ‘Generation of 1897–1922’.Footnote 25 Note that Christou’s career was a product of the early Cold War, and that his appointment to the newly founded Chair of History of Medieval and Modern Western Art in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1965 marked an important turning point towards the West, in terms both of teaching and research.Footnote 26
Approaches to the connection between ‘Greekness’ and modern art vary. Kotidis has used the label ‘Generation of the Thirties’ for painters, but by far his preferred word has been ‘tradition’, which he uses to describe that intellectual tendency of the 1930s which called for a ‘return to the roots’.Footnote 27 Later, Matthiopoulos has approached it through a socio-historical analysis emphasizing the political forces that shaped it, using the term ‘ethnocentric’ art.Footnote 28 Before them, in the 1980s, Eleni Vakalo, in her book The Myth of Greekness, saw this art trend in the 1930s as a response to a mixture of cosmopolitanism, neoromantic pessimism, and a turn to Byzantium as the root of Greek identity.Footnote 29 She regarded this turn to ‘the roots’ as a purely modern characteristic, an act similar to the western modernist turn to primitive or folk art.Footnote 30 After all, Tsarouchis himself had maintained that the figures of Karaghiozis, the Greek shadow theatre, were for him what ‘negro’ sculpture was for the cubists.Footnote 31 Recent researchers conclude that Tsarouchis and Vakalo described the phenomenon accurately.Footnote 32
All art historians on this topic have begun their analyses with the intellectual environment of the interwar period but base their argumentation on the post-1945 production. And this is to be expected, for they all admit that, although rooted in the 1930s, this ‘generation’ in art reached its peak only after 1945.Footnote 33 It is then that it became the dominant trend in the Greek art scene, a fact that led art historians to speak about descendants, heirs and successors, thus extending the ‘generation’s’ reign almost to this day. Tsarouchis and Moralis were certainly the two most influential artists in the early post-war decades.Footnote 34 Why did their style come to be so popular in the 1950s and 1960s?
I believe that this ‘Greek’ version of modern art should be examined broadly as a post-war construct, not only because it attained a dominant position after 1945, but because the ideological frame that nourished it in the 1930s had by then been radically transformed, in accordance with the post-war revision of Greek national identity and the international Cold War cultural politics. Although ‘tradition’ in the 1920s and 1930s was perceived as a turn to Byzantine and folk art, a turn that matched the aestheticism and the bohemian style of many intellectuals and coincided with the anti-classicism of the artistic avant-garde, this fertile diversity was destroyed during the Second World War and the Greek Civil War. Greece’s new position as an ally of the West imposed different political pressures and cultural priorities. Athens had to return to her world-renowned position as the ‘cradle of democracy’, and the classical Greek heritage had to be reasserted over Byzantium, which was associated with the Slavic Eastern bloc.Footnote 35
Politics apart, in psychological terms the formation of the literary Generation of the Thirties has often been interpreted as a response to a collective trauma. The quest for ‘Greekness’ in the inter-war period was associated with the Asia Minor Disaster and the exchange of populations that followed. In the post-war period the collective trauma was the German Occupation and the Civil War. ‘Greekness’ inevitably meant something new in this context.
The continuity and rupture points between the inter- and post-war contemporary Greek culture are many and diffuse. Kostas Tachtsis (1927–88), in the brief sleeve note he wrote for Manos Hadjidakis’ LP Ο σκληρός Απρίλης του ’45, summarizes the situation experienced by the ‘enfants terribles of the 30s’ after 1945:
At the time of the Civil War, around 1945–1948, we […] found ourselves in a dead end, unknown to the generations before or after ours. Our healthy instinct told us that we had to start by tearing down [the past]. But: (a). the macabre game that was supposed to decide whether the demolition would be from the ground up, was still being played in the Greek mountains […]. (b). we had nothing ready or suitable to take the place of what we were going to demolish —nothing, that is to say, that was not only acceptable by our modern sensibility, but that would meet the demand for a return to the Greek roots, for which we had been convinced, albeit with some ambiguity and plenty of sunny sentimentality, by the people we saw as teachers. c. the horrors of the Occupation were still alive in our memory and in our flesh, we had passed close to death, and we wanted to forget, we wanted to live […].
