Yannis Moralis

Moralis was born in Arta, in Epirus, on 23 April 1916. At only fifteen, in 1931, he entered the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he studied briefly with Konstantinos Parthenis and then with Umberto Argyros, and learned engraving in the workshop of Giannis Kefallinos, whom he later called «a father, a teacher and a friend». He graduated in 1936, and the next year a scholarship from the Academy of Athens took him to Rome and then to Paris, where he studied, among other things, mosaic. The Second World War brought him back to Greece.

He belongs to the «generation of the 1930s», the artists and writers, like Ghika, Tsarouchis, Seferis and Elytis, who looked for a modern art that was also deeply Greek. In 1947 he was elected to teach at the School of Fine Arts, where he became a full professor in 1957, and he taught there until 1983, shaping generations of Greek painters. In 1958 he represented Greece at the Venice Biennale together with Tsarouchis and the sculptor Lazaros Sochos. He received the Order of the Phoenix in 1965, the Arts Award of the Academy of Athens in 1979, and a major retrospective at the National Gallery in 1988, when he donated a large group of works to it. He painted almost until the end of his long life and died in Athens on 20 December 2009, at ninety-three.

Moralis began with a sensitive, realist painting of portraits and figures, in soft colours. From the 1950s his art became more and more geometric: bodies turn into curves and planes, faces into ovals, and colour into flat, warm areas of ochre, white, earth red and blue. His subjects are few and constant: young women, lovers, the nude, the sea, the Greek light. The figures are both modern and ancient; they recall the calm of archaic sculpture and the grave stelae of the Kerameikos.

This link with ancient funerary art is clearest in the Επιτύμβια (Funerary Compositions), a series of paintings about death and farewell, shown in 1963, that are among his masterpieces; he later gave them to the National Gallery. Moralis also worked on a monumental scale: for the Athens Hilton, opened in the early 1960s, he designed the huge engraved marble compositions that cover its façades. He designed sets and costumes for dance and theatre, from the ballet Έξι λαϊκές ζωγραφιές (Six Folk Paintings, 1951), with music by Manos Hadjidakis, to Aeschylus' Ικέτιδες (The Suppliants, National Theatre, Epidaurus, 1964) and Karolos Koun's Οιδίπους Τύραννος (Oedipus the King) at the Aldwych Theatre in London in 1968. He also illustrated editions of the poets of his generation, Seferis and Elytis, for the publisher Ikaros, and his drawings and the poems share the same clarity.

Anyone who walks along Vasilissis Sofias Avenue in Athens can see Moralis' work: the carved marble façade of the Hilton is a landmark of the city. Inside, at the National Gallery, the Επιτύμβια and many other paintings hang in the permanent collection, and his works are in many Greek public and private collections. His geometric lovers appear on book covers, posters and school art books, and the editions of Elytis and Seferis that he illustrated are still in print. For many Greeks, his warm ochres and calm faces simply look like «Greece»; try describing one of his paintings in Greek: colours, shapes, feelings.

• He entered the Athens School of Fine Arts at fifteen, in 1931.
• He taught at the same school for more than thirty-five years, from 1947 to 1983.
• The marble compositions on the Athens Hilton's façades were his design, commissioned in 1959.
• He represented Greece at the 1958 Venice Biennale together with Yannis Tsarouchis.