Konstantinos Parthenis

Konstantinos Parthenis was born in Alexandria in 1878 or 1879. He attended the Saint François-Xavier Jesuit school and graduated in 1895. From 1897 to 1903 he lived in Vienna, where he studied with the theosophist painter Karl Diefenbach and the portraitist Berthold Dominik Lippay. In 1900 he participated in the Exposition Universelle in Paris and in the exhibition of the Society of the Friends of the Arts in Athens. He returned to Greece in 1903. He painted the churches of Saint George on Poros (1906 – 07), Saint George in Cairo (1908), and Saint Alexander in Palaio Faliro (1919). He lived in Paris from 1909 to 1911 and then in Corfu, before moving to Athens in 1917. In 1920 he held a retrospective at the Zappeion Exhibition Hall and received the National Award for Letters and Arts. In 1924 he designed his home and studio at the foot of the Acropolis. In 1929 he became professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he taught until 1947. In 1938 he represented Greece at the Venice Biennale. He was a founding member of the Techni group, with which he exhibited in 1917 and 1933. In 1966 his students organized a solo exhibition for him at the Athens Technological Institute. Celebrated as a “poet of the brush” and the preeminent Greek artist of his time, he modernized Greek painting and exerted significant influence through his teaching. He died in Athens in 1967. In 2023 the National Gallery in Athens staged a retrospective of his work.