Biography

Periklis Vizantios (1893–1972) was a leading Greek painter of early modernism, closely aligned with post-Impressionism and celebrated for the way he captured Greek light.
Born in Athens in 1893 to a family with Phanariot roots in Constantinople, he showed an early vocation for art and chose painting despite social expectations of the time. He studied at the Makris School and in the studio of Evangelos Ioannidis, then left in 1910 for Munich intending to study law. He soon abandoned law for Paris, enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts and attending the Académie Julian. In the French capital he encountered the avant-garde firsthand—Neo-Impressionism, and close contact with Cubism and Fauvism—experiences that, together with Paris’s intellectual freedom, decisively shaped his artistic temperament.

In 1916, during World War I, Vizantios returned to Greece for military service and settled permanently in Athens. That same year he first exhibited in a group show of the Association of Greek Artists. In 1917 he co-founded the group Techni, a progressive circle of young artists determined to modernize Greek painting against academic conservatism. During World War I and, especially, the Asia Minor Campaign (1921–1922), he served as a war artist on the front. Sketches and small oils from this period were shown at the Zappeion in 1922, though much of the material was later lost in the Catastrophe of Smyrna.

Over the next decades Vizantios emerged as a multifaceted presence. In 1928 he helped found the artists’ club Atelier (later the House of Letters and Arts), a gathering point for creators and intellectuals. In 1934 he and painter Aleka Stylou-Diamantopoulou established Athens’s first free private painting school, which operated until the Occupation. Active institutionally, in 1938 he was a founding member—and first president—of the Association of Greek Painters. From 1930 he worked as a set designer for the National Theatre, while also publishing caricatures. In 1939 he became director of the Athens School of Fine Arts annexes in Hydra and Delphi, promoting art education beyond the capital. His exhibition activity was equally rich: regular appearances at the Panhellenic Art Exhibitions (1938–1965); representation of Greece at the 19th Venice Biennale (1934); participation in the Exposition Internationale de Paris (1937); and numerous solo shows in Athens from the 1920s through the 1960s (Stratigopoulou Hall, Studio Gallery, Zygos, among others). After his death (1972), major retrospectives at the National Gallery (1972) and MIET (1994) confirmed his place in modern Greek art.

Artistically, Vizantios developed a personal language that married the French tradition with Greek realities. Early works—urban scenes and society portraits—bear post-Impressionist inflections from his Paris training. He later focused on landscape, rendering the Greek environment with a sensitive palette and an acute feel for light and atmosphere. Beyond painting, he produced drawings, sketches, and stage designs. His works are held by leading public collections—most notably the National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum—while many of his war pieces are on permanent view at the National Historical Museum’s Hydra branch. Numerous works are in private collections in Greece and abroad, including the A. G. Leventis Gallery in Nicosia. With his wide-ranging activity, Vizantios helped bridge domestic traditions with European modern currents, decisively advancing 20th-century Greek art.

Bibliography

1. Periklis Vizantios, The Life of a Painter: Autobiographical Notes. Athens: MIET, 1995.
2. MIET, Periklis Vizantios — One Hundred Years from His Birth (exhibition catalogue). Athens: MIET, 1994.
3. National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum, 100 Years: Four Centuries of Greek Painting (from the collections of the National Gallery and the Euripidis Koutlidis Foundation), exh. cat., Athens 1999, p. 159.
4. Yiannis Voutsinas, 56 Greek Painters Talk About Their Art. Athens: Govostis, 2000, pp. 99–103.
5. Rena Gaki-Panteli, “Periklis Vizantios’s Greek Impressionism,” To Vima, 4 Oct 1998.

This biography was created with the assistance of AI.