Chryssa (1933-2013): Reality codified
Bia Papadopoulou
Chryssa at work preparing sculptures for her 1990 solo exhibition at Stavros Mihalarias Art, Athens, Greece
“Art is an oasis in the desert of our everyday life”
Chryssa [1]
I met Chryssa in 1990 in Athens, Greece, on the occasion of an article I had written on her solo show at the Art Center of Stavros Mihalarias, where she displayed works from the mid 1960s to that day, that assumed the role of a small-scale retrospective. [2] Two more exhibitions by Chryssa had also previously been held in Athens: at the National Gallery in 1980 and at the Zoumboulakis Gallery, a year earlier. The artist kept close bonds with her birthplace, often cryptically referencing its ancient civilization alongside the aesthetics of modern Cityscapes.
Born in December 1933, she experienced the German Occupation (1940-1944) and the Greek Civil War (1945-1949). Like other Greek artists, she was marked by the resistance slogans written illegally at night on Athenian walls. [3]
In 1954, as advised by the renowned Greek art critic Angelos Procopiou, Chryssa left for Paris to study at L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière. A Montparnasse alternative, free art school, woman friendly, [4] that attracted students from around the globe, including many Greeks.
During her brief stay in the French capital, Chryssa visited numerous museums and met leading figures of the European avant-garde, among them André Breton, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Braques. In February 1955, she married Jean Varda in Paris; a Turkish-born American artist of Greek and French descent whom she had met in Athens the previous year. Varda was a cosmopolitan persona, a bohemian, a symbol of the Hippie subculture and a friend to major artists both in Europe and America. Protagonist in Agnès Varda’s short documentary Uncle Yanko (1967), he was a professor at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), now the San Francisco Art Institute.
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Chryssa followed Varda to San Francisco, plunging into his free, unconventional life-style as a resident of the houseboat Vallejo in the floating city of Sausalito. The same year, 1955, she enrolled at the CSFA, one of the rare Greek art students in America at that time, and certainly one of the first Greek women.
On her way from Paris to the West Coast, Chryssa stopped briefly in New York and visited Times Square. If the political phrases on Greek walls had impressed her, the gigantic neon advertisements literally overwhelmed her. They symbolized a modern, free and burgeoning world. A world of power, wealth and prosperity that exploited technology in order to address the collective consciousness. Peculiar monuments of a consumptive society, the luminous advertisements, static and scrolling, functioned as propagandistic signifiers of the American Dream. Chryssa was fascinated by the ever-changing spectacle of New York’s major commercial intersection. Ever since, she has attempted to alchemically transmute her experience into art, to recreate it and transcend it.
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Untitled, from the “Tablets” series, ca. 1957, bronze, 92,07 x 67,94 cm, Hellenic Diaspora Foundation Collection, Patras, Greece​
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During the formative years as a CSFA student, she began two series entitled Tablets and Projections, in 1956. They made use of lettering, establishing her as one of the first artists to turn scripture into content, as art historian Sam Hunter aptly remarks. [5] Her works in bronze, the Tablets, bore illegible texts alternating with void planes in horizontal zones. Projections anatomized the structure of letters and archetypal symbols through the use of simple monochromatic forms protruding from their substructure. The almost identical modules, in a rhythmic repetition, could extend ad infinitum. They shaped art pieces, based on the ideas of analysis, fragmentation, deconstruction and reconstruction. The clear-cut geometrical structure, modular synthesis and laconic aesthetics of Projections presage Minimalism.
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Chryssa’s aforementioned juvenilia also explored “static light” which she defined as natural light activating a form by means of its juxtaposition with cast shadows. Portraying an early interest in pervading three-dimensional space, both series were in relief, allowing a fertile dialogue between light and shadow.
“Static light” is further correlated with the artist’s first attempts to capture movement, natural movement, the passage of time alone visually transforming the artistic shapes. Later she would replace static with artificial light and embody mechanic motion through the use of timers, thus creating kinetic light sculptures. The artist intermingles the infinite with the ephemeral, recalling Heraclitus’s view on the unity and harmonic coexistence of opposites. The ancient Greek philosopher’s thought imbues her art, particularly the notion of perpetual flow.
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Cycladic Book, 11, 1957-1962, plaster, 46,5 x 39 x 6 cm, Stavros Mihalarias Collection, Athens, Greece​
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Cycladic Book, 2, 1957-1962, plaster, 51 x 42 x 4 cm, Stavros Mihalarias Collection, Athens, Greece​
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In 1957, Chryssa focused on the Cycladic Books, seen by many art critics as anticipating 1960s Minimalism or inclining toward Process Art. [6] The works occurred by accident, namely by spilling the left-over plaster from the letters she was casting in a cardboard box. The random lines, the creases and folds of the container’s bottom were impressed on the plaster surface, turning the empty box into a ready-made matrix. This process gave emphasis on chance and involved physical bodily action. Methodologically, it hinted at Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement which solidified New York’s position in the 1950s as a global avant-garde artistic hub, seizing the role from Paris. On a morphological level, however, Chryssa’s works were intentionally the visual counterpoint to the paintings of the “star” movement. After all, they were small and three dimensional. Furthermore, they were reserved, monochromatic, defying sentimental explosions and bearing no signs of hand-made gesture. They were prophetically original in their austerity and cold look.
The Cycladic Books, resembled white pages void of scripture; they conveyed a feeling of silence and the grandeur of simplicity. As their title suggests, they conversed with the ancient past of Greece, visually reflecting the extreme abstraction and simplification of form characteristic of Cycladic sculpture. Conceptually, they mirrored the Lacaedemonian belief that equated brevity and philosophy (to lakonizein esti philosophein), echoed much later in the minimalist slogan “less is more”. However, albeit their pure abstraction, the Cycladic Books were innovative portrayals of the modern world. Peculiar, codified portraits of America’s blossoming consumer society.
