To say that 1919 was a turbulent year to be an artist in Russia would be a gross understatement. Civil war was raging, and the economy was collapsing. So it’s understandable that Alexis Gritchenko (1883–1977), a Ukrainian artist living in Moscow, decided to leave. Gritchenko was a significant figure in the Russian avant-garde and later in the École de Paris; his works drew equally from Fauvism and Russian Cubo-Futurism. He left for Paris, but en route stayed in what was then Constantinople for sixteen months and in Greece for a further six months. This sharply focused exhibition, “The Greek Adventure: A Ukrainian Avant-gardist in Greece,” curated by Michel Lièvre-Markovitch and Maria Tsantsanoglou, concentrated almost entirely on works Gritchenko made during his sojourn in Turkey and Greece, as well as on a return visit to Greece in 1922–23. The result was an exhibition with a rare degree of depth and detail, featuring more than one hundred works. These were made under highly constricted circumstances during his travels. They had to be portable and were produced without a proper studio. All quite small, they include watercolors, gouaches, and works in graphite or tempera (sometimes both) on paper or cardboard. (A small selection of pieces made in Paris functioned as something of a coda.)

But for all that, many of these works are exquisite. Take, for instance, a tempera-and-gouache work titled Golden Horn, 1921. Its modest dimensions can barely contain its chromatic intensity. Most of the picture is dominated by the turquoise-green ocean. But it is so dense, with the brushstrokes vertically oriented, that it feels like a solid wall. This mass of color is accentuated by the casually arranged, white sideways crescents. Presumably representing waves, the strokes look as though carved into the green plane, revealing the white beneath. There is a lone flag in striking red near the center, supposedly connected to a boat, of which only the back end is visible, but strangely detached from it so that it appears to be floating freely in the air. At the bottom edge is a wharf with a lone standing figure in yellow, anonymous and cartoonlike. It is a world on the cusp of total takeover by abstraction, but resisting doggedly at the edge. 

Most of the works made in Turkey are of urban scenes—cityscapes and observations of people in public spaces. But they are studies of the interplay between geometry and color as much as a visual diary. Their strength lies in how immediacy of observation and spontaneous execution are synthesized with a more systematic aesthetic project of testing how far abstraction can be pushed without forgoing representation. In contrast, the pictures Gritchenko made in Greece are almost entirely rural. Rugged landscapes, ancient ruins, Byzantine sites, occasional shepherds. The mood is sober, the colors more muted: less pure pigment, more ocher and gray—autumnal, perhaps, which is an odd quality to find in paintings made in Greece. That is not to say that they are any less striking than the Turkish works. The watercolor Epidaurus, 1921, is a quilting of triangular and trapezoidal patches of yellow ocher, ultramarine, etc. One might think of Paul Klee, but Gritchenko was less whimsical and considerably more concerned with the integrity of pictorial construction.

On one level, a Greek museum wanting to stage a show of works an artist made in Greece during a crucial period in the history of modern art is straightforward. But the effect the exhibition created was far more experimental than its simple premise suggested. The show examined what happens to an artist’s output when the parameters for artmaking—available materials, scale, production facilities—are highly constrained for an extended period of time. Gritchenko proved to be an artist who thrived under limitation, creating a body of work that is among the most distinctive in modernist works on paper. It is also a vindication for curatorial focus, and for concision and simplicity in exhibition making.