About the artist

He attended lectures at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1915-1917), from where he graduated a decade later, having in the meantime travelled to Europe and studied at independent academies in Paris; on scholarship, he left once again until 1930 for Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne and the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1931, the ‘18 critical essays on an exhibition', published for his first solo exhibition, came to be regarded as the manifesto of modernism in Greece. He moved to the USA, held a solo exhibition in New York (1935) and worked for film production companies designing printed material and posters. His four wall-paintings on the theme of The History of Greece went on display in the Greek pavilion at the New York World Fair (1939). In 1949 he became an American citizen under the name Guelfo Ammon d’Este and his traces have been lost to Greece ever since, even though his works continued to go on display in the 1960s and 1970s. He painted the New York Cathedral and the Church of the Holy Trinity (Agia Triada) at Lowell, MA, and also taught painting. From 1980 to 1985 he lived in Nice, in France. His work was shown in the Munich Glyptothek (1980) and the National Gallery in Athens (1982). The complete body of the works from America went to the Greek Society for the Protection of the Environment and was shown in Argostoli, in Cephalonia (2001). His dreamlike paintings are examples of Surrealism.