by GEORGIOS CHRISTOYIANNIS

In the early sixties I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Upon entering its spacious foyer my attention was instantly drawn to a sculpture: a bright green snake, larger than life size and surrounded by potted plants, looking so lifelike it was frightening. I scrutinized it with admiration. It was coiled, with its head and eyes posed in readiness. A true work of art carved out of green stone, an acquisition of the New York's famous museum, the repository of countless masterpieces, visited by millions of people from all over the world each year. I wanted to find out what outstanding creator was responsible for the piece and was agreeably surprised when I read the Greek name POL. VAGIS scratched on the base of the sculpture. That was my first contact with the work of the great Greek-American sculptor. Shortly afterwards I had the pleasure of meeting him personally at a meeting of a Greek Society in New York. And he paid me a visit later at my office in the Greek Consulate.

It did not take long for us to become friends, and to me that friendship was a divine gift, filling me with a great many powerful emotions. I discovered in Vagis both a formidable sculptor and a genuine Greek, who had firmly held onto his Greek soul and artistic roots in the enormous melting pot of the New World. His wish that a large portion of his work should be housed in his birthplace seemed to me a sacred obligation, both prayer and curse at the same time, and I could not rest till I saw it become a reality: a beautiful museum in the village of Potamia in Thasos. My acquaintance with Vagis and his work and the way in which I managed to bring about the creation of his museum in Thasos seems like a fairy tale whose happy outcome hinges on any number of bizarre twists of fate.

We met several times in New York and talked about his life and work. His nostalgia and desire to send his sculptures - those that were still in his possession - back to Greece were intense. As I wrote in my article on Vagis, which was published in his memory in Pnevmatiki Kypros (Cultural Cyprus) in 1965, the year of his death:
"The unforgettable Vagis used to come often, unannounced, to my office, in search of the warmth of Greek companionship, of the Greek home. He frequently carried a bag filled with photographs of his 'children', his sculptures. He used to speak of his sculptural creations reverently as if they were living things. He would reminisce about when they were 'born' and how they had evolved. He would sit next to me, silently if I was writing. Sometimes he smelled of tobacco, which he always carried with him. His body, which had also been worked with a chisel and time, had thickened somewhat. But he still stood erect and proud, despite all the tempests and storms that had erupted around him in the years of struggling to entrench himself in American soil. His eyes were dark but bright, his broad forehead crowned with thick white hair. His features were expansive, his skin weathered by the sun and the open air, where he still lived and worked from time to time. He was always very careful of his hands. Strong, calloused, all muscle. Weary hands, but capable and proud. The hands of a creator....
"In our conversations he would remember the old times, the tough struggle day and night for survival, his efforts to bend the bigoted reaction of vested artistic interests in the steely megalopolis during the period between the wars and to stand out in an environment that could at times be hostile. He spoke with pride of his Greek origins, his birthplace Thasos, the Greekness of his work, the continuity of the sculptural tradition of his great fellow countrymen. He used to tell me how, with pride and determination, he had held on to his very Greek name and how he stamped his work with it, at a time when most immigrants tried to hide their origins behind foreign masks and when a slightly Anglo-Saxonized version of his name would have ensured him an easy rise to fame. He was proud of his first name, Polygnotos. the same as the famous Greek artist of the 5th century B.C. He had an unreserved admiration for the classical masters of Greek art and for the more recent Greek colossus, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, whom he considered the father of modern painting. He felt that the celebrated artists of our own era such as Picasso, Braque, Maillol, and Moore were illuminated by the classical Greek spirit 'translated into more modern dynamic subjects'."

In the spring of 1962 a mutual friend and I had visited Polygnotos's studio in the quiet village of Bethpage, Long Island, that appendage to New York State. We had first passed by his house in the district of Queens to pick up the artist. He was waiting at the heavy barred door with the joy of a little child written all over his face. "The house fell apart when my wife, Sylvia, died", he said. His wife, who had been Jewish, had fallen victim to a stroke not long before, on the threshold of old age. Our friend had taken her death very hard. The good-natured Sylvia had given him tender companionship in his solitary life and spiritual support in his artistic efforts. On the evening of her death, the artist telephoned a friend of ours and in a broken voice told him of the loss of his companion. At the end he asked him, choked with pain, "How is my mermaid?" That's what he called the sculpted head of the water nymph he had given his good friend some time before. It was as if he feared that, somehow, the mermaid too might have slipped away.

His house in Queens looked abandoned and dilapidated: his wife's daily life had stopped in its tracks, all her things unchanged and undusted just as she had left them that evening. But within this world of melancholy routine, another world, it too abandoned and undusted for years, concealed in the suggestive half-light a breath of youth: some of Polygnotos Vagis's sculptures.

