Sophia Laskaridou

Biography

Her father gave her a revolver for her walks with the easel. Sophia Laskaridou was then little more than ten, and she went out sketching alone and for long stretches; her biographers later liked to picture her with a revolver in one hand and a brush in the other.

She was born in Athens into a well-to-do family. Her father, Laskaris Laskaridis, grew up in London and worked as a merchant; her mother, Aikaterini Laskaridou (née Christomanou), grew up in Vienna, opened a girls’ school in Athens in 1864 and was devoted to the pedagogy of Friedrich Fröbel. In 1887 the family bought an estate in Kallithea, then a rural place where Athenian aristocrats spent their leisure. There are two dates of birth: by some accounts 15 February 1876, by others 1882; 1876 is the more common. Sophia had two sisters, Melpomene and Irene, and Irene later devoted herself to the education of the blind.

She began to draw before any systematic training, and so at first chose landscape: she could not yet paint the figure. By family tradition she held her first exhibition at fourteen, at the Society of Friends of the Arts. In 1900 she spent six months abroad, visiting galleries and taking lessons at the Académie Julian and in the studios of Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens. She then studied at the art school for women run by the Society of Friends of the Arts, but its standard did not satisfy her.

The School of Fine Arts did not take women. Thalia Flora, who had tried to enter first, was turned down by the board for no reason but her sex. In 1901 Sophia obtained an audience with George I and asked him to intervene. Permission came only in 1903, and both her fellow students and conservative opinion received it with hostility.

She studied until 1907 under Konstantinos Volanakis, Georgios Roilos, Nikiforos Lytras and Georgios Jakobides, and also with Spyridon Vikatos. Lytras, according to her memoirs, was pleased with her. While still a student she exhibited at the Zappeion, at the Society of Friends of the Arts, at the literary society Parnassos and at the international exhibition of 1903; in 1906 she showed work together with Thalia Flora, and in 1907 she opened a solo exhibition at Parnassos. A scholarship from the Bozeios endowment let her go to Germany in 1908. She studied landscape painting in Dachau, then in Munich, where she also attended the school of the women artists’ association and won prizes in competitions.

By early 1910 Munich had nothing more to give her, and she was thinking of Paris. What held her back was a letter from Periklis Giannopoulos, a writer and journalist whom she had met before her years at the School. He urged her to return; she had refused to marry him, but the relationship continued through all her years of study. On 8 April 1910 Giannopoulos rode a white horse into the sea and shot himself. Sophia learned of it on the train home. A few days after the funeral she herself tried to take her own life, and her mother saved her. Afterwards she left for Paris.

There she opened a studio with her friend Lena Skordeli, studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Colarossi, and exhibited at the Salons and in group shows. The critic José Belon singled her out among the thousands of exhibitors at the Salon des Indépendants of 1911. She travelled to England and to Venice. In a letter from Baden-Baden in 1913 she wrote that she would return to Paris for a short time and then go to Greece: “My place is there.”

Her mother died in 1916, and Sophia went back. She took over the training school for kindergarten teachers founded by her mother and taught drawing and painting there for thirty-one years; in 1951 she published a book describing her teaching system. She exhibited in 1917, 1919, 1924 and 1927, the last time together with her pupils, took part only rarely from 1930, and in 1952 held a solo retrospective. She gave her paintings titles in demotic Greek, and this drew her into the dispute over the language question: some admired the titles more than the paintings, while supporters of katharevousa, the formal literary language, were indignant at her remark that in that language the subjects sound cold.

Critics praised her for the “Greek light” in her landscapes and for working outdoors alone. Later people came to talk more about her than about her pictures. Legends grew around her Paris years, of affairs with Picasso and Renoir, and these were later taken for fact. In 1953 the Academy of Athens honoured her for her contribution to Greek painting. In 1955 she published her autobiographical book From My Diary: Memories and Contemplations, and in 1960 its sequel, A Big Love, about Giannopoulos. She spent her last years in Kallithea almost as a recluse, receiving visitors only once a month, on the first Sunday.

She died on 13 November 1965. The art historian Christina Grammatikopoulou, who tracked down about three hundred and forty of her works, found among them experiments close to Cubism, abstraction and Surrealism. The house in Kallithea, built to a design by Ernst Ziller, stood abandoned for a long time; in 2002 a municipal gallery named after Sophia Laskaridou opened in it.