There are not many collections of sculpture - internationally, not just in Greece. A spatial art of usually monumental dimensions, of volumes and planes, sculpture needs to attract dedicated collectors from the outset to win them over. In the absence of external impressiveness -not offered by the austere language of sculpture, anyway - one has to have deep self-confidence and great love in order to embrace this art.
Zacharias G. Portalakis, the collector of Modern Greek sculpture, does have an indisputable strong confidence in his taste as well as a deep love for sculpture. His clear-cut Cretan idiosyncrasy knows how to insist on what he is interested in and how to acquire it through arduous efforts. Starting from the direct realism of Thanassis Apartis he went on to the figurative expressionism of Christos Capralos; the next steps naturally took him to the abstract formalisation of Yorghos Zongolopoulos and the geometrical outlines of Costas Coulentianos.
This exhibition includes seventeen of Christos Capralos' works from the Zacharias G. Portalakis Collection; they form a whole which is well able to demonstrate the sculptor's contribution to Greek art.
Born in Panetolion, near Agrinion, in 1909, Capralos went from a young age as an apprentice under local religious painters one of whom was called Georgiadis. However, the one person who sealed his young soul was a man he met by chance in Agrinion around 1927: Nassos Gerakis, painter, sculptor, journalist and writer, looked after the young Capralos as both father and mentor, urging him to draw, read books and learn French poems by heart so that he would learn the language (Christos Capralos, Athens 1981, p 18).
In 1928, aided by the well-known tobacco manufacturer loannis Papastratos he goes to Athens to work as a draftsman for the architect Vassilios Kouremenos. In 1929 he goes to the studio of the sculptor Vassos Falireas as assistant. Next year he enters the School of Fine Arts and, still with support from the Papastratos brothers who regard him as one of their family, studies painting under Oumvertos Argyros, at the same time doing sculptures on his own.
In 1934 he leaves for Paris with a one-year scholarship. For the next four years he has to work hard for his living, although the French engineer Henri Bonifacy, like another Papastratos, helped him in difficult times (op. cit., p. 29). In the French capital he studied at the Grande Chaumiere and Colarossi Academies under Marcel Gimond.
When the War broke out he returned with Yannis Moralis to Greece. He lived at his village till 1946, working in the fields and producing sculptures with clay brought over from Athens. He often used his mother, his sister and other people close to him as models in his works. It was at that time that he created his friezes for the Monument to Combat of Pindos with scenes from the War, the German Occupation, the Resistance and the Peacetime.
In October 1946 a —homeless!— Capralos has his first solo exhibition at Parnassus; it was the first post-war exhibition of art in Greece.
Despite the impact of his works (or because of it, as Capralos was thought to be politically tainted), nothing was bought. The writer Spyros Melas wondered in Estia (31.10.1946), "Is anyone going to understand him? Help him?" Capralos was about to return to his village when the journalist Yeorghios Fteris wrote in Ta Nea (2.12.1946) an article entitled "In order to save a talent; Appeal for Capralos". The response came from Costas Kotzias, mayor of Athens, who donated a piece of land from his own private property in Athens. Kotzias also asked Capralos' old supporter loannis Papastratos and Admiral Charilaos Liambeis to finance the building of a studio for the sculptor, who could now dedicate himself to his work (op. cit., p. 49).
In May 1947 the "Tetradio" publishing house —born out of the literary magazine of the same title produced by Antonis Vousvounis, Andreas Kambas, Alexandros Xydis, Alexis Solomos and Matsi Hatzilazarou— published Christos Capralos, Sculptor. It was a short, neatly printed monograph written by Alexandros Xydis and art edited by Antonis Vousvounis which provided Capralos with a small revenue. Telemachos Apostolopoulos, Director of the lonian and Popular Bank and nephew of Alexandros Papanastasiou, bought a large number of copies and actively supported Capralos (op. cit., p. 63). The sculptor spent the summers from 1952 to 1956 in Aegina where he sculpted the seven friezes with the reliefs from the Combat of Pindos in limestone.
In 1957 the Athens & Piraeus Electrical Co. organised an exhibition of Capralos's works in their Athens showroom in order to promote their new system of artwork illumination. In late 1960 the sculptor Costas Klouvatos helped Capralos to set up a brass foundry next to his studio, where he used the old method of cire perdue to cast the works he exhibited at the Biennale of Venice in 1962 (op. cit., p. 68).
In the years from 1963 to 1973 he exhibited in America, at the Martha Jackson and Park galleries in 1963, the Albert White in Toronto and the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1967. He also participated in group shows in Germany, Italy and the USA. In 1975 he exhibited at the Hilton Art Gallery in Athens, and in 1975 he represented Greece at the Biennale of Sao Paolo. In 1991 the Christos and Souli Capralos Foundation was established in Aegina; the Foundation opened the Christos Capralos Museum with premises in Aegina, Athens and Agrinion. The Aegina division of the Museum houses the Monument to Combat of Pindos, a large number of microsculptures made of baked clay, a series of manlike seats made of limestone, and wooden sculptures; the Athens division houses bronze works and clay vessels; and the Agrinion division, presented by the "Papastratos Tobacco Company", houses early sculptures from the 1930-1950 period.
