Georgios Polybius Georghiou

Biography

His first paints were sent from England by a friend, John Piper: a large parcel of watercolours and paper, with a note saying it was time to start drawing. Georghiou was already past thirty by then, and a lawyer by training.

He was born in September 1901 (1 September, according to the preferred data) in Famagusta, the son of Polybius and Mariolitsa Georghiou; he had two sisters, Elengo and Katina. When he was eighteen his father died. The family sent him to study law in London, with the expectation that he would take over the family business. In London he became interested in painting, met artists from London and Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, spent long periods abroad and went to museums, galleries and exhibitions. In 1933, having finished his course, he returned to Cyprus for good and began work in his father’s office.

He began to paint partly for the sake of his European friends, who knew nothing of Cypriot culture: he wanted to tell them about it in the language of Western art. His first works were made with those same paints from Piper. During the Second World War, it is reported, he alone was permitted to paint the defensive Venetian walls of Famagusta from convenient vantage points and to sketch the manoeuvres of Cypriot ships and troops in the town’s harbour.

Two families helped him develop as an artist: those of Professor John Beazley and of Willy Peplow. Beazley, a lecturer in ancient Greek history at Oxford, supported him when Georghiou showed his work at the British Council in Nicosia, and arranged for it to be shown at the Blackwell Gallery in Oxford. Will and Clotilde Peplow owned the Le Fevre Gallery in London and in 1951 organised his first London exhibition, shared with the painter John Wynter. The show was a success, and many of the pictures were sold.

He remained self-taught, but developed a recognisable manner. He was influenced by modernist movements and by older painters: El Greco, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. He combined this with the traditions of his own country: ancient sculpture, Byzantine art, Gothic and Cypriot folk art. Some of his works are painted in oils on wood, which links them with ancient Cypriot and Byzantine art. Most often he painted Cypriot peasants, in whom he saw the true inhabitants of the island. One of his best-known pictures is “Portrait of a Village Priest”. In “The Priest’s Wife” features of the Byzantine icon and of modernism are combined; the woman’s hands are disproportionately large, and, it seems, the artist meant by this to signify creation, the birth of new life.

Around 1944 he painted “The Nine Saints”, a picture that is now in the Presidential Palace of Cyprus. Before that he had been painting the church at Peristerona, but he put it aside for “The Nine Saints”. Churches appear often in his work, including his landscapes; it seems to me that it mattered that he was born and lived in a town said to have had three hundred and sixty-five churches.

Soon after the founding of the Republic of Cyprus he made the diptych “Greek Cypriot Couple” and “Turkish Cypriot Couple”: in the gestures and bearing of his figures he tried to convey the characteristic features of each of the two communities.

In 1958 came “Arrested Graves”. In close-up, behind bars, are ten graves of Cypriots who died in the struggle for independence and were buried by the British within the grounds of the Central Prison in Nicosia. The names of the dead are inscribed on the gravestones: Michael Koutsoftas, Stelios Mavromatis, Andreas Panagidis, Evagoras Pallikarides, Iakovos Patatsos, Andreas Zakos, Charilaos Michael, Michalis Karaolis, Andreas Dimitriou and Grigoris Afxentiou. In a note on the painting published in The Times, Georghiou said that Afxentiou’s remains were buried on 7 March 1957 behind the iron bars of the prison, and told the story of a white dove that landed on the church roof on the fortieth day, during the memorial service. At the bottom of the picture he placed three mothers, and above them a dove on a church.

He went on exhibiting in cities in Europe and America. His last exhibition took place in Nicosia in 1963; after that he fell ill and stopped painting. He spent his last years in his sister’s house in Famagusta and died there on 2 August 1972. His works are in museums and private collections in several countries. In 2002 a film about him was shown at the fourth Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.