Biography
Peter A. Contis (Panagiotis Athanasiou Kontogiannis) was born on May 28, 1890, in Vlahokerasia, Arcadia. For half a century he ran his own restaurants in Pittsburgh, and he only began to paint when he was past seventy. Within a few years he produced a body of work that is recognizable at a glance. Today he is one of the few Greek Americans to have gained a place in American folk art.
In 1910, like many young men of his time, he left for America to escape poverty and to help his family. Three older brothers were waiting for him in Pittsburgh, already working in restaurants. The brothers changed their names to English ones, and Panagiotis became Peter Contis. At first they all worked together at a restaurant called The Buffalo, and in 1914 Contis opened his own, The Chicago. In late 1926 he went back to Greece to look after his mother, who was widowed and ill. There he met 21-year-old Helen Stamatopoulou from Kollines, the neighboring village, and three months later, in 1928, they were married.
The couple returned to Pittsburgh in 1928. The Crash of 1929 cost Contis his business, and for a while he worked washing dishes. He tried again and again, and in 1932 he opened The Neon Grill in the East Liberty neighborhood. The Neon Grill supported the family for thirty years and became a gathering place for the city's Greek community. The couple had three children: Athanasios (Art), George and Artemis. The family lived in the Oakland neighborhood, near the church of St. Nicholas, which later became the city's Greek Orthodox cathedral.
In 1962 The Neon Grill was closed and torn down to make way for an apartment tower, and Contis stopped working. His son George knew how much his father enjoyed hand-lettering the menu boards, so he gave him a set of paints as a gift. From then until his death, for about ten years, Contis painted constantly, mostly in gouache on paper and board.
He painted Pittsburgh: the Liberty Tunnels (1966), the Allegheny Observatory, downtown (1970). He also kept returning to Greece, with villages of the Peloponnese, Vlahokerasia and Hagia Sophia, as well as birds, gardens and flowers. His style stands out immediately. His pictures are flat, perfectly symmetrical and built from countless small, colorful dots. He rarely painted a place exactly as it was. More often he combined buildings from different Pittsburgh neighborhoods, and often from Greece, into one imagined, ideal landscape. The architect David Lewis, a family friend who studied his work, explained this through the painter's deep faith. Contis believed that God's love is present in everything, even in the hardest things. That is why in his paintings the houses are always symmetrical, the river is always blue and the flowers are always in bloom. During his lifetime his work was shown in several places, among them the Pittsburgh National Bank.
Peter Contis died in 1973. His last work was an untitled view of Mount Washington in Pittsburgh. A year later, Helen came across a painting her husband had left half-finished and completed it herself. She signed it “Peter & Helen Contis,” and with it she began her own life as a painter.
In 1995 the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh held an exhibition of the couple's work (June 24 – September 3, 1995). The same year David Lewis published Byzantine Butterflies: The Folk Paintings of Peter Contis and Helen Contis, Greek Immigrants in America (Overlook Press, 1995), with a foreword by Richard Armstrong. To this day it is the only book written entirely about Greek American folk painters. In 2004 Helen Contis donated about one hundred of their paintings to the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh and two to the Carnegie Museum of Art. In 2026 Concept Art Gallery in Pittsburgh presented the exhibition The Folk Paintings of Peter and Helen Contis.
Peter Contis turned an immigrant's life into a personal painting language, full of faith and color. In his pictures, industrial Pittsburgh and the villages of Mount Parnon meet in the same bright landscape.
Bibliography – Sources
- Lewis, D. (1995). Byzantine Butterflies: The Folk Paintings of Peter Contis and Helen Contis, Greek Immigrants in America. Foreword by R. Armstrong. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press.
- Frangos, S. “The Greek Outsiders: Artists Lost to Hellenism – Chicago's Peter and Helen Contis (Part 3).” The National Herald. Reprinted by the Modern Greek Studies Association.
- Lowry, P. (2004, August 31). “Obituary: Helen Contis / Her passion for painting blossomed late in life.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
- Vlahokerasia Digital Museum. “Peter A. Contis (Panagiotis A. Kontogiannis).”
- Senator John Heinz History Center. Peter and Helen, object no. 2007.131.20, and collection of works by Peter A. Contis.
- Concept Art Gallery. The Folk Paintings of Peter and Helen Contis (June 26 – August 29, 2026).
- Charlton Hall Auctions. Peter A. Contis, Greek Coastal Village (exhibition record, Carnegie Museum of Art, 1995).
This biography was created with the help of artificial intelligence.