Yannis Tsarouchis

Tsarouchis was born in Piraeus on 13 January 1910, into a family that soon moved to Athens. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts from 1929 to 1935 under Konstantinos Parthenis, and at the same time, from 1931, worked beside Fotis Kontoglou, the painter and writer who was reviving Byzantine icon painting; from him Tsarouchis learned the flat colour, the firm outline and the respect for the folk painter Theophilos that stayed with him all his life. In 1935 he travelled to Istanbul and then to Paris, where he saw the work of Matisse and met Giacometti and the sculptor Laurens. His first solo exhibition was held in Athens in 1938.

He fought on the Albanian front in 1940–41 and passed the occupation in Athens, painting and beginning his long collaboration with Karolos Koun's Art Theatre, for which he designed sets and costumes from the 1940s onward. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he painted the works people know best, the sailors, the soldiers, the coffee houses, and won an international reputation; he represented Greece at the Venice Biennale in 1958. The same year he designed Maria Callas' Medea in Dallas, and later her Medea at Epidaurus in 1961.

During the dictatorship of 1967–74 he lived in Paris, returning for good in 1980. In 1981 he turned his house in Marousi, north of Athens, into the Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation and museum. He died in Athens on 20 July 1989.

Tsarouchis belonged to the generation of the 1930s, the painters and poets who asked what a modern Greek art could be, and his answer was to look at what was already there: Byzantine icons, the Karagiozis shadow theatre, the naive paintings of Theophilos, the neoclassical houses of Piraeus, the dancers of the zeibekiko in the tavernas. He painted all this with the clarity and colour he had learned from Matisse. His favourite subject was the young man, in uniform or in shirtsleeves, seated at a table or standing in a doorway, drawn with a frankness about male beauty that was daring in his time and is part of why his work is loved today.

Among the famous pictures are the many paintings of sailors from the 1930s onward, the soldiers and εύζωνες (evzones) of the 1950s, the allegorical series on the months and seasons, and Καφενείο Νέον (The Neon Café, 1965–66), a large canvas of men sitting alone under the hard light of a coffee house on Omonia Square. His watercolours of old houses in Piraeus and Athens record a city that was being demolished around him.

In the theatre he designed for Koun's productions of Lorca and Tennessee Williams, for the ancient drama at Epidaurus and for the opera, and in 1977 he directed and designed Euripides' Τρωάδες (The Trojan Women) himself, in an open-air car park in central Athens. He also wrote: Ως στρουθίον μονάζον επί δώματος (Like a Lonely Sparrow on a Roof, 1978) and Αγαθόν το εξομολογείσθαι (It Is Good to Confess, 1986) collect essays and memories in a dry, witty Greek.

The Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation museum in Marousi, in the house he lived and worked in, shows his paintings, stage designs and personal objects, and the National Gallery in Athens holds many of his major works; a large centenary exhibition at the Benaki Museum in 2009–10 drew record crowds. His sailors and soldiers are now part of the national image of Greece, printed on posters, book covers and postcards, and his sets and costumes for Koun are part of the history of Greek theatre. His sentence «Στην Ελλάδα είσαι ό,τι δηλώσεις» (In Greece you are whatever you declare yourself to be) is quoted constantly, usually with a laugh, about the Greek habit of self-invention. A learner can visit the Marousi museum, half an hour from the centre of Athens by metro, and look for his work in the National Gallery.

• Before studying modern painting he learned to paint Byzantine icons in the workshop of Fotis Kontoglou, and he kept the icon painter's flat colour and firm outline all his life.
• He designed Maria Callas' Medea in Dallas in 1958 and again at the ancient theatre of Epidaurus in 1961.
• In 1977 he staged Euripides' Trojan Women in a car park in the centre of Athens.
• The title of his book «Ως στρουθίον μονάζον επί δώματος» is a line from the Psalms: like a lonely sparrow on a roof.