YANNIS TSAROUCHIS (1910-1989) Soldat dansant le zeibekiko

YANNIS TSAROUCHIS (1910-1989)
Soldat dansant le zeibekiko
signé en grec et daté "1966-68" en haut à gauche
huile sur toile
195,5 x 97 cm. (76 3/4 x 38 3/16in.)

signed in Greek and dated "1966-68" upper left
oil on canvas
Provenance
Acquis directement auprès de l'artiste par un collectionneur privé à Athènes vers 1969, puis transmis par héritage au propriétaire actuel.

Exhibitions
Athens, Kalfayan Galleries, Yiannis Tsarouchis (1910-1989), December 14, 2007 - January 26, 2008 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, p. 10).
Basel, Art Basel, Kalfayan galleries, Tsarouchis,
June 2018.

Literature
Tachydromos magazine, no. 1702, December 25, 1986, p. 40.

Bless you, dear Tsarouchis, so valiant and humble.
Safe journey to your zeybek,
safe journey to Greek eternity steeped in eros.
Yannis Ritsos

"For a while, the music stops amidst rounds of applause; the waiters sweep the tiles of the dancing floor clean, removing the broken plates and glasses and trampled flowers; and now comes a zeibekiko,1 Christ Almighty, such vibrancy and rhythm ... a downbeat without an upbeat: not breathing out, it falls on the following upbeat right away, as if we breathe twice together ... and now a manly fellow leaps up, calm, with his eyelids lowered, he springs up alone ... a small cross around his neck flickering like an evening-star on his hairy chest, his waist slim as a ring, tight buttocks high up; the first steps are slow and solemn, a ritual; the broad-winged eagle flies down low ... his right hand stretches out horizontally, and every so often, his left hand clutches the bulge there between his legs: 'Here I am, here is the world;' a chaste oracular nakedness secretly telling the world's secrets ... and he leaps and whirls around the invisible altar known only to eternity ... glory, glory be to life, glory be to the human body."2

In volume six of his vast autobiographical work entitled Iconostasis of Anonymous Saints (1983-1985), the great Greek poet and Nobel Prize nominee Yannis Ritsos gives us the above amazing description of the zeibekiko dance. His breathtaking narration continues, even when the dance is over, with an ingenious comparison between the ritual of the zeibekiko and the liturgical ceremonies of the Orthodox church:3

"The dance had finished, so had the music; silence, no applause, no breaking of plates; awe, devoutness, piety; as if he were still alone, the dancer went back to his seat with slow steps; only for a moment, before sitting down, his left hand touched the cross which had slipped out of his shirt, and pushed it back on his chest ... the ecclesiastical rite was over; we stood up and went out; the church emptied, the chalices remained empty; I lifted a trampled gardenia from the tiled floor, like a flower which had fallen from the Bier of Christ Epitaphios procession. I smelled the flower; ah, ah, Greekness Romiosyni, you brave mother of heroes, you who gave birth to gods, angels, naked limbs of statues ... and dithyrambs of roses."4

In the following pages, Ritsos recalls Tsarouchis's "superb zeybek dancers, marvellous poses, handsome lads dressed in navy or army uniforms," and quotes more than one full page on the zeibekiko written by the artist himself. This is the one and only time in the entire course of the Iconostasis when a long quotation from somebody else's work appears. Ritsos justified this exception by praising the quality of the text: "I've never read better lines about the zeibekiko than his. Tsarouchis was not just a painter, he was also a poet; let me copy his text verbatim:"

"In 1934 I saw genuine zeybeks who got aboard at Smyrna, on the ship taking me to Constantinople. I was on my way to see the mosaics of Saint Sophia, which had just been uncovered by the American Byzantinist Thomas Whittemore. These zeybeks were dressed in their old-fashioned costumes and looked very much like the ones painted by Gysis5 and Lytras6 ... Towards sunset, one of them danced up on the deck. As he began to move, he was genuinely transformed. He was no longer the same person. His valour in a curious way supplemented a kind of humility and a kind of gratitude, though you couldn't know to whom this was addressed; and with great modesty, he seemed to be expressing gratitude to God for the miracle of life. He was accompanied by a toumbeleki drum, which another zeybek was beating in the magic rhythm 9/8.

