Andreas Vourloumis

Andreas Vourloumis was born in Patras on 29 July 1910, the third child of a well-to-do middle-class family. His father was a merchant and was involved in politics alongside Venizelos.

The Vourloumis family moved to Athens in 1918. At the age of ten, Andreas Vourloumis copied sculptures from archaeological museums, and at twelve he produced his first watercolours with the help of his Belgian private art tutor, Antoine Pic. By the age of thirteen, he was already producing his first oil paintings. He never studied painting systematically, having graduated as a chemist from the University of Athens (1928–1932).

During the winters of 1934–1935, he stayed in Paris, where his friend, the sculptor Yannis Pappas, was also living at the time. There he painted at the Chaumière and visited the museums daily. He was deeply impressed by Dürer, Rembrandt, the Impressionists, Van Gogh and Cézanne. Although he worked for a few years as a chemist, painting remained his main occupation until the end of his life. In 1938, he took over Aginoras Asteriadis’s studio in Pagrati, and from then until his death, all his studios were in the same area, in the parish of Agios Spyridonas. With the exception of a trip to London in 1957, he did not leave Greece again from 1935 onwards. Nevertheless, he remained independent of developments in the modern Greek art scene. He was, however, moved by the work of Parthenis and later showed a keen interest in Tsarouchis and Kontoglou in the 1940s. He studied Byzantine painting in depth and created many portable icons in a strictly Byzantine style. He also contributed to the decoration of churches and was involved with Byzantine music. He was very fond of folk poetry and frequently illustrated books, mainly children’s books, calendars and periodicals.

He held very few exhibitions during his lifetime.
His first solo exhibition took place in 1954 at Monica Payne’s gallery in Athens. Other solo exhibitions of his were held at the ‘Zygos’ gallery (1960), the ‘Zouboulaki’ gallery (1961), the ‘A.T.I. Doxiadis’ – a retrospective – (1963), the ‘Ora’ gallery (1981), at the ‘Skoufa Hall’ (1988), at the National Gallery – a retrospective – (1990) and at the ‘Skoufa Hall’ (1994).

Major exhibitions of his work were organised posthumously by the Benaki Museum (1999) and the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation (Eynardos Mansion, 2004).

Andreas Vourloumis died in Athens on 8 August 1999.