Tachtsis’ words reveal what continuation and rupture meant at the time, what the emotional burden was and what led young people to ‘dead ends’: it was not the final demise of the Great Idea, but the cruel everyday reality of their own time. Their ‘modern sensibility’ was conditioned by the events of the 1940s and their ‘Greek roots’ had to be redefined, for they were already questioning ‘Greekness’ as imparted by their ‘teachers’.
The notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernization’ are not ‘natural’ categories, nor are they stable. They are constructs connected to the nation-building process.Footnote 36 In Greece after the Civil War both notions and their content changed to facilitate Greece’s new political orientation. In a way, we could trace the construction of a new ‘invented tradition’ as Eric Hobsbawm defined it,Footnote 37 a new way to appropriate the past through Cold War political dynamics.
After 1949 Greece emerged from her Civil War as a Western European state. Her economy, social structures, and national identity had to be westernized, and at a rapid pace. The inter-war view that contemporary Greek culture comprised both western and eastern elements had to be put aside. The Civil War and any form of communist ideology, and consequently any political content in art, would also fall into oblivion. Indeed, after 1949, Greece, for the first time in its modern history, was constructed as a purely western nation.Footnote 38 Under the pressure of ideological and strategic considerations, ‘Hellenism’ was further conditioned by American visions of democracy, development and modernization.Footnote 39 Every aspect of life was fast being modernized, especially in Athens. And so too should art. A modern ‘Greek’ style of painting, referring to the Post-impressionists and to Fauvism, already existed and could serve as the dominant contemporary Greek art production both for internal use and for export.
In the 1950s and 1960s the artists of ‘Greekness’ were celebrated by art critics and the local art market. But what did the national institutions promote? The only public collection of Greek art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the country was the National Gallery in Athens, which lacked a permanent exhibition space and whose collection was not on show until after 1945. The artistic production of the modern Greek state was not researched, and accounts of its history were completely lacking.
Marinos Kalligas, director of the National Gallery from 1949 to 1971, constructed and methodically promoted the first narrative on modern and contemporary artistic production in Greece.Footnote 40 He organized a travelling exhibition of works from the Gallery’s permanent collections in Ioannina, Nicosia, Kavala, and Thessaloniki in the 1960s. Kalligas proposed that the art of the modern Greek state was the most recent step in the national narrative on Greek culture, which began in prehistory and continued uninterrupted to the twentieth century. His linear narrative emphasized modern ‘Greekness’ wherever that could be traced. His travelling exhibition began with two post-Byzantine icons by Stefanos Tzangarolas (late seventeenth-early eighteenth century) and Andreas Pavias (c. 1440–between 1504–12) and ended in the 1950s with Nikolaos Gyzis (1842–1901) and in the 1960s with Tsarouchis, specifically with his Koundouriotissa οr Woman from Eleusis (1948). Kalligas thought that Tsarouchis was the most important living Greek artist, one worthy of closing and bringing to its climax the linear narration he constructed. His history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek art – actually, of academic and modern Greek art – was in line with the practices of his colleagues in Western Europe: local elements were emphasized in linear narratives, and art was studied as an apolitical phenomenon, outside of historical context, viewed in formalist terms alone.Footnote 41 By placing Tsarouchis at the end of his narrative, he underlined what he considered to be the significant Greek art of his time.
