Mules on the Col at Metsovo, 1960

Periklis Vyzantios, after his time as a student at the School of Fine Arts in Athens, continued his studies in Paris, where he associated with circles of artists who lived amid the fruitful fermentations and changes of the post-Impressionist movements - particularly of the Nabi and Synthetist artists - whose main subject-matter was interiors and scenes from the urban environment. On his return (1915) to Greece to do his military service - which lasted for seven years - he discovered that a different approach to modernism had developed in Athens. The chief concern of this approach was the rendering of natural features of Greece, as those are flooded with the powerful light, but always in accordance with the principles of the Parisian post-Impressionist movements, which influenced all the experimenting artists of the period. Thus, as a founder member of the 'Techni' group of 1917, Vyzantios concerned himself with subjects from the Greek countryside, in which scenes from everyday farming life and landscapes were depicted by means of the possibilities for expression of colour, as well as a special handling of space. The works of Vyzantios very clearly bear the impress of his apprenticeship in Paris, whether these are the creations of the early years of his stay there, with their elegant interiors and graceful ladies, or the landscape painting to which he devoted himself after his return to Greece.