"True sacrificial offering of praise, valour, and at the same time spirit, contrite and humbled. Erotic love and manliness and at the same time, something similar to an awareness of death. It's amazing how this young zeybek lowered his eyes in sweet submission in contrast to his great strength; but at the very same moment, his feet pounding on the ground seemed to threaten something invisible, which was crawling down on earth. He looked like a statue of a warrior who has once fought a dragon with a sword and a shield but now was left with none of those—all of which having been lost, as it often happens with old statues."

"He appeared to be struggling and trying to combat this dragon, and yet, you simultaneously felt that he was passionately copulating with the dragon, no longer with his sword, but with his equally invisible phallus. As also is the case with so many Greeks, his face had the expression of some supercilious, omnipotent being and the humility of a mercenary soldier. A warrior subdued by limb-loosening eros."7

"Yes" exclaims Ritsos, "this is the genuine zeibekiko," ending the quoted passage with a paean to Tsarouchis: "Bless you, dear Tsarouchis, so valiant and humble. Safe journey to your zeybek, safe journey to Greek eternity steeped in eros."8

Since 1957, Tsarouchis had painted young men dancing the zeibekiko—the male dance expressing lovelorn passions, heart-wrenching separations, and unfulfilled desires. The artist's relationship with the zeibekiko was long, profound, and above all experiential. He had been an excellent dancer himself and was thoroughly familiar with this saturnine, almost ritualistic and extremely personal dance, whose social evolution and broadening appeal he had witnessed in the music scene of Athens even before 1940. Painter Philip Tarlow offers a personal recollection:

"I remember a party at Spyros Vassiliou's house in Athens, in the lee of the Acropolis, when Tsarouchis danced the zeibekiko. He had been totally transformed. There was nothing else in the room for him, or for those watching, but the magic of music and dance. I'll never forget the expression on his face as he danced; it was wild, solemn, sensual, reserved, ceremonial, at once deeply somber and ecstatic."9

For Tsarouchis, zeibekiko expresses the Modern Greek male psyche. A dance representative of a marginal male culture, it symbolizes the eternal struggle of life with death. By depicting it in his work as being danced by Greek sailors and soldiers, he highlighted its folk character and stated his belief that the mystic origins of zeibekiko have Greek roots, deriving from the ancient divination centers of Thrace and Dodoni. He also mentioned that he never used models for his zeibekiko paintings, which were based solely on his memory and imagination.10

Here, Tsarouchis's 'zeybek' is captured in shallow space against a dark monochromatic background—a compositional structure reminiscent of Renaissance portraits that played a pivotal role throughout the artist's career.
Simplification, flat patterning, broad and overlapping planes of colour, pronounced contours, limited colour scheme, confident brushwork, and a stage designer's perception of space11 build up a solid edifice invested with a meditative feel.

By imaginatively combining a sense of monumentality, permanence and sculpturesque clarity rooted in ancient Greek art, with a keen eye for many neglected aspects of contemporary popular culture, Tsarouchis probed into the inner world of Greekness, elevating a young soldier dancing zeibekiko into a symbol of the Modern Greek spirit.

Note that while the ancient ruins and architectural fragments scattered on the ground behind the dancer suggest an everlasting world of classical reason liberated from the fleeting moment,12 certain mundane details, such as the stainless-steel wristwatch and the piece of pendant jewellery, restore the figure's firm attachment to the here and now, capturing the pulse of modern life. Painted at a time when non-objective abstraction was still the indisputable language of the international modernist avant-garde and figuration was considered an outcast from the mainstream, Tsarouchis's signature male subject was a bold artistic statement offering fresh insights into issues of cultural and sexual identity.

As noted by A. Szymczyk who co-curated the artist's 2021 retrospective in Chicago, "the negotiation and transgression of limits between art and the everyday were central to Tsarouchis's work and philosophy. Many of his later works enter into erudite dialogue with the old masters revered and studied by Tsarouchis. Appropriating compositional schemes from Vermeer van Delft and other Dutch Golden Age painters or portraying himself copying Titian, Tsarouchis ignored artistic fashions of his day, keeping at a distance from his contemporaries and, instead, creating a world of thoughts, emotions, and imagery that was unmistakably his own. He dodged expectations and was a true postmodern artist avant la lettre, constantly brushing up against the grain of his time, fully aware of the fact that his work would only be appreciated in the future."13

Tsarouchis, who now enjoys the reputation of a renowned and highly collectable painter with a growing international audience, was an intellectual who courageously faced ideological challenges and biased ethical practices in Greek society of his time that included homophobia. "It was only in the last years of his life that studies addressing homosexuality in his painting were published. And it wasn't until the year 2000 that art...