64. Georgios Bouzianis (Greek, 1885-1959) Femme assise aux cheveux rouges signé 'Busianis' (en haut à droite); signé 'Busianis' (au revers) huile sur toile 129 x 52.5cm (50 13/16 x 20 11/16in). Peint vers 1950. signed (upper right); signed (on the reverse) oil on canvas Provenance The Artist's Estate. Expositions Athens, Exhibition Hall of the Parnassos Literary Society, Exhibition of Works by G. Bouzianis 1883-1959, May 28 - June 15, 1960, no. 21 (possibly). Literature Zygos magazine, no. 10, August 1956, p. 10 (illustrated). Eikones magazine, no. 243, June 17, 1960, p. 23 (shown in a photograph of the artist's home studio). Zygos magazine, no. I-65, February 1965, p. 11 (illustrated). Zygos magazine, no. 37, September-October 1979, p. 26 (shown in a photograph of the artist's home studio). Bouzianis Watercolours, Agra editions - The Friends of Bouzianis', Athens 1982, p. 114 (shown in a photograph of the artist's home studio). Giorgos Bouzianis, Letters to H. Barchfeld, National bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, Athens 1989, fig. 33 (shown in a photograph of the artist's home studio). Commemorative Exhibition of Works by Giorgos Bouzianis, exhibition catalogue, Municipality of Daphni, 1993 (shown in two photographs of the artist's home studio). D. Deliyannis, Giorgos Bouzianis 1885-1959, Adam editions, Athens 1996, no. 195, p. 31 (shown in a photograph with the artist's wife in his home studio, c. 1959), p. 291 (catalogued), 141 (illustrated). For over 60 years, this remarkable recent discovery by Bonhams has been accessible to scholarly research only though black and white photographs of the artist's Athens home studio taken circa 1959. A magnificent painting, whose large-scale format and signature style make it a quintessential Bouzianis from the 1950s, Seated woman with red hair fills the surface of the painting with her corporeal presence and statuesque calm, generating tension between bodily volume and pictorial space in the vein of Picasso's classic period in the 1920s. As keenly noted by Y. Tsarouchis, "there is something classical in the works of Bouzianis, because for a Greek the classical is a natural state of mind."1 Elaborating on this remark, Y. Psychopedis notes: "Though he had assimilated the radical extremities of expressionism, Bouzianis transformed their pronounced gothic metaphysics to a discourse regarding the living human subject. His figures are tied to reality; they are not alienated as formless matter neither lose their identity becoming abstract, archetypal forms or nightmarish masks... His work emanates a nostalgia for the classical, a nostalgia for a lost and constantly sought balance."2 In a 1960 article published in London's Studio magazine, art critic C. Spencer noted that "in his draughtsmanship and handling of form Bouzianis reveals his German inheritance. His colours, however, are entirely non-Teutonic. They sing their lovely gay hues, and it is a Mediterranean, Grecian song, full of sun and golden light. There is also a less easily defined pathos in the colour, for all its glowing beauty. In this mingling of joy and sadness, of sensuality, of movement and form, Bouzianis is a richly rewarding and complex artistic personality."3 Emerging from a shimmering ground of greens, greys, and blues Seated woman with red hair becomes both a reflection of the sitter's inner life and the artist's intense response to the subject. Treated in a frank and direct manner and rendered explicitly in all its glory, the female figure—one of Bouzianis's favourite subjects after 1926—reflects the artist's firm belief that art should be a vehicle for emotional states rather than a process of beautification. Leaving clear traces of a vigorous painting process, the picture pulsates with strong feeling and crackling energy, yet is continuously subordinated to aesthetic demands and disciplined by artistic intelligence. This inexhaustible vitality and incessant pulsating rhythm animate every part of the canvas, making it look like a vibrating star bathed in its own light.4 A master of psychological interpretation and a true visionary, Bouzianis is an artist of international calibre. Being part of the interwar European avant-garde, he transcended the sterile academic tenets with an art of emotional and physical immediacy, seeking, as Oscar Kokoschka once said, to render the vision of people being alive. 1 Y. Tsarouchis, preface to Bouzianis Watercolours [in Greek], Agra editions -The Friends of Bouzianis, Athens 1982, p. 12. 2 Y. Psychopedis, "The Militant Introversion, Expressive Lyricism and Critical Spirit in the Work of Bouzianis" [in Greek] in Nostos, Kedros editions, Athens 2009, pp. 228-229. 3C.S. Spencer, "George Bousianis", Studio magazine, London, vol. 159, no. 806, June 1960, p. 206. 4 See G. Mourelos, "Bouzianis's Technique" [in Greek], Kathimerini newspaper, Epta Imeres, October 27, 1996, p. 28.