ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

Yannis Gaïtis () was a Greek painter and sculptor, who was born in Athens on August 1, 1898.

Biography

Children and studies

Yannis Gaitis was born in Athens. His father Philippe François left Pyrgos, a village on the island of Tinos, settled in Athens and married Panayota, a native of Doliana de Kynouria, in Peloponnese. The second of five children, Yannis is very quickly teasing and facetious. His education takes place in Athens, under the sign of indiscipline, at the 5th High School of Boys.

His early passion for painting enabled him to find decisive support with his teacher Johan Romanos, an anticonformist artist and intellectual. A drawing reproduced in the national daily I Vradini bears witness to the enthusiasm of the 16-year-old Yannis.

He was enrolled in the School of Fine Arts from 1942 to 1948. His parents are true allies, they are at his side at each exhibition and unite with the paternal uncle Tassos, to counter the shortage that Greece experienced at that time when it was necessary to buy, at a price of gold, the necessary paint tubes. It was in those years that Gaitis met Dimitris Chytiris and Yannis Maltizos, an artist with an experimental spirit that became an intimate friend. At the École des Beaux-Arts, he studied with Daniel Panagopoulos, Panayotis Tetsis, Yannis Migadis and Jason Molfessis, who went like Gaitis to mark the turn of the post-war period by bringing European trends to Greece, in the workshop of the great Constantin Parthenis, a modern artist par excellence from the beginning of the century and renowned professor since the 1920s, qualities which made him one of the few to know modern currents: especially post-impressionism and cubism. Yannis Gaitis attended little school, he preferred to work at home in Athens, at 35 Mavrommatéon Street or, in the family country house, in Amphithèa. It is in the garden of this house that he created, between 1947 and 1948, his first white sculptures, of wire and plaster.

Political commitment
The Terminal Class of the "5th High School of Boys" in Parthenon, Athens, 1940.
Faced with the situation of his country then in full occupation, Gaitis took part with his brother Tryphon and his sister Dina in the Resistance and became a member of the predominantly communist youth organization EAM (National Liberation Front). At night, with some friends, it covers the walls of Athens with slogans and posters in favor of the Resistance. Everything he undertakes, including political commitment, must feed the only essential thing for him, painting. A habit of unusual passion and working force, he continues to paint.

In 1944, he organized his first personal exhibition in the paternal home where his workshop was located. He met poets and writers involved in the renewal of Greek literature