Adamantios Diamantis

Biography

“The World of Cyprus” is almost eighteen metres long and 1.75 metres high. Diamantis painted it between 1967 and 1972: eleven acrylic canvases forming a single band, with about sixty-seven life-size human figures. Peasants, priests, children and old women sit at rough tables, their tired hands resting on their knees. The background is soft and earthy, and the figures are outlined in black so that the eye does not wander.

Diamantis was born in Nicosia on 23 January 1900. From 1920 he studied painting for two years at St Martin’s School of Art in London, then at the Royal College of Art, where in 1923 he won first prize for drawing. In 1926 he returned to Cyprus and until 1962 taught art at the Pancyprian Gymnasium in Nicosia. He also organised the first art school in the city and ran it until 1962; in 1950 the work of his pupils was shown with success at an exhibition in Athens. Alongside this he collected folk art, belonged to the Society of Cypriot Studies and took part in founding the Cyprus Folk Art Museum in Nicosia, of which he became the first director. He was a friend of the poet George Seferis, who dedicated to him the poem “Details in Cyprus”.

He painted all his life, and almost everything he made is connected with the island. His early work shows experiments with Cubism, which he abandoned fairly soon, remaining faithful to a realist manner. Among the early pieces are “The Planters” (1932–1933) and portraits of his mother, a beggar with a baby, a girl with poppies, men playing cards in a coffee house and women with water jars. “Rest” of 1942 is painted calmly and gently. “The Asmaalti Tavern” (1961), in which people gather over cheap coffee on a hot day, looks noticeably more anxious. By the middle of the 1950s, as the struggle against British rule sharpened and tension between Greeks and Turks on the island grew, dark tones became more frequent in his pictures. In 1963, when clashes between the two communities threatened the young independent Republic of Cyprus, he began the cycle “Agony”. The main thing in it, he said, was to convey despair: writhing human figures, their fear and their hopes. “The World of Cyprus” grew out of sketches and drawings from life that he had been making since 1931, and each figure was worked out beforehand in separate studies. Diamantis said that he knew everyone he portrayed: the village sculptor, the sage, the musician, the young bride in white whom he had long wanted to paint. A special place is held by the people of the village of Asia, which he visited often and which after 1974 he could no longer reach.

In the summer of 1974 the north of the island came under Turkish control. Diamantis, by his own account, would go out on his balcony and look towards his beloved Kyrenia and the Karpas Peninsula, where he could no longer go. For a long time he could not return to painting, and over the next five years he made only a few works, devoted to the grief of Cypriots, for example “Tragedy at Home” (1976).

“The World of Cyprus” was first shown at the Folk Art Museum in Nicosia in May 1975. The canvas was then sent to Greece: it was exhibited at the National Gallery in Athens and afterwards bought by Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Returning the picture to Cyprus was not safe at the time; Diamantis received an oral promise that it would come back when conditions improved. Later the Leventis Foundation brought it back, and it is now on display in the Leventis Gallery in the centre of Nicosia. The preparatory drawings are held in European museums and private collections. He also exhibited in other cities: London, Edinburgh, Athens, Sofia, Prague, Budapest, Berlin, Bucharest, Belgrade and Paris.

Recognition came late. In 1976 the Academy of Athens honoured him for his work as a teacher and his general contribution; in 1989 the University of Athens paid him tribute; and in 1993 he received the Cypriot state award in arts and letters. His works are in the National Gallery in Nicosia and in private collections.

Diamantis died in Nicosia on 28 April 1994. His son gave his library, about 1,200 books, to the University of Cyprus.