Modern Greek

When he was a 13-year-old schoolboy, a tousled Greek youngster named Nicolas Hadgikyriaco saw his first "modern" painting--a tortured Matisse street scene--in a Paris gallery. "I was terribly shocked," he remembers. "I was as shocked as if I saw a woman walking on the Boulevard de la Madeleine stripped naked." Young Nicolas soon got over his astonishment at the new art. He began to paint himself, grew up to become a pupil of the modern school and, eventually, Greece's best living painter. Last week he was in London giving the city its first good look at the work he signs with a family name "Ghika."

What London saw were 38 paintings as clean and clear as light mountain wine. Ghika's style is closest to cubism, but a cubism tempered and refined with a solid, realistic touch. On Ghika's canvas, Paris' chimneyed rooftops, the jackstraw confusion of a Greek hillside town become strict, disciplined designs blocked in with arbitrary colors. But there is no trouble recognizing what he paints: his sharp draftsmanship shows all the cruel dryness of Greece's stony uplands, its patterned fields, searing sun, and gaunt, bare-limbed fig trees. Said London's Observer, after seeing the show: "Ghika has extended the boundaries of cubism."

Ghika served his apprenticeship in Paris, soaking up great art in its museums and loud argument in its noisy bistros. He first tried formal study in the city's Academic Ranson, but soon gave it up. Ghika got his own studio, met Picasso, Braque, and Jean Arp, and learned the hard way. At first, he copied the impressionist manner of Renoir, then progressed to Cezanne and Seurat, and finally found what he was looking for in cubism. When Ghika held his first Paris show in 1927, it was a near sellout.

Today, Ghika lives in Athens in the shadow of the Acropolis, flying kites from its slopes for recreation and painting his razor-edged cubist landscapes whenever the spirit moves him. He thinks too few of his fellow moderns paint with real feeling for the everyday world of sights, sounds and smells. "Much art today," says Ghika, "is an acte gratuit--done for the sake of doing it. It's done with no purpose--it's a play and after a while you don't know what to do with it. A painting ought to respond to some human necessity."

In London last week, the art patrons evidently agreed. By the time the show closed, Cubist Ghika had sold 17 of his 38 (five are loans) pictures, one for a thumping -L-1,000 ($2,800). Said London's Telegraph: "No living British artist commands such a price in our art galleries today, except possibly Augustus John."

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