In the 1950s and 1960s many in the Greek art scene felt threatened by the advance of abstract art in the western world. As more conservative stylistic choices prevailed after the Civil War,Footnote 42 abstraction was often seen as the work of the Devil, an audacious foreign invasion that endangered contemporary local culture, or an easy choice made by lazy, untalented artists indifferent to Greek values.Footnote 43 In contrast, the ‘Greek’ type of post-war modernism offered a style that conformed to the Western art canon: an apolitical art based on formal experimentation, with references to French modernism that dominated the post-war world, and infused with local elements.Footnote 44 Abstract, but not to the point of abstract expressionism or art informel, ‘safely’ based on art trends that were already in the museum and therefore certainly recognised for their value, avoiding subjects of recent history or of contemporary social or political interest, and based on an aestheticized perception of the Greek cultural past, this style dominated contemporary Greek art. It was both ‘Greek’ and ‘European’, and thus synchronized with the Greek state orientation in Cold War politics; was uncontroversially accepted locally; and could perhaps offer artists a measure of European prestige. However, what was intensely discussed within Greek borders did not reflect the current international tendencies: when Moralis and Tsarouchis represented Greece at the Venice Biennale in 1958, Moralis was unsuccessfully nominated for a humble award. It was the abstract painter Yannis Spyropoulos (1912–90) who at the same event in 1960 won the prestigious UNESCO Prize.
‘Tradition’ and modernity as an image and stereotype in the 1950s and 1960s
An ahistorical view was adopted in defining ‘tradition’ in the early post-war period. Vakalo understood artists’ references to ‘tradition’ not as straightforward stylistic loans, but as a more vaguely described embrace of the past, perceived as ‘experience, feeling, idea, form’.Footnote 45 This approach to the past is what Tziovas calls ‘aesthetic or modernist’ and ‘assumes the presence of the past not so much as a historical survival but as a kind of aesthetic or stylistic continuity or a metaphorical equivalence’.Footnote 46 This generalizing view of the past, beyond the constraints of history, conformed to the stereotypical images of European local cultures that formed in the post-war period. In the 1950s and 1960s, mass tourism was important for all European countries, whether they belonged to the Western or the Eastern bloc. It was not only an economic factor, bringing in foreign currency and promoting regional development. It also had a prominent social dimension, since it presupposed the right of workers to paid vacations, a practice that was essentially a Cold War institution. By promoting a new form of consumption, that of services, it helped to create stereotypical images of national identity in each country, which progressively became more commercialized.Footnote 47
As tourism became a significant industry, simplistic images of national assets widely disseminated. The Greek National Tourism Organization (NTOG) was re-organized, after pressing interventions by the USA, in the 1950s.Footnote 48 Greece was branded as the land of ancient culture and the cradle of significant western values, such as democracy and freedom. Advertising campaigns showcased archaeological treasures and spectacular landscapes, but also pointed to the hospitality of the local population and their carefree mentality. The tourist industry required stereotypical values and easily ingestible images. In this context ‘Greekness’ became a spectacle, ready to be traded and consumed. Note that many artists of the ‘Generation of the Thirties’, such as Vasileiou, Tsarouchis and Moralis, designed posters for the GNTO.Footnote 49
In short, the popularization of the interwar notion of ‘Greekness’ took place in an environment saturated with images and commercial stereotypes. Kotidis describes the shift:
In the 1950s and 1960s ‘the worldview of Tradition’ passed from the closed collective of artists and intellectuals of the inter-war period to an unprecedented popular absorption throughout the arts, but especially music and poetry.Footnote 50 […] It was then that the aesthetics of ‘Tradition’ reached its pinnacle, since its interwar classics produced their finest works in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 51
This explains the free associations with ‘tradition’ that Vakalo described as a vague reference to an all-encompassing cultural past, perceived in the present as experience and feeling. These artists propagated a modern Greek style, which was less based on ideology, at a time when ‘Greekness’ was rapidly becoming an image and a spectacle. Their visual references to ‘tradition’ were no longer part of a search for a couleur locale, nor did they serve an ideological ‘return to the roots’. They gradually became references to the mass media stereotypes of ‘tradition’ that were already in circulation: balanced and harmonious compositions were associated with classical antiquity, schematized, abstract, human figures with Byzantium, colourful decorative motifs with folk art, and so on. After all, easy recognition of visual references meant easy access to a wider Western market, which all artists in Greece craved.