Christos Capralos died in Athens in 1993.
The artist's mother is a recurrent theme in many plaster works produced at his home village between 1940 and 1945. Whether standing or seated, with her head held high or bent under her worries, the figure alludes to the monumental works of ancient Greek sculpture. My Mother, a 1950 work in bronze showing her in a typical peasant woman's stance, employs a dialogue between straight lines and curved or angular themes, a firm pyramid to introduce us to the world of silent toil she nobly incarnates.
A fundamental reference to his mother (and, indirectly, to womanhood) is to be found in Figure (1957, hammered lead), whose posture (the emphatic promotion of vertical and horizontal planes at right angles and the few curves, mostly meant as pointers to gender) hints at her grandeur and dignity as suggested in the second title the artist has given: The Proud One. This work's eclectic affinity with Julio Gonzalez's iron sculpture Seated Figure (1935) does not go unnoticed.
In Goat, a bronze sculpture made in 1959 and repeated in a variation in the same year, the artist reproduces the sacred event of birth which he must have witnessed quite often in his village. This simple synopsis of a routine incident contains a dramatically expressionist tone, which brings it close to Marino Marini's works from the same decade.
The Wounded Horse (1959,bronze) alludes to the cubist Horse produced by Raymond Duchamp-Villon in 1914, also in bronze. Capralos renders the suffering body in the same fragmented way, as a sloping curve indicating the animal's declining state. Note in particular the stance of the horse's head (a favourite theme of Capralos's) which provides the necessary line to complete the composition but also makes the viewer feel the wounded beast's silent pain.
From the 1960s onwards the artist's anthropocentric work focuses on abstract expressionist figures rendered in a fractional way -an example of this is Korae (Maidens,1961, bronze), exhibited at the Venice Biennale of 1962 and formerly the property of the II Millione Gallery of Milan; the mutilated female figures whose names allude to classical antiquity have been «monumentalised». Works of a similarly expressionistic approach where the form is broken down can be found in Germain Richier, already since the 1940s.
Synthesis (1961,bronze) bears the traces of a similar tendency for abstract, generalised forms. The two figures, again mutilated, have been conceived as equal and corresponding to one another. The balanced vertical and horizontal axes bring to mind Kenneth Armitage's Two standing women (1951).
The theme of The Couple (1963, bronze), extensively reworked by Capralos in later variations, has its origins in ancient Greek sculpture. The two mutilated bodies —the strong, vertical man and the dependent, recumbent woman— suggest a powerful contact between them.
The human form in the work of Capralos gradually becomes more fragmentary and deliberately simplified. The Woman at the Door (1963, bronze) attests to the sculptor's tendency to clear away any identification with specific people. He is interested in the interplay between lines, vertical and horizontal, straight and curved, and the unexpected tensions hiding behind them.
The symbolism is transparent in the works Mother - Daughter (1963,bronze). The female figures, standing in one work and seated in the other, display their clear emotional bond. Their lines bring them close to Lynn Chadwick's efforts from the same decade.
The tragic element of ancient Greece informs the Figure (1963,bronze). The gestures of the female figure express her charged mental state while the angular motifs exacerbate the intensity of the image.
In the Bathing Woman (1966,bronze) Capralos depicts a familiar genre theme without stopping at a mere description: he interprets it through straight and curved lines and omits any irrelevant or accidental details.
The Composition (1968,bronze) takes the artist's symbolism to its extreme. Is the female figure behind the window a female object of sensual lust?
The Chariot (1969,bronze and wood) is rendered in a totally abstract way but at the same time with the sense of motion clearly stated by the incomplete rider who is connected to one wheel and his horse's head.
Lament is to Capralos a deep human emotion, which cannot be assuaged by outward manifestation. His Pieta (1978, bronze) illustrates the terrible anguish.
The oeuvre of Christos Capralos is comprehensively represented in the Zacharias G. Portalakis Collection, focused as it is in the human form which is the key to understanding the sculptor's work: "I start from a great love for people, and that's what I want to express", Capralos used to say. The toiling Man, the Worker and the Fighter, the Woman —these are permanent themes in Capralos. The artist went gradually from figuration to abstraction, from the descriptive to the suggestive, and his figures lost their features to become symbolic images. He was in experiential communication with Greek Antiquity, assimilating its spirit and dynamically transforming and incorporating it in his compositions; at the same time he was not indifferent to the advances of contemporary European sculpture. He knew how to exploit in a constantly alert fashion his material - the cool plaster, the severe marble, the hard bronze, the rigid lead, the rough limestone, the wonderful eucalyptus, the earthy clay.
Dimitris Pavlopoulos
Dr. Art Historian
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