Nonda - in The Streets

In The Streets

In the early 1950’s, Nonda worked nights in factories and tailor shops in order to support himself and buy materials. The streets surrounding Montmartre as well as the outskirts of Paris were overflowing with poor workers, prostitutes, musicians and street peddlers. During this time he produced a series of paintings executed with strong, sweeping brushstrokes which captured the sadness and destitution of this marginal society. Their faces expose emotion and implore the viewer to understand. Often depicted partially nude, the figures expose their humanity in its totality.

One of the paintings from this series, “The Musicians”, which was exhibited in the Salon des Independants in 1954 at the Grand Palais, was analyzed in the book NONDA, L’odysee d’un Peintre by Georges Picard. In the book, Nonda explains

“…look at their feet….I tried to express this in the simplest ways…and I retained their characters…even while deforming their poor bodies…I pitied them…believe me…they look like creatures from another earth but I kept their psychological traits…The woman keeps her coquetterie of a woman lost…the violinist is romantic in his way….his tilted head begs for pity of sorts…while the blind one is devoid of confidence…this is how I translate them…musicians who played their part in a shady café-concert and went their way…their sad misfortune exposed.”

Picard closes the discussion by saying that Nonda essentially paints “ the force and the sentiments which exude profoundly from the faces, the bodies, the lights.” He also describes the process of his own portrait being drawn, as well as a series of extended meditations on selected works, notably the coveted “Nativity” which the artist refused to sell, and a portrait of a beautiful young dancer from the Paris Ballet. Wherever he went, Nonda seemed to exude an aura of passionate intensity which intoxicated those around him. He held firmly to an artistic integrity that one might trace back to his father’s influence as a fine tailor. His father had been known to rip apart suits in which one stitch was misplaced by a worker---this sense of incredible dedication and discipline to a craft carried over from his work into his life. The energy of this devotion and confidence in his art could also lead to fury at the opportunistic dealings of gallerists or other “fashionable” artists. This independence also resulted in decisions which were harmful to his career, such as the invitation from the Art Institute of Chicago, which he left unanswered, and his refusal to court critics and art dealers--- but the force of his work and his sense of artistic freedom was very much linked to this uncompromising stance.

Francis Carco had always been involved with painters. In his youth he had befriended Vlaminck, Derain, Van Dongen, Utrillo, Pascin and numerous masters. He owned many of their early works, and soon bought paintings from Nonda. Carco would also help him show his paintings to the large galleries by introduction, and a letter, hailing the talent of the young painter would insure his induction to the School of Paris and a contract with the coveted Galerie Charpentier whose painters exhibited yearly in the salons at the Grand Palais as well as the Gallery on Rue Faubourg St. Honoré. (now Sotheby’s, Paris) . In 1958 when Carco died, Nonda attended the funeral at the Quai de Bethune carrying a large oil painting of a mass of flowers he had painted the night before, which he placed in the grave along with the other flowers thrown to the dead. It was his final tribute to the man who had helped him start his career. In 1954 Francis Carco had already written, “The ardor, the force contained in this young Greek painter signals a rare temperament…” And Galanis writes, “I viewed the paintings of Mr. Nonda which show a true talent and express a grand pictorial temperament…” This praise from two of the most respected artistic figures in Paris at the time resulted in his first one-man show in Paris in 1956 at the Gallerie Allard in the Rue des Capucines. J.P Crespelle, reviewing the show in the France-Soir paper comments, “(Nonda) has shown himself to be among the most interesting young artists to emerge in recent years…this son of an Athenian tailor has been revealed as one of the hopes for new painting…”