In this frame, conservative intellectuals worried about a possible loss of the national character in Greece, as new ideas and ways of life were promoted. Not without reason: in the late 1950s, as economy gradually recovered, optimism returned to Greek (at least Athenian) society. Pop culture was imported and conquered every aspect of life. Slowly but steadily a wholly new field of desire developed. How many people could resist this new, glimmering and optimistic lifestyle? Who among the artists could still maintain an academic viewpoint?
In the Athenian euphoric scene of the 1960s modern art seems to have been everywhere: in exhibitions brought to Greece by foreign institutes, in galleries, as a trendy background in the popular black-and-white Greek movies and indeed in public space, through architecture. Modernism was the undeniable dominant trend in Greek architecture, both in its high version and its low-brow one.Footnote 52 No wonder artists like Moralis collaborated with the architects of the Athens Hilton in decorating its façade, and with the ceramist Eleni Vernardaki (b. 1933) for the pavilion ‘Dionysos’, while all Xenia hotels and motels were decorated by artists including Loukopoulos, Tsarouchis, Moralis, Vasileiou, Vernardaki and others.
Alongside architecture, music was another Greek production that introduced the local population to modernity and pop culture.Footnote 53 It was in fact the first contemporary Greek production to reach international audiences. The song Children of Piraeus won Hadjidakis an Oscar in 1961 and Nana Mouskouri had many sold-out performances at the Olympia in Paris in the second half of the 1960s. Mikis Theodorakis held many successful concerts in Paris and London. Both Hadjidakis and Theodorakis set to music poets of the ‘Generation of the Thirties’, Elytis and Seferis being their favourites. No wonder Tsarouchis, Moralis, and other similarly-minded painters were the illustrators who produced the covers of their music albums. Among countless examples: Moralis created the cover of Hadjidakis’ album Για μια μικρή λευκή αχιβάδα in 1947 and Tsarouchis illustrated the first edition of Elytis’ Το Άξιον Εστί set to music by Theodorakis in 1960. They also designed the covers for many books written or translated by the literary Generation. The cover of Eliot’s The Waste Land, mentioned at the beginning of this article, was designed by Moralis.
In the post-Civil War conditions spectacles of every kind were a popular means for comforting audiences and healing wounds. In Athens multiple fruitful collaborations resulted in high-quality theatrical and dance performances that created a model of how to be up-to-date Greek and modern at once. I believe these collaborations had a formative role for the painters I discuss in this essay. Painters worked with theatre directors, dancers and choreographers with whom they shared convictions in matters political as well as in lifestyle. The most studied examples are Tsarouchis’ collaboration with Karolos Koun (1908–87) and Manos Hadjidakis, as well as those of Moralis and Ghikas with the Hellenic Choreodrama of Rallou Manou (1915–88), founded in 1951, for which they designed costumes and settings.Footnote 54 As spectacles aiming at local audiences, these performances had fewer references to classical antiquity than to Byzantine and folk art. The past so recreated was thought to be alive among the rural population. However, the Greek creators who staged such plays were not peasants but bourgeois intellectuals. This ‘living tradition’ was foreign to them, they were as much detached from it as any European intellectual.Footnote 55 In fact both the Greek past and the European ‘modern past’ were foreign lands to Greek artists, who had to conquer both, even though they did not quite understand them. And in this they were not alone. The European Others shared the same view about the Greek past:
Paradoxically, it was this Balkan, ‘oriental’ past that made Greece such a charming country to visitors, readers, and scholars after the Second World War. There was much interest, for instance, among professionals and lay individuals in the folklore of the country—from the ritual lament to rebétika, from firewalking to honour, from kafenio to palikari.Footnote 56
