Markos Zavitzianos

In 1912 the socialist club in Corfu brought out Konstantinos Theotokis's novella Honour and Money, and the six copperplate engravings in it were cut by Markos Zavitzianos, who had helped found that club with him. The two had met in Munich, where Zavitzianos studied painting under Gabriel von Hackl at the Academy from 1906 and took lessons in engraving alongside it, and where Theotokis, one of the first Greek socialists, pulled him into Marxist company.

He was born in Constantinople in 1884 into a Corfiot family, his father a doctor, his mother French and a painter by inclination, and he went to the Greek school in the Phanar quarter before the family moved back to Corfu in 1902. He thought of himself as a painter, and the landscapes, interiors and portraits lean towards Impressionism. Clouds, in the National Gallery in Athens, is one of them.

The engravings are what his name rests on, most of them made for books. In 1917 he was among the founders of the Art Group in Athens, with the painters Nikolaos Lytras and Konstantinos Parthenis. He travelled to Geneva in 1923, caught pneumonia and died there at 39, and his prints were sent to the Venice Biennale 13 years later.