Vikatos, Spyridon

Spiridon Vikatos was born in 1878 in the city of Argostoli on the island of Kefalonia . He has shown a penchant for painting since childhood. At the age of 10, due to financial problems of the family, he was forced to work in a pharmacy. The pharmacy showcase was his first exhibition stand.

The turning point in his fate was his portrait of Metropolitan German Kalligas. In 1889, Herman became the archbishop of Athens. Herman paid the costs of moving Vikatos, as well as his studies at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1896-1900).

Vikatos studied painting with Nicephorus Litras and Spiridon Prosalentis and sculpture with Georgios Vrutos . As a student, Vikatos in 1897 received prizes for his work, established by the philanthropists Chrysergis and Tomaidis.

In January 1900, having received a scholarship from Vallianos , Vikatos left for Munich to continue his studies at the Munich Academy of Arts . In Munich, Vikatos studied painting with Nikolaos Gizis and with the German genre artist and landscape painter Ludwig von Löfftz. Fellow students of Vikatos were the Greek artists Friksos Aristeas, M. Iliadis and Hector Dukas.

In 1903, Vikatos received a silver medal and cash prize at a painting competition in Munich. Vikatos fell in love with German impressionism and was very productive. The artist successfully participated in an international exhibition in the Glass Palace in 1905. The former teacher of Vikatos, Nikifor Litras , watching the success of his student, predicted that Vikatos, on his return to Greece, would take his place in the department of painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts .

Vikatos returned to Greece in 1905. In 1909, as Litras predicted, Vikatos began teaching at the School of Fine Arts in Athens , remaining in this post for 31 years, until 1940 . The artist took part in international exhibitions in Bordeaux in 1907 (gold medal), in Rome in 1911, in Paris in 1937 and at the Venice Biennale of 1934 and 1936.

Spiridon Vikatos died at the age of 82 from pneumonia.

With his will, he left his fortune to the Athens School of Fine Arts and instituted a “Vikatov Scholarship” for students of painting, sculpture and engraving who received a diploma with the mark “Excellent” to continue their studies in Munich. The Vikatos scholarship is also given once every 3 years to a German sculptor, a graduate of the Munich Academy, to study ancient Greek sculpture on the spot.

He also donated 30 of his paintings to the National Gallery of Greece . A large number of Greek artists of the 20th century are students of Vikatos. Among them, From his students distinguished artists G. Gunaropoulos, Giannakos, Α. Γ Georgiadis and Γ. Μugios, Tsaruhis, Giannis ^[1] .

The work of Vikatos covers the entire first half of the 20th century. The artist was extremely efficient and productive. He wrote about 1,500 oil paintings and countless drawings.

Vikatos painted mostly portraits. To a lesser extent, its themes included religious compositions, genre scenes and still lifes. But Vikatos painted a small number of landscapes, since he was not very interested in the problems of natural light. Vikatos worked in his workshop under artificial lighting and wrote “quickly, using a brush, spatula and even fingers, almost like a sculptor, processing a lot of paint and emphasizing the volume of strong lighting. His works, despite their expressiveness, did not have a detailed treatment. ”

Vicatos was not interested in displaying an incomplete natural form, but "that dramatic moment of artistic creation, when the artist's inspiration unexpectedly extracts its living form from the shapeless mass of paint." This boundary between life and death explains the artist’s preference in his work for the heads of the elderly. For the same reason, the artist uses heavy, earthly colors and sharp shadows, rough forms without outlines, an indefinite background with deep colors.

The artist transfers the center of gravity from objective reality to individual creativity with the transfer of energy from the artist to his work, which portends some trends of modern abstract art ^[2] . The artist remained faithful to the traditions of German academism . Hermann Nasse, a German art history professor, writes that Vikatos follows traditional Greek school manners, such as semi-light. He writes that Vikatos does not hide the fact that he is a faithful student of his teachers. He also notes that the paintings of Vikatos testify to his special love for old age.

From notes the characteristic, "real Greek heads" of the elderly, similar to the ancient philosophers with an exciting expression. These faces symbolize the experience and wisdom of life. But in the paintings of the 60-year-old Vikatos there are many heads of children. "They all sing about the life and death of these two poles of the northern man." In religious paintings, “Christ walks among modern people, speaks and teaches like Fritz von Ude ” ^[3] .

In addition to his professorship at the Athens School of Fine Arts , Vikatos agreed to periodically accept student assistants to his workshop. The future professor A. Prokopiu, having heard about the liberal teaching of Vikatos, became one of these students in 1930.

Prokopiu writes that with chagrin he discovered his teacher’s “non-pedagogical” approach.

The student wrote in coal and each time Vikatos silently wrote his work on top of the student's work.

Desperate and finding no understanding, Prokopiu moved to the workshop of Umverto Argiros , and then Konstantin Partenis . Today, Prokopiu believes that he was not mature to understand his teacher and that Vikatos was doing something more significant than the oral teaching that Prokopiu expected.

“Because Vikatos felt painting as an action, not as a theory. When he did me the honor of writing on top of my work, I should have been able to follow the successive stages of the topic. ”

Prokopiu writes that Vikatos wrote with instinct, with incredible speed, like an automaton. “He himself did not realize how easily he solved the problems that nature and art posed before him.”

Prokopiu writes that it would be erroneous to attribute Vicatos, whose work is divided into 3 periods to any school or course. He was not realistic , because in reality this was the beginning of his journey.

He was not an impressionist , because the natural light did not greatly excite him and he preferred to work in his workshop.

He was not an expressionist , because he was not obsessed with the agony of fate and loneliness.

Vikatos was a strong individual who placed feeling in the place of ideas and opened the way for students to express freely.

Vikatos himself was a stage for his era ^[4] .

For his contribution to Greek painting in 1937, the Athenian Academy of Sciences awarded Vikatos the Distinction of Arts. In 1946, George II (King of Greece) awarded the artist the Order of the Phoenix . In 1951, at a special ceremony, the President of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, Josef Henselmann (1898-1997), proclaimed Vikatos the honorary professor of the Munich Academy.

Pictures of Vikatos are stored and exhibited in the National Gallery of Greece , in the Munich Gallery, in the galleries of Vienna, Belgrade , Rome , Paris , as well as in private collections. The artist's works are often exhibited at international auctions of works of art ^{[5] [6]} .