Parthenis arrives in Paris, and the price of a Greek canon

There is a painting by Constantinos Parthenis that refuses to resolve. Poésie (Annonciation) presents a young woman at the center of its composition — seated, calm, gesturing toward an angel above while holding a scroll that might contain sacred text or poetic verse or both. She is, simultaneously, the Virgin Mary and Poetry itself. The forms around her are simplified, the colors soft and translucent, the canvas given open space that Western oil painting tradition would typically fill. Standing in front of it, a viewer is being asked to hold two registers of meaning — the sacred and the literary — as though Parthenis believed they were the same register, or that the distance between them was the proper subject of painting.

This is not a minor artist making a modest claim. Parthenis (1878–1967) was the figure around whom Greek modernism organized itself — a painter who spent time in Paris absorbing the influence of Maurice Denis, Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, and Puvis de Chavannes, and then returned to work those Symbolist lessons through the formal language of ancient Greek art. Simplified line, soft color, spiritual elevation, a serenity that does not read as emptiness but as intention. His synthesis was specific enough to constitute a position, not merely a style.

Poésie (Annonciation) by Constantinos Parthenis (1878-1967) (estimate: €300,000-500,000)

Poésie (Annonciation), executed circa 1950, is the largest painting by Parthenis ever offered at auction. Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr is bringing it to Paris with an estimate of €300,000 to €500,000 — a figure that arrives immediately after the artist’s last major institutional reassessment: a 2022 retrospective at the National Gallery and Alexandros Soutzos Museum in Athens in which this canvas appeared in a prominent position. What the market is now being asked to confirm is what the institution already said.

The Greek Sale — organized collaboratively between Bonhams Paris and its Athenian associate Art Expertise — is a sale with a thesis. Greek modernism, it argues, is not a provincial adaptation of European movements but a full participant in them: a school that developed its own internal logic across painting traditions ranging from orientalist realism through symbolism through geometric abstraction. The selection of works makes this argument not through rhetoric but through accumulated evidence. Yiannis Moralis (1916–2009) appears with Full Moon H, a work of geometric abstraction that balances physical tension with formal discipline — solid structure and purity of form in direct dialogue with the European geometric tradition, estimated at €250,000 to €350,000. Nikolaos Lytras (1883–1927) is represented by Sur le toit-terrasse, île de Tinos, a canvas painted circa 1923–1926 that was among the twenty Lytras oils shown at the 1936 Venice Biennale — institutional provenance that the market will now price accordingly, at €70,000 to €100,000.

The Theofilos Hadjimichael (1871–1934) lot may be the most historically charged object in the room. Erotokritos et Aretoussa is a large fresco transferred to canvas — originally housed in a mansion on Lesvos, preserved by a process that extracted it from its architectural context and made it portable, collectible, and now auctionable. The scene depicts the romantic meeting from the seventeenth-century Cretan verse epic: the lover Erotokritos climbing to the balcony of Aretoussa in a composition that layers Byzantine color harmonies — striking blues against ochres and reds — with Western narrative convention and folk visual tradition. The estimated price of €100,000 to €150,000 does not fully account for its rarity as a surviving fresco of this type. Rare objects tend to be underestimated.

Nikolaos Gysis (1842–1901) complicates the canonization narrative in the most productive way. Le Zeybek, painted circa 1873 during a journey to Asia Minor that Gysis and Nikiforos Lytras undertook to study local life — a journey that briefly resulted in their arrest on suspicion of espionage before their release through the Greek consul — presents a young man of the Zeybek people in traditional costume. The Zeybeks, known for their resistance to Ottoman modernization, are rendered here not as exotic subject matter but as figures of specific historical identity. Gysis had trained at the Munich Academy; this journey forced his academic formation into encounter with a familiar and lived reality. The estimate of €50,000 to €70,000 seems calibrated for a secondary highlight, but the painting carries a narrative about how Greek artists of the nineteenth century navigated between European academic training and a Mediterranean world that resisted the categories that training provided.

Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1906–1994) appears twice. Pont à Santorin, painted in 1963, takes the island’s complex architecture and pushes it toward post-cubist fragmentation — broken geometric forms, sharp angles, spiraling lines that may echo the 1956 earthquake, Cézannian structure meeting Byzantine compression. Femme avec miroir dans un intérieur, an earlier work made under the direct influence of Picasso’s early 1930s painting, shows how Ghika absorbed and reworked the Parisian modernist vocabulary without simply replicating it. Together the two works demonstrate a career moving through the European avant-garde’s central conversations while maintaining a specific identity within them.

Sur le toit-terrasse, ile de Tinos by NIKOLAOS LYTRAS (1883-1927), oil on canvas painted circa 1923-1926, (estimate: €70,000 - 100,000) — Sur le toit-terrasse, ile de Tinos by NIKOLAOS LYTRAS (1883-1927), oil on canvas painted circa 1923-1926, (estimate: €70,000 – 100,000)

Terpsichore Angelopoulou, Director of Art Expertise in Athens, has described assembling these sales as the process of “discovering hidden gems and missing links in the history of Greek Art.” The language is revealing: not simply curating a market selection but reconstructing a historical record that has been, in the international auction context, largely absent. Greek art has been visible to Greek collectors — domestic and diaspora — for decades. Its presence in major international auction venues has been more intermittent, and its prices have reflected that intermittency.

What this sale tests is whether the moment of canonization has arrived, or whether it is still being constructed. The Parthenis estimate at half a million euros maximum is a significant bet. It is a bet premised on the 2022 Athens retrospective having done its work — having re-established this artist’s place not just within Greek cultural memory but within the broader European modernist argument. If the painting sells at estimate, the message to the market is that Greek modernism is no longer waiting for international recognition. If it exceeds estimate, the revaluation has already happened, and the sale was simply the moment the market caught up.

Selected highlights will be on preview in Athens at Amalias Avenue 36 from 4 to 6 May, from 11am to 8pm. The full sale will be available for viewing at Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr, 6 Avenue Hoche, Paris, on 16 May from 11am to 6pm and from 18 to 19 May from 10am to 6pm. The auction takes place on Wednesday, 20 May.