Thalia Flora-Karavia

Biography

The Athens School of Art refused to admit her to its painting course because she was a woman. This happened after 1888, when Thalia Flora finished at a Greek boarding school for girls in Constantinople.

She was born in 1871 in Siatista, in Western Macedonia, which was then under Ottoman rule. Her father was a priest. In 1874 he moved the family to Constantinople, and there she studied at the Zappeion School for Girls: according to some accounts, on a scholarship, from 1883 to 1888. After graduating she is reported to have taught for a year.

The refusal in Athens did not stop her. She went to Munich and worked with Nikolaos Gyzis and Georgios Jakobides, two of the best-known Greek painters of the Munich circle. Women were not admitted to the academy, so she attended a private school that offered courses in drawing and painting. Working alongside her were Nikolaos Vokos, Paul Nauen, Anton Ažbe and Walter Thor. The years of her training are given inconsistently: by some accounts she arrived in Munich in 1895, by others she also studied in Paris. In 1898 she returned to Constantinople to work professionally, and then was in Munich again, until 1900.

Her exhibiting also began in 1898. She showed work in Paris at the Exposition Universelle of 1900, in Constantinople in 1901 and 1902, in Athens in 1903, in Cairo in 1909, in Rome in 1911 and at the Venice Biennale in 1934. In 1906 she held a joint exhibition in Athens with Sophia Laskaridou.

In 1907 she found herself in Egypt and married Nikolaos Karavias, the publisher of the Greek newspaper “Ephimeris” (“Εφημερίς”). She lived in Alexandria for about thirty years. There she founded and ran a painting school, which was well known in the city’s Greek community.

The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 gave her her main subject. She followed the Greek army as a correspondent for the newspaper her husband published, and drew the daily life of the troops, refugees and the wounded in charcoal, chalk and pastel. Among the subjects held in the War Museum in Athens are the camp at Emin Aga in February 1913, an improvised hospital at Philippiada, horses being watered, portable bread ovens, and King Constantine I with his staff. She gathered her impressions of those years in a book, “Impressions of the 1912–1913 War: Macedonia and Epirus” (Athens, 1936). She also accompanied the army in Asia Minor (1918–1922), and in 1940–1941 she drew on the Albanian front during the Greco-Italian War.

It is said that Esat Pasha, who defended Ioannina, told her husband: while you smoked one cigarette, your lady sketched three drawings. That is hard to check, but the remark conveys the speed of her hand well.

Besides the war drawings, she is known for about five hundred portraits. Among those she drew were the poet Constantine Cavafy and the writer Alexandra Papadopoulou. She also painted landscapes, still lifes and genre scenes, illustrated books and worked as a journalist. She began by the academic rules of the Munich school, and then her canvases gained light and colour, as in Impressionism. In an interview in 1955 she said: “I work in an Impressionist way.” In her late postwar works she moved away from Impressionism as well and turned to Expressionism. To my mind, the path from the academic school to a freer manner can be followed best in the portraits, but I would not risk drawing that conclusion from reproductions.

She returned to Greece for good, by some accounts in 1939, by others in 1940. In 1945 the Academy of Athens awarded her its silver medal, and in 1954 she received the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Benevolence. Her works are in the National Gallery of Greece, the National Historical Museum, the Municipal Art Gallery of Ioannina and the Averoff Gallery in Metsovo. About seventy of her war drawings were bought from her in 1957 and donated to Ioannina.

Thalia Flora-Karavia died in Athens on 17 January 1960.