The Friends of Mount Athos Book Reviews

© 2005

The Mount Athos Paintings: Spyros Papaloukas. Research-editing by Markos Kambanis. Mount Athos: The Mount Athos Archive, 2004. 284 pages, 208 colour illustrations, 31 × 25 cm. ISBN 960-87331-2-X. No price given. Hardback. Available from Orthodox Christian Books Ltd (orthbook@aol.com).

What makes Spyros Papaloukas (1892–1957) so interesting as a Greek painter is that he straddles the art of Western Europe (he studied in Paris from 1916 to 1921) and the traditional art of the Orthodox Church. Unlike his ultra-conservative friend Photis Kontoglou he did not react against the influences he was exposed to in western art, but saw a certain parallelism with icons in some of the more recent movements – especially perhaps the Nabis by whom he was particularly influenced. As George Galavaris writes in one the this book’s chapters, ‘[The Nabis] went in for simplified drawing, flat shapes, clear, transparent colours and a spirit which could be defined as a quest for the “invisible”.’ He could be describing icons here!

Certain of the paintings illustrated in the book (for example St Andrew’s Skete, 1932–5, ill. 43) reveal the painter’s desire to get under the skin of the landscape, to show its numinous quality, to give an impression of divine presence. Here, as Galavaris observes, Papaloukas seems to have drawn on the Fauves and Cezanne to help express this essentially spiritual concern. Years after his sojourn on Athos, Papaloukas was to apply this belief in shared concerns between Byzantine and modernist art when he frescoed Amphissa cathedral.

This book concentrates on the oil paintings Papaloukas made when he was on Athos for a year from November 1923 to November 1924 and also in later years when he again painted Athonite themes (1928, 1932–5). Most of the paintings are of the monasteries’ exteriors and as such offer an accurate record of how the buildings looked at that time. There are also slightly stylized copies of the Akathistos hymn embroidered on to the famous stole at Stavronikita Monastery, some illuminated manuscripts, portable icons, and frescos.

But his painting style is anything but naturalistic. Papaloukas emphasized light and limpid colour. Also, in the manner of icons, he kept his subjects within a flat plain so as to emphasize luminosity rather than depth in space. Judging by the written accounts, the originals are more translucent and radiant than the illustrations suggest: despite the tonal accuracy of the book’s excellent reproductions, printing cannot do justice to the other qualities of paint. This must be kept in mind when viewing the works in the book, which to some eyes might look somewhat pastel and faded.

An old friend and supporter of the Friends of Athos, Markos Kambanis has done a splendid job in this volume. The articles he and the six other contributors have written show insight and a lively sense of how Papaloukas’s concerns are so apposite to our own time in respect of the Orthodox–Western dialogue. As Markos writes of Papaloukas’s paintings: ‘They constitute a link between Byzantine artistic expression and contemporary painting trends in a manner that is creative and above all natural.’

AIDAN HART

Shropshire