Paris – From an Athenian collection, Soldat dansant le zeibekiko by Yiannis Tsarouchis (1910-1989), dated 1966-68, leads Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr Greek Sale in Paris on Wednesday 21 May. This triumphant example of Tsarouchis' art is estimated at €300,000-500,000.

In 1967, because of political developments in Greece, the artist went back to Paris and returned home once and for all in 1980. Two years later he launched the "Tsarouchis Foundation" based at the artist's house in Maroussi and containing both his works and those of other artists. One of the most important representatives of the "Thirties Generation", the artist embodied in his work the ideal of "Greekness" and created a unique personal style, depicting landscapes, still lives, nudes and allegorical scenes. Since 1957, Tsarouchis had painted young men dancing the zeibekiko—the male dance expressing lovelorn passions, heart-wrenching separations, and unfulfilled desires.

The Greek Sale is a collaborative sale put together by Bonhams in Paris and London and its associates in Athens, Art Expertise.

Director of Art Expertise in Athens, Terpsichore Angelopoulou, commented: "Moralis, Tsarouchis and Fassianos are some of Greece's most beloved contemporary painters. These works are the best ambassadors for Greece's contemporary culture. This year, we are delighted to showcase an impressive selection of paintings by women artists such as Opy Zouni, Sophia Vari and Marina Karella."

Executed in 1994, Les orangers by Yiannis Moralis (1916-2009) is an acrylic on canvas acquired from the artist by the present owner and exhibited in Athens at the Benaki Museum in 2022 (Estimate: € 100,000 – 150,000). This painting from the late period of Moralis' oeuvre has been executed following the 1988 retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery where the artist also made a large donation to the museum. He has had a definitive influence on the field of post-war art in Greece, both with his work and his teaching. Though interested in a variety of thematic categories, such as landscape and still life, his creative work, both in its realistic and geometric stage, is first and foremost anthropocentric, with Eros and Thanatos its axes.

Student of Yannis Moralis at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he studied from 1956 to 1960, Alecos Fassianos (1935-2022) continued with studies in lithography in Paris (1960-1963), on a scholarship from the French government. In the following years he travelled between Paris and Athens. His work is dominated by the human figure such as this painting entitled Rencοntre d'un été executed in 1987 (Estimate: €50,000 – 70,000).

The auction pays tribute to Greek women including a large selection of works by Opy Zouni (1941-2008) and a 1996 geometric acrylic on wood entitled Colonnes et ombres à l'horizon (estimate : €12,000-16,000), Sophia Vari (1940-2023), Nu allongé, bronze with black patina mounted on marble base (estimate: €15,000-20,000) and Marina Karella (born 1940), La naissance d'Aphrodite, gesso, acrylic, fabric and silver leaf on resin (estimate: €10,000-15,000)

Other highlights of the 171-lot sale include:

• Yiannis Moralis (1916-2009), Grande érotique, oil on wood, 1987 from a private collection (estimate: €60,000-80,000). Glowing like a classical statue brought to light in a Greek garden, Moralis' male nude imparts a sense of Doric dignity and Ionian elegance. Slender, stylishly elongated, with gentle forms, serene expression, fluid lines, and graceful pose, he bears testimony to the artist's personal reinterpretation of the classical.

• Nikos Engonopoulos (1907-1985), Tragédie à Hérodion, oil on canvas, 1955 (estimate: €120,000-180,000). Flooded with light and colour and bathed in a translucent atmosphere of dazzling clarity and glow, this exquisite painting is one of the finest examples of the artist's mastery of colour.

• Fotis Kontoglou (1895-1965), Guerriers des montagnes pendant la révolution Grecque de 1821, chahutés par la muse populaire, oil on canvas, 1945 (estimate: €50,000-70,000). The sober composition and the technique is close to that used in portable religious icons with their painstaking detail. The flat rendering of space, absence of chiaroscuro, inner, otherworldly light, earthy colour and schematisation of form stem directly from the Byzantine and Post-Byzantine pictorial tradition, while the disciplined design and delicate modelling, rendered through fluent brushstrokes, evoke a mood of austerity and contrition, lending the notorious brigands a dignified appearance.

• Georgios Bouzianis (1885-1959), Garçon assis avec un bras levé, oil on canvas painted circa 1928 (estimate: €50,000-70,000). This important canvas, one of the most alluring paintings by Bouzianis ever to appear in the auction market, shows why the artist was widely acclaimed in Germany as a prominent figure of the avant-garde in the late 1920s.

• Yannis Tsarouchis (1910-1989), Mavrokefalos Café, oil on canvas, 1963 (estimate: €70,000-100,000). Captured in all its austere simplicity and invested with a poetic aura that recalls the enigmatic façades of Giorgio de Chirico, the entrance to the Mavrokefalos coffeehouse—a traditional neoclassical establishment in central Athens frequented mainly by sailors and soldiers—conveys a sense of monumentality and order.