Loukia Nicolaidou

Biography

Loukia Nicolaidou’s first solo exhibition opened in 1934, first in Nicosia and then in Limassol. The response was unfavourable: the public accepted neither her modern manner nor the subjects themselves.

She was born in 1909 into a wealthy family in Limassol. She finished the School of Foreign and Greek Languages and then took a correspondence course with the ABC School in Paris. The painter Vasilis Vryonidis advised her to go abroad to study. For Cyprus at the time this was unusual: women were generally expected to be wives and mothers. In 1929 she left for Paris and enrolled at the Académie Colarossi, where she spent a year. Then the Greek sculptor Konstantinos Dimitriadis helped her gain a place at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Among her teachers was Lucien Simon, who had a marked influence on her work. She completed the course in 1933 and returned to Cyprus. She is considered the first Cypriot woman to study art abroad.

Her Paris works of 1929–1933 followed European models and dealt with the female body and sexuality. After her return she continued the theme, but in a more primitive manner, which has been compared to Paul Gauguin. Her palette grew warmer, and her figures took on a more exotic look, with darker skin and hair. Her heroines are unlike the domestic mothers and wives familiar from Cypriot art: they are educated, liberated members of a cosmopolitan and progressive society. Few Cypriot women painters of her time painted the nude. Her models are not presented as objects of desire: they look defiant and tend to ignore the viewer. The canvases are typically monumental in size. She also painted scenes of everyday life and landscapes.

Two more solo exhibitions followed in 1935 and 1936, and the reception was again lukewarm. In 1937 she moved to London, where her older sister lived. For many Cypriot women artists, going abroad meant a kind of voluntary exile that let them work without regard for the patriarchal restrictions of their homeland; it was so for her as well. In England her work became more expressive, with an emphasis on geometric forms under the influence of Picasso.

In 1939 she took part in a group exhibition that won recognition. That same year she married the ship owner Ioannis Vassiliou, from Hermoupolis, and stopped showing her work in public, devoting herself to her family. From then on she used a double surname: Nicolaidou-Vassiliou.

In Cyprus her paintings were gradually forgotten. In 1992 the art historian Eleni Nikita published her biography and restored her place as a pioneer in a profession closed to women. Nicolaidou died in London in 1994. Her painting “The Good Fruit of the Earth” is in the State Gallery of Contemporary Cypriot Art in Nicosia; her work is also in the collections of the Bank of Cyprus and in the gallery of the Municipal Bank of Limassol.