A fascinating study of Greek identity
Ever heard of the artist Yannis Tsarouchis? If the answer is yes, it’s a pretty good bet you have some connection to Greece. His work is well known there. But beyond? Crickets chirp at his name. Especially now.
But a remarkably comprehensive new exhibition in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, the first major U.S. retrospective of Tsarouchis’ work, makes the case that this artist was anything but parochial. Bluntly put, this is an experience brimming with arrestingly erotic images of beautiful, naked men, carefully observed in all the erotic complexity of that statement, and mostly bathed in the singular light of the lands that surround the Mediterranean Sea.
To wander through the aptly titled “Dancing in Real Life” at the Alphawood Foundation’s relatively new Wrightwood 659 gallery (a worthy artistic destination in and of itself ) is to explore the Greek identity. You’ll feel like you’re dancing through a feast of rich mythology and classical culture, for sure, but also the turbulence of Greece during the 20th century.
It is a remarkable exhibit not just for its singularity and introduction of an artist many Chicagoans will not know, for the feeling of thoroughness with which it leaves the viewer. You walk back out into Lincoln Park feeling like you’ve not only taken the measure of a man, but explored oft-shrouded aspects of one of the more complicated countries in the world.
Tsarouchis was already at work in 1928 and he didn’t stop until his death in 1989, despite being afflicted with Parkinson’s disease in his last years. During that lifetime, Greece went through a fascist dictatorship, a Nazi occupation (with the consequent annihilation of a large Jewish community), a civil war, a military coup and Junta (which enjoyed U.S. support), any number of rebellions and revolutions on the streets and, of course, periods of great economic stress.
Tsarouchis was a visual artist, known primarily for his paintings and sketches. But, in an interesting twist, his day job was in the theater and the opera house. He worked as a professional costume designer, set designer, playwright and director — mostly in Greece but, on occasion, beyond its borders.
At the exhibition, you can see a picture of Tsarouchis standing with the opera star Maria Callas; the pair worked on a production of Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea” at the Dallas Civic Opera in 1958, a staging that was reprised all over the world; it was one of Callas’ favorite roles.
But as you can see on the walls of the gallery, Tsarouchis’ most interesting theatrical work took place in humbler locals: a production of Euripides’ “The Trojan Women,” for example, staged in a parking lot in Athens in 1977, or his Dionysian designs for an Athenian production of Aristophanes’ “The Birds.” That 1959 staging was so controversial, it was shut down.
Tsarouchis was shut down a whole lot.
Which brings us back to the naked Greek men, many of whom are depicted in their military uniforms. Seen in such ecstatic profusion, they are a fascinating bunch, often depicted with some surreal mythological referent juxtaposed with the prosaic: “Two Men with Butterfly Wings and Black Shoes,” say, or “Young Athlete in Black Shorts next to a Bust of Hermes.”
For much of this artist’s career, the removal of certain offending paintings would be demanded by some Greek general or another. The Greek military did not care for his “Seated Sailor and Reclining Nude,” for example. They worried the nudity of the military figures made these men look weak.
Viewed now, of course, the concern is absurd, the romantic sentimentality of the artist notwithstanding. And, of course, you can see Tsarouchis’ work as a kind of homoerotic counterpoint to a whole series of repressive Greek regimes, the popular Greek stereotype notwithstanding.
In an essay in the catalog, the scholar Evgenios D. Matthiopoulos argues that the critics of the time were complicit in this decadeslong repression of the artist’s themes: “In exercising self-censorship,” Matthiopoulos writes, “they demoted eroticism conceptually and excluded it from what was deemed moral enough to interpret.”
In fairness, they probably were worried about their own livelihoods.
Practicalities and the need to survive meant that Tsarouchis also had to understand that while he had a license in his paintings and theater work to explore homoerotic themes (to a point, anyway), that freedom did not extend to public statements.
Not, at least, for most of his life.
Eroticism, though, is hardly demoted in this Chicago exhibition, as thrilling an exploration of the male nude form as you are likely to see, en masse.
But that’s hardly the full measure of Tsarouchis: his work is a veritable feast of contrasts, between East and West, secular rebellion and spiritual quest, transformation and transcendence, democracy and the repressive tendencies of left and right; heck, even Plato and Jesus Christ.
You know, all that tricky stuff that roiled the 20th century.
At tucked-away Wrightwood (which has only had a few exhibitions to date), COVID is keeping down the exhibit to 24 viewers at a time (at least at press time).
So the experience is intimate.
Until the fall of the Junta in 1974, all public employees in Greece were obliged to fill out an official certificate, attesting to their appropriate political beliefs. Tsarouchis always refused, even though it cost him professorships he coveted.
His reasoning was that no one who had agreed to fill out such a certificate, whatever the flavor of political obeyance it might demand, could retain enough credibility to talk to students about art or theater.
Lessons for our moment. We see you, Yannis Tsarouchis. We can all learn from your courage.
“Dancing in Real Life” with works by Greek artist Yannis Tsarouchis is at Wrightwood 659 in Lincoln Park through July 31; wrightwood659.org