Landscape
The presence of Nikolaos Lytras in the artistic life of Athens was associated with the movements of renewal which overwhelmed the art world in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Both his membership of the 'Techni' group in 1917 - in the founding of which he played a leading role - and the freedom which he gave to his students when, in 1923, he was elected professor at the School of Fine Arts were the application in practice of his beliefs about subjective expression, which on each occasion models in form, colour, space not only what the senses apprehend, but also what the mind conceives. More conventional in his depiction of portraits, but with greater daring in his landscapes, Nikolaos Lytras succeeded in uniting, in a way characteristic of him, contemporary trends towards renewal, which tended towards the elimination of a naturalistic rendering, in line with the demands of the age for a contemplation of nature, as that is illumined by the Greek light. Lytras conceived nature with a Constructivist approach, as he modelled it in planes, rhythmically positioned and of equal standing in colour terms, on the two-dimensional surface of the picture.
We can observe the characteristics of Lytras's painting in the work Landscape, in spite of the fact that, as the untidy and unsophisticated work on it, and its small dimensions, show, it was probably a rough sketch taken from nature. The thick paint, applied with rugged brush-strokes, on unified surfaces, defines the levels of the terrain, of the clump of trees, a belt of sea, and, perhaps, of sky.