A composition constantly recomposed, an achievement in harmony which never seems to have an inter¬mediate phase — colours and lines and forms and words and sound all in a fascinating perpetuum. One never knows the ultimate destination of all these elements: there is music in the paintings of Spyros Vassiliou as there is colour in his prose, and of course where the painter stops, the stage — or costume — designer takes over, with the architect or landscaper lurking to balance off some brilliant academic display by The Teacher.
This explains the immense popularity of Spyros Vassiliou in almost all cultural strata, Greek and international.
I have known Spyros for a good forty years now and have never seen him lose his sense of balance in public, even under the most trying circumstances.
Just to make sure, however, that this blatant statement applies to his private life as well, I rang up his wife, Kiki Vassiliou, and this is what she had to say:
‘Spyro never really explodes into anything except work. No harsh words, no shouting. If I see him fretting over something too much, I, as a wise wife, gently slide out of the house and go for a walk’.
Perhaps it is a coincidence that almost every house which the Vassilious have occupied has had the easiest possible access to open spaces! For inside this soft-spoken, smooth-mannered young septuagenarian lies a tremendous strength of character cou¬pled with that type of physical endur¬ance which enabled his fellow-craftsmen of other centuries to paint the domes of St. Peter’s and St. Mark’s lying on their backs on a scaffold some 150 metres above the ground.
Spyros, in his time, ‘did’ his churches too. Foreign visitors to Athens include on their cultural itinerary a visit to the Church of St. Dionysios of Areopagos, off Kolonaki Square, to look at his splendid iconography which was hon¬oured by the Academy of Athens with a special prize in 1936.
Yet my own most treasured collec¬tion of memories of the Vassiliou family (one can never think of Vassiliou without the surrounding and ever-thickening family web) goes back to the bitter years of the German Occupation, when any work of art by Spyros Vassiliou was, if not butter, surely bread, and only those who have been through it all know what a great compliment this is.
I happen to possess a couple of very good Vassiliou paintings of the Eretria period, but I would give a fortune (and they are worth one) to own anything dating from the Black Years. In fact, his had been doubly black, for he resorted to carving at that time, paints being virtually unobtainable.
These were the woodcuts of those days: The Women of Mesolonghi, Makriyannis Singing under the Parth¬enon the night that Gouras was destined to be killed, the Burial of Kostis Palamas, the Woe of Kalavryta — this was the blood that Vassiliou transfused to all of us when tomorrow seemed like a monstrous improbability.
Then came the Liberation, and Vassiliou the Secret Consoler and Inspirer became Mr. Open House. (These were the occasions when Kiki Vassiliou could not venture out even for the shortest stroll). From his own church-decorating scaffold Vassiliou seemed to enter another Scaffolding era; Athens in the Hands of the Civil Engineers! Architecture was temporari¬ly (?) dormant in those days.
On to 1960 and The Guggenheim National Section Award is awarded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Founda¬tion to Spyros Vassiliou for his painting ‘Lights and Shadows’.
And this is where I started disagre¬eing with Spyros Vassiliou (and of course with the Guggenheim Founda¬tion). Athens, indeed the whole of Greece, tends to look better than it actually is in the paintings of Spyros Vassiliou. Moreover, Tights and Shadows’ and an intense tourist poster campaign in which Vassiliou played no mean part have created a legendary Greece which poor tourists seek in vain when they set foot on Greek soil.
Reconciliation is fairly easy in the case of Spyros Vassiliou. In my particular case it happened on a certain Kathari Deftera in the course of the usual party which the Vassiliou family gives for their friends at Eretria.
It is, or was, the custom for some masquerading on this day and Spyros had rigged up for himself an authentic shepherd’s costume, crook and all. There was a genuine primitive aura about him, reminiscent of his deep roots in the Greek soil and explaining one of the basic factors of his work — Greekness as a living reality. In this I think I can quote a statement by Leslie Finer: Ά Vassiliou party is often worth as much as a dozen learned books for those who wish to inquire into the sights and the soul of Greece’.
Shortly after, I happened to pass by the Eretria studio and found the artist at work. He was painting a sunset, and the sunset was there, right across the Euboean Straits, and it was this constant, balanced conflict between the actual red sunset and Vassiliou’s deep mauve sunset that led me to write a poem called ‘Eretrian Vespers’.
Here again we have the phenome¬non of the painter improving on the Greek landscape without actually fak¬ing it. I think Pandelis Prevelakis, as always, has defined this latent truth in an article published in ‘Ellinika Grammata’ in May 1935:’… Mr. Vassiliou, with his twin gifts of an original imagination and penetrating percep¬tion, brings reality to his cavases. He shows accuracy and intellectual power in his observation, understanding in the way he plays with form, inventiveness in combining and positioning subjects. And all this is expressed in vivid and well-chosen colours, in a composition full of gems of artistry…’
Had I been writing a biography of Spyros Vassiliou, I would have started with ‘The Golden Hour’ and ended it somewhere around the wedding of his daughter in 1965. So does the painter, in fact, in the case of ‘Lights and Shadows’, and this is already almost ten years gone by.
What may be characteristic of these last ten years, is perhaps a more intense self-concentration, one might say, in the middle of happy family surroundings, a more widespread international recognition, and a warmer Panhellenic acceptance of the painter and his work.
One has a feeling that Greece is paying back the debt to Vassiliou for preserving what should be preserved and embellishing what is being molested. This universality apparently \yill be obvious in this year’s presenta¬tion. The objects will start speaking to us in the usual transmutable process.
‘… As a painter, he speaks a language that is both graceful and unaffected, a language that has the invincible attraction of the fairy story and the fascination of a child’s dream, that penetrates to the most sensitive compartments of our mind. That is why he has deeply touched men’s hearts…’
This is by Angelos Katakouzinos, Professor at the University of Paris and a well-known art-lover — a fitting tribute to a unique achievement: staying young and keeping others young in this very soul-consuming world.
