Kefallinos, Giannis

Born in 1894 in the Greek community of Alexandria. His parents were wealthy people and their roots came from the Greek islands of Zakynthos and Chios . Giannis Kefallinos received his primary education in Alexandria and was sent by his family in 1912 to study as an engineer in Ghent in Belgium . Despite his abilities in mathematics and the instructions of his parents, Giannis Kefallinos decided to leave his studies in Ghent and went to study in Paris to study the history of art and painting. He entered the Paris School of Fine Arts .

In 1914, fleeing the First World War , he interrupted his studies and returned to Alexandria. Yannis Kefallinos remained a pacifist even after Greece entered the war, as well as in the subsequent Asia Minor campaign of the Greek army.

In Alexandria, he made friends with the Greek literary circles of the city and published a number of essays on art. During this period, he created his first engravings for the satirical journal Mask ( 1918 ).

After the end of World War I, he returned to Paris in 1919 and continued his studies at the School with the engraver Gabriel Bellot ( French: Gabriel Bellot ). After completing his studies, Yannis Kefallinos remained in France for ten years, where he continued to engage in engraving and illustration of books. At the same time, he maintained friendly relations with the Greek poets Sikelianos , Cavafys , Varnalis and others.

In 1922, Kefallinos illustrated the book of writer Joseph Rivière ( fr. Joseph Rivière ) Mer océane ^[2] and, two years later, he illustrated the book by Anatole France “On a White Stone” ( Sur la pierre blanche ).

In 1924, the artist married and settled in Cinq - Mars la Pile, where he bought a manor with a garden. Here he lived for six years and became known in France under the name Jean Kefalinos.

The Greek public first learned of Yannis Kefallinos from a dedication published by Kostas Varnalis in the journal Filiki Eteria in 1925.

Particular attention and appreciation of his work by Yannis Kefallinos was made by the famous Greek sculptor Konstantinos Dimitriadis , who was already a famous sculptor and worked in Paris. Konstantinos Dimitriadis left France after the invitation of the Greek Prime Minister Venizelos to head the Athens School of Fine Arts, which was experiencing a period of stagnation.

In 1930, Konstantinos Dimitriadis invited Yannis Kefallinos to head the department of engraving at the School of Athens. In the same year, Yannis Kefallinos left his well-established life and career in France and settled in Athens. In 1931, he headed the “Engraving Workshop” at the Athens School of Fine Arts .

Greek reality did not leave Yannis Kefallinos much time for her own creative work. However, the artist always found time for her. This is especially true of the period of his eight-month stay on the island of Mykonos , where he performed a large number of woodcuts. The art of engraving and its teaching, as well as the art of illustrating books at that time, were almost unknown in the country. Yannis Pappas, who was a student and collaborator of Yannis Kefallinos, believes that Yannis Kefallinos was not only the organizer of the "Engraving Workshop", but also the creator of the engraving in Greece, which received brilliant development and international recognition through his students ^[3] .

Art historians rank Yannis Kefallinos as a small group of Greek artists, which includes Dimitris Galanis , Angelos Theodoropoulos , Lycurgos Kogevinas and Georgios Ikonomidis , who brought the spirit of expressionism to Greece ^[4] . While some art historians consider Galanis the pioneer of engraving in Greece, others believe that Giannis Kefallinos created the first generation of Greek engravers and formed the Greek face of engraving. In the “Workshop” of Yannis Kefallinos, which became a creative and democratic oasis in the difficult times of political instability and the dictatorship of General Metaxas , the Greek engravers Vaso Katraki , Kostas Grammatopoulos , Thassos , Yannis Moralis , Georgios Varlamos , Tilemahos Kantos and many others studied .

Giannis Kefallinos was a staunch pacifist. But after the start of the Greco-Italian War of 1940, he mobilized his “Workshop” and students to issue patriotic and propaganda posters. These posters received national fame and contributed to the Greek victory, which was the first victory of the countries of the anti-fascist coalition ^[6] .