We can easily trace the view of the European Other in films such as Never on Sunday (1960) directed by Jules Dassin and Zorba the Greek (1965) directed by Michael Cacoyannis, with music respectively by Hadjidakis and Theodorakis. Both films were instrumental in constructing a stereotypical image of Greece, its landscape, its people and its identity,Footnote 57 an image enthusiastically consumed both in Greece and in Western Europe. Τhe painters examined here were immersed in its construction. One example: for the ‘Greek party’ organized for the premiere of the film Never on Sunday in Cannes, which introduced the syrtaki dance to Europeans, it was Moralis who designed the setting, hanging mermaids from pedimental facades and transforming the room into a taverna.Footnote 58
The ‘Generation of the Thirties’: a catchy label for Greek art in the Metapolitefsi
Yet, despite the dominant position of ‘the painters of Greekness’ in the 1950s and 1960s, the tag ‘Generation of the Thirties’ in art gained wide currency only following the Metapolitefsi. This was curious timing: Theotokas had in 1963 argued that the myth he claimed to have created in 1937 ‘was a genuine Greek literary movement, which lasted the whole of the 1930s. After 1940, the group movement ended and each of us continued our work under our own responsibility.’Footnote 59 If the leader of the literary generation took such a self-critical stance and announced the demise of the group, why was the term extended in the late 1970s to other artistic productions? Since many art historians would today agree that the painters of ‘Greekness’, as described by the ‘Generation of the Thirties’ schema, represented more certainly a post-war phenomenon than the literary generation, and this was probably common knowledge among the artists too, why was the term applied to them? In this article I can only offer tentative hypotheses.
In Greece from Junta to Crisis, Tziovas maintains that a significant shift in national identity happened in Greece after the Metapolitefsi, a shift from economic to cultural concerns.Footnote 60 He schematically describes the successive shifts in national identity in post-war Greece as follows:
After the end of the Civil War, Greece faced a series of challenges. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the challenge of rebuilding the country after the devastation of the war, resulting in an unprecedented urbanization; in the 1970s and 1980s, it was the redistribution of power and wealth with the concomitant rise of consumer culture; and since the early 1990s, it has been the negotiation of the country’s position in the world order, following the end of the Cold War, and as a result of further EU integration, migration and globalization. This has brought to the fore issues of identity, cultural repositioning and national rebranding and could lead to the argument that it is the preoccupation with identities that has stolen the limelight, and which defines the post-junta period as a whole.Footnote 61
As I have already indicated, during the early Cold War decades, the ‘Generation of the Thirties’ began to function as a broad, loosely defined term, extending beyond literature to encompass visual arts, architecture, music, theatre, and film, effectively establishing a new artistic canon. This period also witnessed the literary Generation of the Thirties achieving international acclaim, with extensive readership and the Nobel literature prizes for Seferis (1963) and Elytis (1979). Simultaneously, a touristic and neo-colonial version of ‘Greekness’ gained widespread popularity. Following the Metapolitefsi, Greek intellectuals grappled with modernization, Europeanization, and rationalization.Footnote 62 As Tziovas argues, ‘the debates on identity and the fetishization of “Greekness” increased, in an attempt to resolve cultural dilemmas or navigate between opposing perspectives on the past’.Footnote 63 Consequently, in the 1980s, Greek modernism, identified with the ‘Generation of the Thirties’, became a central element of national identity and a key focus of cultural debate. In literature
there was also an attempt to reread earlier Greek fiction from a modernist perspective and this has led to the reassessment of writers such as Melpo Axioti, Yannis Skarimbas, Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis, Yannis Beratis, Nikos Kachtitsis and Dimosthenis Voutyras. […] Their texts have been reprinted and formed an alternative modernist canon, upstaging the writers of the 1930s (such as Myrivilis, Terzakis, and Theotokas), who managed to retain some of their past popularity by their novels being serialized on television (a new phenomenon beginning in the last quarter of the twentieth century).Footnote 64
It was in this context that the label ‘Generation of the Thirties’ took on flesh and blood for the artists. And it is in this context that I began weaving the present text.
