She called herself María Kallas, and like the soprano in Medea, unleashed a tragedy with his revenge. It happened in 1985. After the gallery owner Alexander Iolas After throwing him out of the Athenian mansion portrayed in this report for robbery, Maria Kallas, a transvestite whom he had employed there as an assistant, began to accuse him of drug trafficking, pedophilia and antiquities smuggling. “The Roman orgies of Iolas”, “Iolas is rotten”, declared the chorus of the tabloid press in Greece. And such was the hatred that these newspapers generated that, when Iolas died after just two years, that anger did not completely disappear: it fell on his famous art collection.
Unprotected by the authorities, the gallerist’s residence on the outskirts of Athens was looted and vandalized. One day, intruders set fire to one of his Egyptian antiques. Another, they burned his catalogues. They attacked her with graffiti, they broke the furniture. But, as with all martyrdom sites, over time Villa Iolas (as it began to be called) also attracted some devotees. “I visited her a few years ago and found Iolas’ phone book. He had written down the numbers of Duchamp, of Peggy Guggenheim in Venice, of Magritte… he was a fascinating man,” says the Greek artist Andreas Angelidakis by email, for whom that clandestine visit inspired several works. “The house of Iolas was an avant-garde mecca in a Greece full of mediocrity and homophobia,” says fellow Greek artist Angelo Plessas when talking about his visit. “I was a child, but I remember very well the harshness of the attacks and slander from the press that led to his abandonment.”
If in its decline the mansion of Iolas became a symbol of its fall, it is because before it was a symbol of its greatness. Eleni Coutsoudis, niece and heir of the gallery owner, explains in the documentary Villa Iolas (2017) who was Iolas’s father, an Egyptian cotton merchant, who in 1950 began building the house on land in the Agia Paraskevi area, northwest of Athens. By then the name of Alexander Iolas was already well known in the art world and, like the Macedonian king who had inspired him, he was linked to numerous journeys. Born in Alexandria in 1907, Iolas was still called Constantinos Coutsoudis when as a teenager he became friends with Cavafis, the great poet of that city. It was he who encouraged him to move to Athens, a place where, encouraged this time by the prestigious conductor Dimitris Mitropoulos, he learned piano and took his first steps as a dancer. In 1930 he left Greece to study dance at Tatiana and Victor Gsovsky’s school in Berlin, but the rise of the Nazis (and the beating he said he received from a group of them) caused him to go to Paris. There he famously encountered a painting by De Chirico in a gallery. “I had never seen a modern painting,” Iolas recalled. “The frequent visits I made there were the seed of my desire to be a gallery owner.”
His good star followed him in 1935 to New York, where with his new name, and after a decade doing ballet in companies such as Balanchine’s, he left dance and began directing Hugo Gallery, a gallery sponsored by the aristocrat Maria dei Principi Ruspoli (married to a great-grandson of Victor Hugo), and where Iolas’ commitment to surrealism led to collections as important as that of the De Menil family in Houston. Iolas exhibited Magritte, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini… And in 1952, the drawings inspired by Warhol’s Truman Capote in what was the first exhibition of this artist, whom Iolas discovered and with whom he shared a taste for the marginal and the bizarre. “Andy adored Iolas,” Bob Colacello writes in his memoir of his years with Warhol. “With his extravagant turquoise and emerald satin suits, and matching upholstered platforms, he passed for one of their superstars.”
Its golden age came in the 1960s with the expansion of Iolas Gallery (it was now the owner), one of the first to grow through a network of international locations. Iolas opened in Paris, Milan, Geneva, Madrid… or in Athens, where he had returned every summer and where his mansion had been transformed as he triumphed. It is not just that in 1971 Iolas ordered the construction of a second floor, or that the initial surface area of 50 m² ended up being 35 times larger. Behind the engraved bronze gates of the house (believed to have been designed in part by Dimitri Pikionis, the architect of the modern approaches to the Acropolis) a myriad of works of art and antiquities unparalleled in Greece filled the various marble and It turned the visit to the kitchen into an art master class: from a room dedicated to Ancient Greece, one moved on to another on the Byzantine period or one with works by Picasso. The spaces that appear in this report are a consequence of the death of Max Ernst in 1976, an event that led Iolas to close his galleries, as he had promised this artist he would do when he was gone, and to retire permanently in Athens. . According to Eleni Coutsoudis, his uncle didn’t know how to be idle, so he began to run the mansion as if it were a new gallery, filling it with works by Warhol, Niki de Saint-Phalle and other artists with whom he had met. worked up. “I was tired of paying $700,000 in storage costs,” Iolas said in 1981, downplaying the presence of those pieces in the house. But the excuse, if it was one, fell short when he invited artists like Marina Karella to create new works there, or when he designed surprising spaces like his bathroom, covered by a golden ceiling. “The house was the best gallery of all the ones he ran,” says Coutsoudis.
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Iolas’s great mistake was to open the doors of this avant-garde kingdom to the public opinion of Greece, through an interview given in his home in 1983. He gave his opinion boldly about the society of his country and, in particular, about his rise to power. of President Papandréou. His statements were not amused in Athens, and made him uncomfortable for the Hellenic Republic: two years later, this Maria Kallas only had to throw a match on the bonfire.
Alexander Iolas died of complications from AIDS in a New York hospital on June 8, 1987, supposedly wishing that his house would become a museum that would help redeem him in Greece. His niece denies it. “My uncle didn’t care what happened to the house. He used to quote Louis XV: ‘After me, the flood’. Be that as it may, the thefts of hundreds of works of art during the looting of the house and attacks by vandals made such a museum impossible. Much of the blame for their neglect lies with the authorities of the municipality of Agia Paraskevi, owner of the property since 2013. “That the house remains in ruins shows how even in today’s Greece Iolas remains marginalized,” George Vamvakidis says by phone. , co-founder and director of the Athenian gallery The Breeder. “For the new generations of Greek artists, and especially for those who are queerwhat happened to his house not only represents a lost opportunity to get to know his collection, but, on a symbolic level, to have a place where he can feel heard, seen and celebrated.”
Perhaps that is not where these young people should honor him. In the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh you can visit some works from the series that in 1984, perhaps guessing its end, the traitors who would provoke it and the faithful who would remain loyal, Iolas commissioned his friend in what was his last work. both: the pop version of The Last Supper.
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