The lessons of Modernist Painter Yannis Tsarouchis

Kyklos Paros welcomes Euphrosyne Doxiadis, painter, writer and art historian.

She will talk about her teacher, the great Greek modernist painter Yannis Tsarouchis (1910-1989), whose signature homoerotic works earned him international acclaim.

Euphrosyne co-edited Tsarouchis’ lectures on modern art given on the island of Chios.

The 1981 Chios lessons are a valuable legacy for those interested in this exceptional artist with an incredibly versatile career.

All his loves: painting, the theatre, with its sets and costumes, Karagiozis, and of course Piraeus, the setting in which he grew up.

Euphrosyne kept us captivated last year with her Fayum lecture. Now that the book on the painter has just been published, we thought it was appropriate to revisit it.

About Euphrosyne Doxiadis:

Yiannis Tsarouchis

While today Tsarouchis remains relatively little-known outside of Greece, he is unanimously recognized in his native country as one of its most important painters of the twentieth century.
Born in 1910 in the Greek port city of Piraeus and educated at the School of Fine Arts in Athens, he began painting at an early age and earned his living as a set and costume designer for the theater.
In 1935 Tsarouchis went to Paris for the first time, where he encountered the work of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and other artists of the Avant-garde.
In 1938, at the age of 28, he had his first solo exhibition in Athens. After serving in the Greek army on the Albanian front in Second World War, he returned to painting and working in the theater, gaining an international reputation.
During Greece’s military dictatorship (1967—1974), Tsarouchis went into exile in Paris to then return to Athens, where he lived until his death in 1989.