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​Stocks (Lehman Brothers), from the “Newspaper” series, 1962, oil on canvas, 175,26 x 190,5 cm, Hellenic Diaspora Foundation Collection, Patras, Greece​
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Chryssa’s marriage to Varda was short-lived, as was her stay in San Francisco. Following her separation in 1958, she settled permanently in New York, seduced by the city’s beat and enormous energy. She began visiting Times Square frequently, strolling around like a flâneuse, studying the monumental advertisements day and night, absorbing the aura of her urban muse.
The Square, a lively emblem of America’s Golden Age, also became the artist’s locus of collecting prima materia. Disused newspaper printing plates, discarded signs, metal fragments, and other industrial scraps were either used in the production process of paintings or incorporated as structural parts of her sculptures. In creating non-realistic art from material fragments of the real world, Chryssa foreshadowed the 1960s European movement “Nouveau Réalisme,” orchestrated by the well-known French art critic Pierre Restany.​​​
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Study for the Gates to Times Square, 1962, white pastel on black paper,
50 x 45 cm, Stavros Mihalarias Collection, Athens, Greece
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Study for the Gates to Times Square, 1965, pencil and wash on paper, 41,9 x 40,6 cm, Hellenic Diaspora Foundation Collection, Patras, Greece​​
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Chryssa’s success in New York was immediate. In 1960 her work Arrow: Hommage to Times Square (1958) –one of a series that would lead to her magnus opus, the monumental out-door sculpture The Gates to Times Square– was included at the Whitney Museum Annual. That same year Projection Letter F was acquired by MOMA and presented in the Recent Acquisitions exhibition. These museum inclusions, presumably, paved the way for her solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum the following year.
In 1962, she incorporated in her sculptural assemblages industrial neon tubes that reflected the city’s colossal advertisements. Neon light has since become a characteristic feature of her oeuvre. Jessica Morgan and Rebecca Rabinow remark: “Chryssa was ahead of her time in using neon as an artistic medium and by responding to a new commercial landscape before the formation of American Pop Art.”[7]
The Gates to Times Square, 1965 – 1967, neon sculpture with timer in plexiglass box
114 x 94 x 71 cm, Stavros Mihalarias Collection, Athens, Greece
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Playing with typography and topography in a single work, Chryssa created peculiar psycho-geographic portraits of ΝΥ and other Cityscapes, forming multi-ethnic abstract mosaics. Notwithstanding her obsession with scripture, calligraphy and mass communication, her works transfer illegible, fragmented messages that activate both the viewer’s eye and mind. As she claimed in her now historic 1968 lecture at New York University: ”Symbols of communication are made to reach out and communicate. In my work it all has to do with me trying to communicate with myself. The created art object is, for me, a way to reality.”[8] Chryssa’s art as a whole centers on reality, filtered through an inner journey, rendered in bits and pieces, in a codified and disguised manner. A true inventive art!
Bia Papadopoulou
Art Historian, Curator
​The Gates to Times Square, 1965 – 1967, neon sculpture with timer in plexiglass box, 114 x 94 x 71 cm, Stavros Mihalarias Collection, Athens, Greece​
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[1] Interview to Thanassis Lalas, newspaper To Vima, December 3, 1995.
[2] Miranda McClintic. Chryssa. ’60-’90, Stavros Mihalarias Art, May-July 1990. Bia Papadopoulou. “Chryssa: Reality abstracted,” Next, Anno VI, n. 18, Giugno-Agosto 1990, pp. 70-71.
[3] For instance, Vlassis Caniaris (1929-2011), a leading Greek artist, painted in 1959 an entire series entitled “Hommage to the Walls of Athens 1941-19…”
[4] Sophia Laskaridou also studied at L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris during the second decade of the 20th century. Considered the first woman graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts, (ASFA, 1907) –then the School for the Arts–, Laskaridou had convinced king George I of Greece to sign a royal decree instituting co-education of men and women in 1901.
[5] Sam Hunter, Chryssa, Harry N. Abrams, N.Y., 1974, p. 9. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg also explored letters as content during this period.
[6] The first Cycladic Books date from 1954. Pierre Restany, “LE VERRE SE FAIT LIVRE”, Chryssa. Oeuvres récentes, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1979. Also mentioned by Megan Holly Witko in Chryssa’s chronology, Chryssa & New York, Dia Art Foundation, The Menil Collection, ed. By Megan Holly Witko, Sophia Larigakis and Michelle White, 2023, p. 165.
[7] Jessica Morgan, Rebecca Rabinow, “Directors’ foreward”, in Chryssa & New York, p. 7.
[8] Reprinted in Chryssa & New York, p. 36.
Notes for the sculpture Cityscape-Mott street, no 3, 1987-1988, Stavros Mihalarias Collection, Athens, Greece​​
Bia Papadopoulou is a Greek curator, art historian, and cultural producer known for her work in contemporary art, with a focus on site-specific installations, interdisciplinary projects, and public art. She has curated numerous exhibitions in Greece and internationally, often emphasizing cross-cultural dialogues and exploring themes related to identity, memory, and socio-political issues. Her curatorial practice is characterized by a thoughtful engagement with both emerging and established artists, creating platforms that foster innovation and community interaction. Papadopoulou has also contributed to art publications and has been involved in various cultural institutions, positioning her as a significant voice in the contemporary art scene.