The main purpose of our visit to his home and studio was to inventory the works still in his possession. There were exactly sixty-five. Most of them originals with a few copies. The artist had invited us because he wanted to offer his works to Greece, his birthplace. Some would be chosen by our common friend, who was representing a Greek shipowner, one of Vagis's admirers. This rich and cultivated gentlemen had had the lovely and brilliant idea of decorating the garden of his villa in Montreux, Switzerland, with fifteen of Vagis's famous pieces. I believe that finally the artist let him have them on condition that they be returned to Greece after the death of the art-loving shipowner. At the same time that the great sculptor, feeling his life beginning to ebb away, was trying to leave his remaining work in worthy hands, powerful financial and artistic interests in New York were systematically attempting to lure him with tempting offers over to their side. But old Polygnotos, an inveterate Greek, closed his ears to the foreign temptors.

Vagis's country home in Bethpage, a village with a population of 20,000, gave us a happier welcome among its trees and flowers that afternoon. There the treasure was placed for security reasons in the basement. With great difficulty Vagis had managed to open the trapdoor outside. We descended the few steps into the damp, dark kingdom, into a realm that was a revelation to me. It was as if we were digging up still another treasure that had lain for eons within the embrace of the Greek earth.

Vagis lit the way before us with a candle and showed us his sculptures one by one, with such naturalness, love and emotion, that it was as if he were introducing us to living beings. There, far removed from the admiration and affection of contemporary artlovers, Vagis - who was never known for commercial flair or self-promotion - was hiding works re- presenting every stage of his fertile career. From the early pieces of his student days - where even then the artistic spark was evident - and traditional renderings up to the settled works of his mature years. Figures of people and animals, statues, busts, reliefs, pieces in marble, bronze, plaster, wood, stone, granite. Numerous copies of originals that had received awards in prestigious American competitions and which today adorn illustrious private collections and famous museums. In the flickering candlelight, which symbolized the emotion of the old artist, shrouded in an otherworldly veil of mist, dampness and silence, his "children" stood out. Approaching an ancient-looking head carved out of hard stone, with simple proportions inspired by sister figures from the frieze of the Parthenon, we heard his emotion-charged voice say, "My daughter the Amazon". Further on, in front of a bronze statue of an athlete, whose kinetic grace and technical perfection made Myron's Discus Thrower come back to life, its creator, the man who had endowed it with aesthetic spirit forty years earlier, gazed on it proudly, "My athlete" (The handball player).

Before us, silently but eloquently, neglected but ageless, stood Vagis's world, the product of his ideas and his chisel, the expression of his simplicity and Greekness, his agony but also his vindication.

At first I tried to list the names and dates of the sculptures. But I was quickly caught in the spell of the artist's powerful emotion faced with his life's work, his sleeping children whom he was trying with paternal tenderness to bring back to the light, to the radiant light of Thasos, which had been for him a beacon of life and art. In the dusky cellar memories of a stormy life were recalled; amidst the tempests and turmoils the faint rainbow of happiness could be discerned once again. The artist's mind, now finely distilled, was struggling and wrestling between the obscurity of an American basement and the brilliance of a renewed Greek space. There was a wolf stalking his chosen flock: the wolf of oblivion and commercialism. And old Polygnotos was fighting within himself to throw it out, to bring his flock safely to the blue-green island of Thasos... I couldn't bear it any longer and gave up the graceless task of cataloguing, for I felt like a missionary, a grave robber.

As for the work of Polygnotos Vagis, its artistic value, which will increase with the passing of the years, has been discussed by others more qualified than myself, and as more people come in contact with and study his work, there will be more written about it. Besides, as usual, the artist himself has some eloquent and candid words to say about it: "I always loved nature and to relax I used to go fishing on the beaches of Long Island. In the course of those walks I used to come upon many of those beautiful stones, especially quartzes, which I used in many of the pieces shown in my recent exhibitions. I have a preference for unusual and hard materials because their natural shapes inspire my subjects. I work with various materials: clay for modelling, stone, wood and hammered bronze, but I always liked direct carving in stone best of all. Stone is a medium I still use today. Sometimes when I look at the stone, it immediately suggests a subject; other times months have to go by before I can see the subject within the stone... I usually prefer not to polish my stones, except if the natural colour and the subject itself demand it, as in the case of my 'snake'. Rarely does commercial marble interest me, but I like large blocks of stone or uncommon stones that I've collected on the beach or in the country. Even when I'm working on a clay model, I keep the simplicity and feeling of the stone intact. I don't believe in realistic constructions, but I always keep in mind the durability of the mass, as can be seen in my 'Revelation' in the Museum of Modern Art. In the course of my work I've formulated a certain theory about sculpting: the artist must be constantly experimenting with the search for basic truths in art, he must struggle to develop his senses and express his own nature. The true artist is an individual who is not interested in 'stylism' and does not latch onto the 'isms' in fashion, but who seeks to develop individuality and his own expression. In order to create a really worthwhile work of art it is essential to try to create with your own spirit without borrowing from traditional or other sources. It is my belief that honest personal expression is the only possible basis of genuine art."

