Nikolaos Lytras

In 1923 the Athens School of Fine Arts had a painting professorship to fill, and the contest came down to two men: Konstantinos Parthenis, a modernist shaped by Paris, and Nikolaos Lytras. Lytras won, and then had to listen to critics telling him he stood for the German academic training he had spent his working life getting away from. The charge came with his surname. His father, Nikiforos Lytras, had taught a whole generation of Greek painters the dark, meticulous manner of the Munich School, and had been his son's first teacher.

By then the son's canvases looked nothing like the father's. He had studied at the Munich Academy himself in the years up to 1912, while the Blue Rider group was putting its colour experiments on show in the same city. In 1917, with Parthenis and others, he helped found the Art Group in Athens, an association formed to loosen precisely that German academic hold. His own paint went on thick and visible, and colour did the work that drawing used to do.

The Straw Hat, in the National Gallery in Athens, is the picture that goes furthest. A girl in a whitewashed island courtyard, painted around 1925, yellows pressed against a violet shadow, every brushstroke left open. Lytras had four years in the chair. Tuberculosis killed him in December 1927, at 44, and in 1929 a retrospective of his work filled the Zappeion hall in Athens.