In the difficult years of the triple, German-Italian-Bulgarian occupation of Greece, Kefallinos remained in Athens. During these years, his "Workshop" and students became the authors of patriotic works for the National Resistance . In 1942, he was arrested by the occupation authorities and imprisoned because his three woodcuts, dedicated to the terrible famine of the winter of 1941-1942 , which claimed the lives of 250 thousand people in Athens, showed "defeatism and communist activity" ^{[7] [ 8]} . After the liberation of Greece in October 1944, commissioned the artist to illustrate Nikos Kazantzakis ' Asceticism. A few days later, in December 1944, fighting began between the city units of the People’s Liberation Army of Greece and the British troops landed in Greece. In the midst of the fighting on the streets of Athens, Janns Kefallinos continued to work on the book, secluded in his house.

The position taken by the artist during this period was expressed by the saying of the ancient fabulist Babrios , which Yannis Kefallinos made with his symbol: “ΦΑΙΝΕ ΚΑΙ ΣΙΓΑ” (show yourself and be silent). In December 1945, he published his essay Ascetic, which had 80 pages and a small size (13x19 cm). The text in the book was typed in two columns. The paragraph numbers and initial capital letters were printed in orange and gave the work the appearance of a church book. The severity of the text was emphasized by a thin vignette and the first letter enclosed in the decoration according to the text: a snake (once associated with an apple of knowledge), an eagle, a silkworm in its three forms, an eagle and a snake, divine lightning - everything is connected by arabesques, in complete balance of the image and typographic font.

In the postwar years, Giannis Kefallinos openly supported Cyprus for its independence from the British .

He illustrated books by Kazantzakis, Prevelakis, Zalokostas , Sikelianos . For Bucolica Theocritus, he created a special font. Between 1950 and 1954, Yannis Kefallinos took up the project of postage stamps commissioned by the Greek Post . With the help of his students, he released the album Ten White Lequifs from the Museum of Athens ( 1956 ).

From 1954 until his death in 1957, Yannis Kefallinos was the rector of the Athens School of Fine Arts ^[9] .

The first works of Kefallinos were distinguished by realism. Later, descriptive elements began to fade into the background and forms became more abstract.

Yannis Kefallinos, called the "silent" writer Prevelakis, Pantelis or "Kaloyannis" (kind Yannis) relatives, did not care about advertising his work. His works were scattered mainly from books that he illustrated.

To the works of Yannis Kefallinos can also be added the influence that he had on his students. It was his students who initiated the retrospective exhibition at the School of Fine Arts a few months after the death of their teacher.

Today, the work of Yannis Kefallinos, marked by avant-garde dynamism, has become widely known not least thanks to the work of art critic Emanuel Kassdaglis.

In 2006, the National Art Gallery (Athens) presented the works of Yannis Kefallinos at the exhibition “Paris - Athens 1863-1940”, which exhibited the works of French artists and the works of Greek artists, to some extent connected with French fine art ^[10] .

The works of Yannis Kefallinos took one of the central places in the exhibition “Greek Engravers of the 20th Century”. The exhibition was then transferred to the capital of Macedonia, to the city of Thessaloniki and the capital of the Peloponnese to the city of Patras ^[11] .

The works of Yannis Kefallinos are exhibited in the permanent exhibitions of the National Gallery of Greece and other public and private galleries ^[12] .

• Ε. Χ. Κάσδαγλης, Γιάννης Κεφαλληνός ο χαράκτης , Μορφωτικό Ίδρυμα Εθνικής Τραπέζης, Αθήνα 1991, σελ. 572. ISBN 9602500328 .
• Γ. Κεφαλληηνός , Αλληλογραφία 1913-1952, Κείμενα , Μορφωτικό Ίδρυμα Εθνικής Τραπέζης, Αθήνα 1991, σελ. 431. ISBN 9602500301 .

• https://web.archive.org/web/20140602201227/http://www.nationalgallery.gr/site/content.php?artist_id=4892