Lot 329 D

Nicolas Ghika (also known as Niko or Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika) was a leading 20th-century Greek painter, sculptor, printmaker and writer. He initially studied painting in Athens and then - from 1922 - in Paris, where he would already exhibit at the Salon des Indépendants just one year later. In 1927 Galerie Percier in Paris presented works by him in his first solo exhibition, and these also included the painting offered here. This is presumably where the picture was purchased by Léonce Rosenberg, who was one of the avant-garde's most influential art dealers and had a marked predilection for Cubist and abstract tendencies. The work then entered the exquisite modern art collection of Ismar Littmann (1878-1934), a lawyer from Breslau. His son Hans (also known as Edward) emigrated to the US in 1933 and succeeded in rescuing a portion of the works from the Nazis and shipping them to the US.
Our painting was part of a series totalling six pictures in which Ghika occupied himself with his own studio. With its depiction of a painting on an easel, which in turn casts a long shadow on the wall, this image can also be understood as a complex reflection on his own work as an artist. Today artworks by Ghika can be found at the National Gallery in Athens, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Tate Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.