Yannoulis Chalepas

Giannoulis Chalepas (Greek Γιαννούλης Χαλεπάς, born August 14, 1851 in Pyrgos in Tinos, † September 15, 1938 in Athens), also Halepas, was one of the greatest Greek sculptors.

Life and works

Chalepas came from an illustrious family of marble sculptors from the island of Tinos. His father John and his uncle talked a company of sculpture, with offices in Bucharest, Smyrna and Piraeus. Giannoulis was the eldest of the five sons of the family. He showed at an early age an interest in sculpture and helping his father in his work. His parents first saw him for the profession of the merchant before, but Chalepas decided to become a sculptor.

From 1869 to 1872 Chalepas studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Athens as a student of Leonidas Drosis. In 1873 he continued his studies in Munich, with a scholarship from the Pan-Hellenic Institute of Mary promulgation of Tinos. In Munich Chalepas was a student of Max winds of man. During his stay in Munich, he exhibited the works of The Tale of the Beautiful and Satyr playing with Eros. Both works received excellent reviews and were excellent. 1875 presented Chalepas the work Satyr with Eros playing together with the relief tenderness in the art exhibition from Athens.

1876 ​​Chalepas finally returned to Greece and opened a studio in Athens. The following year, he began work on his most famous work, The Sleeping. It is a grave sculpture for the grave of Sophia Afentaki First Athens Cemetery.

In the winter of 1877/78 Chalepas suffered without an apparent reason, a nervous breakdown and began to destroy his works. He also repeatedly tried to take his own life. The reason for his mental illness was in a morbid desire for perfectionism, an exhaustion by the non-stop work and a disappointed love of a woman from Tinos, whose hand he had been holding in vain. At that time, the psychiatric science was not well developed and the doctors could not heal the deep-seated reasons for his illness. On the advice of the doctors, his parents sent him to rest after Italy. However, this treatment only had preliminary success. With his return to Greece, the symptoms started again: sinking into silence, isolation, meaningless laughter. As his condition worsened, the doctors diagnosed in 1888 at Chalepas a mental illness. His family took him to the psychiatric ward to Corfu. In psychiatry, he could neither draw nor form, because it saw the cause of his disease. Work which he had hidden in his closet, were taken away and destroyed him. Of the few works that he produced in this period, has received only one that had deposited an overseer in the basement of psychiatry and was discovered by chance in 1942.

1901 died Chalepas father. A year later, his mother brought him to his Tinos. There he lived under the strict supervision of the mother, which assumed that her son had gone mad through art. For this reason, they did not allow him to deal with the sculpture. Self-conceptions they destroyed. When his mother died in 1916, Chalepas had no relation to art more. He lived in abject poverty as a shepherd, and was stigmatized in the village as a madman. Nevertheless, he was once again the strength to deal with the sculpture. The resources available to him here were extremely primitive, but he tried to regain the lost art with zeal years.

1923 made ​​the Athenian professor of sculpture Thomas Thomopoulos, an admirer of Chalepas, plaster casts forth his works and presented them in 1925 in an exhibition of the Academy of Athens. Just two years later, Chalepas works have been awarded the highest Greek art prize. His great talent as a born sculptor and the reputation of the mad artist who was well again, soon made him known as a kind of second van Gogh and Rodin. 1928 was followed by another exhibition of his works.

Due to the persistence of a niece from him, he moved in 1930 to Athens. The last years of his life he spent his family. He remained creatively active until his death. Chalepas died on 15 September 1938.

Chalepas was an artist between genius and madness and one of the outstanding figures of Greek art history. His works, of which around 150 have received are allocated mainly of classical art. They are characterized by a great expression of their faces and bodies. In this respect, they are the works of Rodin in nothing.