Red and orange strokes crowd the middle of Constantine Andreou’s Hauts Fourneaux (1961). Dark bars cut through them, while pale passages and patches of blue interrupt the surrounding reds and purples. The eye follows brief runs of parallel marks, then shifts as another line crosses them. Broad areas of colour and clusters of small strokes give different parts of the painting different rhythms.
View Hauts Fourneaux (1961), oil on canvas, in the Hellenic Diaspora Foundation collection.
Fire and smoke
In her study of Andreou, Sapfo A. Mortaki links the foundry paintings to the atmosphere of fire and smoke in a factory. She describes the artist’s use of colour to evoke working furnaces and the light of hot metal, comparing the paintings’ intensity to that of the sun. She dates the foundry series to 1957–1961, alongside moving landscapes of 1957–1962.1
A landscape passing by
Mortaki connects the moving landscapes with the speed of a train. Mountains, cultivated fields, flowering land, lakes, and rivers pass through her description. The subject becomes colour in motion, with graphic marks reinforcing its movement. Her reading directs attention to the changing appearance of the land as the viewer travels through it.1
View Paysage en mouvement (1961) in Mortaki’s appendix: the third illustration on the page, item 83.
In this small reproduction, red and yellow areas are crossed by dark, intersecting marks. The lines run in several directions across the upright composition, breaking larger areas of colour into smaller passages. The caption identifies the painting as Τοπίο σε κίνηση, Paysage en mouvement, dated 1961, and records its medium as oil.2
Sources
1. Sapfo A. Mortaki, Η καλλιτεχνική μετανάστευση στην Ελλάδα: από τον 19ο στον 20ό αιώνα (1870–1970): η περίπτωση του Κωνσταντίνου Ανδρέου, doctoral dissertation, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2010, main volume, p. 335, nn. 407–415. Mortaki draws on earlier catalogues, including Sophia Kazazi’s 1992 retrospective.
2. Mortaki, same dissertation, appendix, p. 146, item 83. The French title Hauts Fourneaux follows the entry for lot 82 in the Astrid Guillon sale of 24 May 2024, cited in the Hellenic Diaspora Foundation’s provenance. The painting’s date and medium follow the linked Foundation record. Visual descriptions are the Archive’s observations of the two reproductions.