Photis Kontoglou

Biography

Kontoglou built the house at 16 Vizyinou Street, in the Athens district of Patisia, in 1932 and painted it the way post-Byzantine churches were painted: the walls from ceiling to floor, in four unequal zones divided by red bands. His pupils Yannis Tsarouchis and Nikos Engonopoulos worked with him. During the Occupation he had to sell the house for a sack of flour, and the new owner painted over the frescoes with oil paint.

By then Kontoglou himself was living in a garage.

He was born on 8 November 1895 in Aivali (Kydoniai in Greek), on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, the son of a sailor, Nikolaos Apostolelis, and Despo Kontoglou. His father died a year later. The boy and his three elder brothers and sister came under the guardianship of their uncle Stefanos Kontoglou, abbot of the monastery of Saint Paraskevi; it was from him that Photis kept his mother’s family name. He finished school in Aivali in 1912, studied at the gymnasium alongside the future writer and painter Stratis Doukas, sat on the pupils’ editorial board of the magazine “Melissa” (“The Bee”) and drew for it. In 1913 he enrolled at the Athens School of Fine Arts, but in 1914 he left and went to Paris. There he studied the work of various schools of painting, contributed to the magazine Illustration, and in 1916 won first prize in the magazine’s competition for his illustrations to Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger”. In 1917 he travelled to Spain and Portugal; in 1918 he returned to France and wrote his first book, “Pedro Cazas”. He received his diploma from the School of Fine Arts later, in 1933, so that he could teach.

In 1919 Kontoglou went back to Aivali, where the Greek army had taken control of the region. He founded a cultural society, “New People”, taught French and art history at the girls’ gymnasium, and published “Pedro Cazas”. In 1921 he was mobilised and demobilised in the same year. In August 1922 the front was broken, and on 29 August Turkish forces entered the town. The men were sent to labour battalions deep in Anatolia, and many died on the way; about twenty thousand remaining civilians were evacuated on ships from Lesbos. Kontoglou left by boat with an icon of Saint Paraskevi in his hands and first landed in Mytilene.

The invitation to Athens came after the book was praised by Alexiou, Avgeris, Kazantzakis and others. In 1923 he went to Mount Athos, where he saw Byzantine painting, the Cretan school in particular, made many copies and wrote texts. On his return he published the album “The Art of Athos” and held his first exhibition, first in Mytilene together with Konstantinos Maleas, then in Athens. In 1925 he was publishing the magazine “Filiki Etairia”, and in 1926 (by other accounts in 1925) he married Maria Hatzikambouri, a fellow native of Aivali, and settled in Nea Ionia.

From 1931 he restored icons in museums, among them the Byzantine Museum in Athens; he helped set up the Byzantine department of the museum in Corfu (1935), and in 1935–1937 he cleaned and restored the wall paintings of Mystras. In 1937 he worked at the Coptic Museum in Cairo. From 1933 he taught art history and painting at an American college in Athens. He painted many churches: Kapnikarea, Saint Barbara in Egaleo, Saint Andrew, Saint George in Kypseli, Zoodochos Peghi in Paiania, the metropolitan church in Rhodes, and chapels of the Zaimis family. In 1938–1939 he painted the reading room of the library of Athens city hall: forty figures from ancient mythology and Greek history on four oblong surfaces, in the Byzantine manner. He wanted to show the continuity of the Greek spirit. Today the rooms there are used for civil registration.

He also published the magazine “Kivotos” (“The Ark”) with Kostis Bastias and Vasilis Moustakis, in which he argued against the westernisation of church painting. Before the war he proposed to Anastasios Orlandos, who headed the service for the restoration of monuments, that churches be built and decorated with frescoes in the Byzantine spirit. He himself wrote that after the Second World War he resolved to devote his talent to Christ, and his postwar work is almost entirely religious. To my mind this is a clear dividing line in his biography: much of what he made before the war has been lost or stayed in private hands, which is why he is known above all as an icon painter.

He wrote prose too, in a language that mixed the speech of sailors, the lives of the saints and the dialect of his native Aivali. In 1937 he translated Molière’s “Les Fourberies de Scapin”, staged at the National Theatre in 1937–1938; in 1952 he translated Leonid Ouspensky’s book on the icon. From 1948 he wrote for the newspaper “Eleftheria”.

For his book “Ekphrasis of Orthodox Iconography” he received the Academy of Athens Prize (1961), for “Aivali, My Homeland” the Pourfina Prize of the Group of Twelve (1963), and for his work as a whole the National Distinction of Arts and Letters of the Academy of Athens. He died in Athens on 13 July 1965. He was buried in the First Cemetery of Athens, and his remains were later moved to the monastery of Nea Makri.