Anna Kindyni: Work from the period 1945-1965. Artistic and ideological similarities

Abstract

The important donation made by Margarita Papadimitriou-Boulenger to the Benaki Museumincludes more than three hundred works by her aunt, the painter and engraver Anna Kindyni. Kindyni, one of the most important figures of Greek art in the twentieth century, is mainly known nowadays for works created in the period 1945-1965, consisting of works in charcoal and pencil, drawings and engravings inspired by the period of the German occupation ofAthens. The majority of these works were created in Paris, where the artist had fled with her husband, Manolis Kindynis, thanks to a scholarship granted to him by the French state.

The harsh and unpleasant subject matter of starving children and people in destitution, the tragic mothers with their skeletal children, the almost exclusive use of charcoal or alternatively engraving and the total lack of colour show some similarities, mostly in terms of style, with the work of the German artist Käthe Kollwitz. By contrast, the artistic and ideological similarities with the French artists Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet, representatives of the ‘art informel’ and ‘art brut’ movements respectively, who were the focus of artistic attention when Kindyni first went to Paris, are significant. The way in which these artists strove to keep alive the memory of the horrors caused by the war and thus to formulate their own response to the accumulation of terror gave Kindyni the necessary psychological impetus to carry off an approach to art which the general public found difficult, and often disturbing, but which was full of sensitivity and dynamism.