In order for us to have a greater appreciation of the sculptor's work, these words I wrote in 1965 may be helpful: "Vagis's sculptures may be classified into two main periods. The first is characterized by stylistically traditional works executed between the wars. At that time the artist was trying to find his own mode of expression within the vast world of prototypes from classical Greece, the Renaissance and more modern movements. He was more attracted to detail then. Technical perfection, originality of concept and realism are the qualities that typify this period.

"The second period includes Vagis's finest works, dating mainly from 1930 on. By now in his maturity, Vagis was able creatively to synthesize classical concepts with modern expressive means. In his traditional period, the artist himself imposed the subject on the material, be it marble, wood or bronze. He took the shapeless mass and gave it the form conceived in his imagination. In the later period, that of direct carving, the material itself (usually hard stone), its natural structure and shape inspired the subject. The sculptor renounced the visionary world of inspiration and went out into the world of nature. He strolled along beaches, through woods, up mountains. His inquiring eye caressed the stones. Until the day a special one would spark his vision. Beneath the husk of the hard material, under the obdurate surface the petrified form lay hid- den. His chisel would carve the surface to the point where the form clearly emerged, the shape held captive by its age-old hardness far from the light and out of sight. Sometimes a fish or a bird, sometimes a human figure would summon the artist to deliver it from its stone fetters and give it the wings of art. Vagis used to say that he never began chiselling until the stone spoke to him, if it did not impell him to do it. He felt that 'he was freeing the stone rather than the subject'."

"His sculptures," wrote art critic Edith Burckhardt in Art News in 1960, "are found in the countryside, resting in the spherical wrapper of their material... Even when the chisel reveals figures at battle, the invader is one with the victim, as in the sculpture 'Eagle and rabbit'. Thus, instead of challenging the world they are coiled in a self-sufficient solid mass. They look as if they were planted in the earth, as unformed matter, where an ineffable life force, monolithic and mute, lay guarded. And this polished, ash-coloured stone passed through the hands of a resolute artist who faces nature with the old, unaffected gaze of those who have been left unscathed by the mechanization of life. Vagis was someone who could say, 'Et in Arcadia ego'. He never lost sight of his birthplace Greece."

In the second period the sculptor paid less attention to detail and more to the architectonic composition of his work. His pieces are balanced between naturalistic and symbolic expression. "Night" and "Revelation" are typical examples.

In this period of artistic activity, Vagis was working with hard material, stone or granite. Difficult and labourious work. One such sculpture is the enormous, monolithic grey stone Monument to the U.S. Armed Forces donated by Vagis in 1952 to the Municipality of Bethpage, which rises impressively today in the park of this picturesque village.

Along with Gill and Moore in Britain and John Flannagan in the U.S., Vagis is considered a pioneer in the use of hard material.
However, all of his works, of both periods, bear the distinct imprint of Greekness. Everyone who sees them, whether authoritative critic or ordinary museum-goer, shares the belief that Vagis was moved, instinctively one might say, by classical models. In his work, the virtues elevated by Greek art to the realm of perfection live again: Simplicity of form, mea- sure and balance in composition, idealism and humanism. Vagis drew his subjects from the close study of nature and humanity.
Polygnotos Vagis was not Greek in his work alone. He was above all Greek in his soul. Born a Greek in Potamia, Thasos in 1892, he remained Greek all his life. Art and Greece were his great loves.
His father, Giorgos Vagis, a carpenter and woodcarver, sent him off to America in 1911. Those were the days of the great wave of immigration that swamped the shores of the New World. Lacking education and means, the young Vagis could well have taken the familiar route to restaurant work or other manual labour. Polygnotos however was possessed of a daemon that had begun to goad him even before he took any sculpture lessons.