In the late 1980s and 1990s the ‘Generation’ was especially celebrated. In literature, architecture, music, theatre, even pop culture, the kind of Greek modernity introduced by the ‘generation’ became the canon. The artists associated with it were well established. Moralis had been teaching at the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA) for more than thirty years, Tsarouchis, Ghika, and Engonopoulos had repeatedly presented their work beyond Greece’s borders and they all enjoyed retrospective exhibitions accompanied by voluminous catalogues documenting their oeuvre. The literature on the members of the art ‘generation’ grew to such an extent that it constituted the main body of publications on Greek modernism.Footnote 65
Another institutional change took place in this period: those who had grown up under the direct tutelage of the ‘Generation of the Thirties’ were now in key positions in the cultural field. Nourished by their spirit and capitalizing on their popularity, they played an important role in the dissemination of a new perception of ‘Greekness’ more clearly European in character and more clearly associated with the proliferation of the mass-media. One such case of succession is of particular interest for the institutionalisation of the ‘Generation of the Thirties’ branding for artists. Pantelis Prevelakis (1909–86) is best known as a novelist, poet, dramatic author and a member of the literary Generation of the Thirties. Less well known is his doctoral thesis, on the work of El Greco in Crete and Italy, a work that led to his appointment in 1939 to the chair of art history at the ASFA. A follower of Henri Focillon, he favoured a more intuitive approach to art production. His art historical text focused on the Italian Renaissance and its connection to Greek antiquity,Footnote 66 while one of the books he translated in Greek is in use to this day.Footnote 67 He made significant institutional contributions to modern Greek culture, for which he was honoured and awarded many prizes.Footnote 68
Prevelakis was succeeded at ASFA by Marina Lambraki-Plaka, one of the first women to be appointed professor at the School, and one of the longest serving directors of the National Gallery, who never failed to mention in her résumé that she had attended Prevelakis’ classes. Her intellectual allegiance to him, whom she regarded as her initiator in the history of art, is evident in the choice of topics for her publications,Footnote 69 in the exhibitions she organized at the National GalleryFootnote 70 and the promotion of the ‘Generation of the Thirties’ in Greek art. She believed in blockbuster exhibitions and in the power of catchy phrases.
Lambraki-Plaka is just one example and the same may be said of to Moralis’ successors at the ASFA or Christou’s at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and in many more cases. Τhe ‘Generation of the Thirties’ was a tag disseminated widely from the late 1970s onwards in Greece. Although it escaped definition, it was used in public debates, university classes, publications and exhibitions. Using it to brand a Greek art production was easy and convenient. The public could easily relate to this brand name, since most people (myself included) were born and raised learning about the ‘enfants terribles of the 1930s’ in school. Politicians and people in the cultural sphere could not resist this choice, which extended the international recognition of a Greek artistic production to their time. The label was appealing and spread far and wide. The name was institutionalized and, despite its lack of historicity, follows us almost to the present day.
To conclude, the term ‘Generation of the Thirties’ in art came to be applied retrospectively to characterize a version of Greek modern art which made strong references to the country’s age-old cultural heritage, from prehistory to the present. The ‘painters of Greekness’, as they were frequently called, produced their primary work after 1949, and enjoyed considerable reputation from the 1970s onwards. They were shaped by the dynamics of the Cold War and shaped in turn the Greek art scene, becoming the most famous artists of the twentieth century both inside the country and beyond. In the 1980s, they were tagged as the ‘Generation of the Thirties’, a clear reference to the more famous literary generation. This attractive, if ahistorical, label, used and disseminated by art historians and museums alike, highlights the complex interplay of history, art, politics and marketing in a media-saturated, consumerist culture that demands easy labels and easily recognizable images of national identity.
Areti Adamopoulou is Professor of Art History at the University of Ioannina, Greece. She specializes in post-1945 Greek art. Her publications, in both Greek and English, address topics such as Cold War cultural diplomacy, exhibition histories, the role of public monuments in shaping collective memory, and the institutional history of art in Greece. She has led and collaborated on numerous research initiatives, including a recent nationally funded project on public monuments commemorating the Second World War. She is also actively engaged in postgraduate teaching and the supervision of emerging scholars in the field.
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