Twentieth-century Cypriot art, from its emergence within the conditions of colonialism to its flowering in the post-independence era, constitutes a case of an "other" modernism on the periphery. It was a "site-specific" modernism that responded to particularities of Cyprus's experience of modernity. With regard to Greek Cypriot artists in particular, these responses included a varied negotiation of tradition as well as of modern art as part of both the need to define a collective identity for the colonial moment and the process of achieving a post-colonial present and future. The works of Adamantios Diamantis, Georghios Pol. Georghiou, and Christoforos Savva-three of the most prominent modern Cypriot artists-constitute important episodes in the course of Cypriot modernity, especially in the middle decades of the century. Taken together, their artistic oeuvres chart the trajectory of Greek Cypriot modernism in the pre-1974 era, the mapping of which contributes to the discourse of "alternative" instances in the history of modern art.
The writings of Periklis Yannopoulos and the Symbolist-Jugendstil
paintings of Nikolaos Gyzis, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, constitute two parallel cases in the culmination of Greek
aesthetic and artistic discourse, as it had been conducted since the
late eighteenth century. The two main strands of this discourse were
the place of Byzantium—especially Byzantine art—in the
wider (Neo)Hellenic narrative, and the concept of a new, "truly Greek"
art, along with the related notion of "Greekness in art." Yannopoulos
contributed, more than anyone before him, to the positive reappraisal
of Byzantine artistic achievements, and he gave the most systematic and
sophisticated exposition, up to then, of the notion of a perennial Greek
aesthetic. His aesthetically-defined landscape found visual expression
in Gyzis's late work, and both announced equivalent cultural debates
and artistic expressions that were to occur in the twentieth century.
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