Nikos Engonopoulos

Biography

The first exhibition to include his paintings was called “The Art of Modern Greek Tradition” and opened in January 1938. Engonopoulos showed tempera on paper with old houses. He was thirty, and he was not yet regarded as a painter in the full sense of the word.

He was born on 21 October 1907 in Athens, the second son of Panagiotis and Errietti Engonopoulos. His father came from a Constantinople family, his mother was born in Athens. In the summer of 1914 the family travelled to Constantinople and, because of the outbreak of the world war, stayed there. In 1923 he was enrolled in a lycée in Paris, where he studied for four years, living at the school. After returning to Greece he did his military service, then worked as a translator in a bank and as a secretary at the University of Athens. From 1930 he was a draughtsman in the city planning department of the Ministry of Public Works. He did not leave the ministry later either: while he was already studying painting he was transferred to the topographical service, and he was confirmed as a permanent draughtsman only six years later.

In 1932 he entered the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he studied under Konstantinos Parthenis. At the same time he attended the studio of Photis Kontoglou, where Byzantine painting was studied; Andreas Xyngopoulos also taught him Byzantine art. In those years he grew close to Yannis Tsarouchis, Yannis Moralis and the poet Andreas Embirikos, and met Giorgio de Chirico. He himself later named Embirikos and de Chirico as his main surrealist influences. He also studied independently abroad: in Paris, Vienna, Munich and Italy.

After the exhibition of 1938, in February, his translations of poems by Tristan Tzara were published. A few months later, in June, came his first collection, “Do Not Distract the Driver”. The second, “The Clavicembalos of Silence”, appeared in September 1939. In November of that year his first solo exhibition was held, in the house of Nikos Kalamaris. At the time he also designed the costumes for Sophocles’ “Electra” at the Kotopouli theatre and took part in a group exhibition of Greek artists in New York.

In 1941 he fought on the Albanian front.

His best-known work, the poem “Bolivar, a Greek Poem”, is devoted to Simón Bolívar; it was published in 1944. In 1968 Nikos Mamangakis set it to music, and Argyris Kounadis wrote the music for a recording in which the author himself reads the poem. From 1945 Engonopoulos was seconded as an assistant to the chair of decorative and free drawing at the National Technical University of Athens, the Polytechnic; he held this post until 1956. In 1949 he was among the founders of the art group Armos, which also included Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, Moralis and Tsarouchis. At the same time he worked in the ministry of reconstruction and, together with the architectural team of Dimitris Pikionis, designed buildings.

In 1954 Greece sent him to the Venice Biennale, where he showed 72 works; the following year he took part in the São Paulo Biennial. Around then he left the Ministry of Public Works for good: he was elected to the permanent staff of the Polytechnic. In 1958 he received the first State Poetry Prize for the collection “In Flowering Greek Speech”, and was awarded it a second time in 1979. In 1966 King Constantine II gave him the Gold Cross of George I for his painting. In 1967 he became professor of painting at the Polytechnic and held the chair until he retired in 1973. It seems to me that his paintings show especially clearly how tradition, history, religion and the present day meet in them, with his own sarcasm.

Engonopoulos’s works are held by the National Gallery of Greece, the Benaki Museum, the Teloglion Fine Arts Foundation, the municipal galleries of Athens, Rhodes and Thessaloniki, and private collections. His poems have been translated into French, English, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Polish and Hungarian.

He died on 31 October 1985 in Athens. The funeral was paid for by the state and took place at the First Cemetery of Athens. In 2007, the centenary of his birth, Greece declared a “Year of Engonopoulos”.