This Thasian artist is the classical example of an inborn and self- taught talent. He had lessons in sculpture for a mere six months before the First World War - when he served in the American Navy - and after the war for a short time at New York's Institute of Fine Arts and Design. His first years in the United States were difficult because he had to help support his family back in Greece. Vagis fought hard and in the end he triumphed. His first success enabled him to acquire a studio. His admirer, Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, offered it to him and there "he created his first works of everlasting value in the world of art." The Encyclopaedia of American Biography has the following note on his character:
"Vagis has a powerful personality and will. He does not accept commissions, because he prefers to work on his own ideas. Up to now he has not taken part in any competitions and, if one exempts his membership in the Art Alliance, he takes no part in the social life of artistic circles in America. His exceptional physical strength is the result of his dedication to sports and perhaps has made him capable of confronting hardships, poverty and deprivation, all of which he has borne with Greek stoicism."

Thus it was not long before he was crowned with success. The most highly regarded art critics in America were soon discussing his work with sincere admiration. Famous museums, like the Metropolitan, Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in New York, the Brooklyn, Toledo (Ohio) and Tel Aviv museums plus well-known private collections acquired pieces of his sculpture. Within the space of thirty years he took part in approximately fifty one-man and group exhibitions and was honoured with distinguished prizes. Just before his death the Greek government awarded him the Order of the Phoenix and President Kennedy invited him, along with selected American artists, to a reception at the White House.

The foreign land remained but a stepmother, however. His real mother was always Greece, although it knew so little about him and was so late in honouring him while he was alive. Vagis was first a Greek, a Thasian, like that other exiled child of Greece, the great Domenikos Theotokopoulos, who always remained "El Greco" or "The Cretan".

After returning from his trip to Greece in the summer of 1963, my unforgettable friend spoke to me worshipfully, passionately about his island, about his good-hearted fellow islanders, about the stones of Thasos, which he had discovered so late. He was thinking of going back again soon. He wanted only, before leaving, to make sure his work was taken care of. He wanted "his children" to "live" under the Greek sun. He refused to have them housed in any of the magnificent modern museums in America or other countries which attempted to seduce him with promises of dedicating whole rooms in his honour. And in the end Vagis made his dream come true. Just before his death, he offered his work to Greece. As he wrote in his will, "To the people and government of Greece to be housed in a national museum or gallery, preferably to be built in Thasos."

Thus, with his conscience at rest the great artist closed his eyes for eternity on the 15th of March 1965. (He died in New York's Veterans Hospital before he was able to return to Greece, to his beloved land and his own people.)

The Greek government, out of respect for the artist and his work, brought back his coffin, which was buried with special honours in his own homeland. In order to keep to the deadline the sculptor had specified in his will, the Polygnotos Vagis Foundation was set up in Kavalla. There his works were housed or rather stored in a tobacco warehouse, destined to be converted into the town's Cultural Centre, and there they remained shut up until 1981 despite persistent attempts by his brother Lambros and the Potamia commune to develop it. Ultimately, the Department for Greeks Abroad of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, of which I had the honour to be director in 1981, undertook to have the work of the great sculptor housed in his own homeland, thus carrying out his wish. The mayor of Kavalla, as president of the Polygnotos Vagis Foundation, con- signed the sculptures to the Potamia Commune. The village's old abandoned school house was judged to be a suitable edifice, a sturdy stone building one hundred years old standing next to the churchyard. The architect P. Bentsoras of Thessaloniki prepared the plans for the renovation free of charge. Others who made invaluable contributions to the entire endeavour were Mr. Dimitrios Voudouris, then Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs; Mr. Theodoros Aspasidis, Governor of Kavalla Prefecture; and Mr. Dimitris Vouzinis, President of Potamia Commune. The sculptor Demosthenes Sotiroudis, who became Keeper of the museum, oversaw with great care the arrangement of the interior spaces and the placement of the sculptures within the large room upstairs as well as in the room with the picturesque fireplace on the ground floor. The residents of the village, who were always so proud of their famous son and who had looked on sadly as the beautiful old school building slowly fell apart, eagerly helped to complete the museum and embellish its surroundings. On the morning of the official opening, a bright day in August, the villagers decorated their houses with flags and coloured carpets and gathered around the museum to celebrate the re-instatement of "the children" of their special fellow countryman.

At the instigation of the Department for Greeks Abroad, one of Polygnotos Vagis's works, the famous "Circle" (a classical composition-bust of a Greek family - father, mother and child in arms) was cast in bronze and placed in the square of the Society of Macedonian Studies in Thessaloniki, as a monument to Greek immigrants. The famous epigraph from Homer's Odyssey is inscribed on its base:

"... But Odysseus, in his longing to see were it
but the smoke leaping up from his own land,
yearns to die."

GEORGIOS CHRISTOYIANNIS

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