Nonda

NONDA (born Epaminondas Papadopoulos in Athens on October 11, 1922; died October 30, 2005) was a leading Greek artist of the school of Paris.

He was one of the handful of Greek artists who received scholarships from the French government to attend the Ecole De Beaux Arts in the late 40s.

In 1947, he left Greece on a scholarship to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he studied in the ateliers Narbonne and Le Magny.

Once in Paris, Nonda began to develop the image of the archetypal “ Femme Parisenne” (“Parisian Woman”) which was to remain a source of inspiration throughout his life's work.

In the early 1950s, Nonda worked nights in factories and tailor shops in order to support himself and buy materials.

The streets surrounding Montmartre as well as the outskirts of Paris were overflowing with poor workers, prostitutes, musicians and street peddlers.

Nonda's first major show was in 1952 at the Parnassus Gallery in Athens.

He exhibited a series of explicit nudes, violent, and highly erotic, crammed with images of Paris and its more liberated women, as well as the series of Femmes Chapeautées which would be shown the same year at the Zaharias gallery.

The Parnassus show generated an immediate scandal.

Alongside the academic early work and the expressive cardboard models of Montmartre tenements, he hung a series of huge canvases depicting the end of love and youth, the sexual perversion of the misogynist, lesbian orgies, and the frightening Satyr-lover figure which he used to portray himself.

The largest works were over three meters tall, executed on canvas in bold oil and completely dominated the space.

Interspersed were the smaller nudes in plaster frames.

The opening was so shocking to certain Athenians that the police, urged by the board of directors at the Parnassus venue, immediately ordered the show closed and padlocked the doors.

The charge was “offense of public decency”.

Like Modigliani's first one-man show in Paris, it had reached the classic impasse, the clash of a conservative authority with an independent and free thinking artist.

In a sarcastic and historically loaded gesture, he collected an armful of fresh fig leaves from the suburbs and pinned a leaf over the genitalia of each of the figures.

Others, considered even more offensive, were veiled with black curtains.

With this new, somewhat comic amendment, the show reopened and as one would expect, the scandal generated a huge amount of attention by creating one of the first real censorship issues for a Greek artist in the Post war period.

The event was unprecedented in Athens, and the images, as well as the artist's response, captured the interest of the city.

Here was a young artist reported to have made great advances in Paris, and commanded the respect of more traditional artists such as Galanis and Vikatos, but with his first real show had managed to scandalize the city with art that was deemed by many to be dangerous, pornographic and “degenerate.” Thousands of viewers stood in lines that circled the block on Christou Lada Street to see the infamous nudes and the renaissance style “cover up”.

Even the controversial King Constantine and Queen Frederika paid a special visit to the show to view the paintings.

The Athenian newspapers were polarized on this issue of censorship and crammed with vitriolic letters by academics and other well known poets and writers as a drawn out debate concerning the art in question commenced.

In an open letter published in the national paper Nonda writes, “…my soul is filled with bitterness because I have found “Art on the Run” in the proverbial “City of Art and Culture”, I raise protest against the cultural and artistic circles in Athens.” Spiros Vikatos, his former teacher in the Academy, stood by the young painter’s work and supported him against the attacks, as did other more progressive artists and writers such as the novelist Stratis Mirivilis, who wrote a heavily satiric article about the censors in the leading Athens newspaper.

These first shows in Athens, although scandalous, had also received rave reviews.

There were articles in all the national Greek newspapers praising the remarkable Greek painter who was to “triumph in Paris” but the fiasco concerning his allegedly pornographic art was the beginning of a troubled relationship with the city of his birth.

Nonda was to prove difficult for the Athenian circles.

“Paris, Pigalle, Place Blanche, Place du Tertre- that’s where my life is!” With these words in a letter home, Nonda conveyed his love for the city of Paris which expressed itself in his work through vibrant and sensual images of Montmartre and the street life of Paris in those years.

He began producing freer, Expressionist works that reflected his turbulent life as well as his deepening confidence as an artist.

His accidental discovery of the use of blood and charcoal as a medium for painting also began in this decade.

These merged into a different period of highly textured painting that is often described as “fresco-like”.

He was ceaselessly experimental with different mediums in his art, using oils, powders wood and sand sand, as well as numerous invented combinations.

This was the beginning of a deep and long-lasting interest in varied surfaces and ways of manipulating, combining or treating paints with other mediums.

Nonda moved on to introduce images of powerful “Amazonian” women which contrasted the delicate “Parisiennes”.

A significant number of these images depicted “woman and bull”, the erotic metamorphosis between humans and animals, a link to ancient art and myth as well as a series inspired by Africa.

He was represented primarily by the Galerie Charpentier in the 50s and early 60s and was well known for his outdoor installations under the Pont Neuf Bridge in 1960s Paris as well as his unconventional use of cow's blood as a medium.

His work is often associated with large scale figurative and abstract expressionist canvases, and monumental sculpture in post-war Paris.

Nonda studied drawing and painting under Spiros Vikatos, who encouraged him in the classical tradition and praised his particular gift in portraiture.

His first works were portraits of his family, bold nudes, as well as landscapes, seascapes.

Many of these works survived the destruction of his atelier in Athens during the Second World War.

While his temperament was clearly precocious, his early paintings were deeply influenced by his interest in El Greco, Ingres, Delacroix and Frans Hals among others, and showed a great respect for the masters.