Yannis Moralis

Yannis Moralis was born in Arta in 1916. He studied painting and printmaking at the Athens School of Fine Arts from 1931 to 1936 with Umbertos Argyros, Konstantinos Parthenis, and Yannis Kefallinos. In 1936 he traveled with his friend Nikos Nikolaou to Rome and then moved to Paris, where he studied painting and mural at the École des Beaux-Arts and mosaic at the École des Arts et Métiers. In 1939 he left his studies and returned to Greece to join the army. During the German occupation he painted portraits for a living. In 1947 he took over the preliminary year at the Athens School of Fine Arts, and in 1957 he was elected professor of painting; he taught there until 1983. He was a founding member of the Armos group (1949). In 1958, he represented Greece at the Venice Biennale. In 1979 he received the Academy of Athens Prize for the Arts. The National Gallery in Athens presented his first retrospective in 1988. He worked in book illustration, stage design, and the design of large architectural ensembles for public buildings. One of the most important Greek painters of the twentieth century, he studied the human figure in depth—particularly the female figure—and rendered it in both figurative and geometric-abstract terms. He died in Athens in 2009.