The bell-tower 

Spyros Papaloukas created this watercolor of a bell-tower sometime in the first half of the 20th century. As a modernist painter working in Greece, Papaloukas had to address the complex relationship between international styles and local traditions. Here, we can see how the formal innovations of early modernism can serve conservative cultural functions. The bell-tower connects to the long history of the Orthodox Church in Greece, its centrality in the cultural life of the nation. In rendering this subject with a simplified, almost childlike style, Papaloukas perhaps attempts to connect the Church with the common people. We might wonder whether this image expresses a self-conscious nationalism, an attempt to define a specifically Greek cultural identity through the iconography of the church. To know more, we might want to investigate the history of the Orthodox Church in Greece, the place of religion in Greek national identity and the cultural politics of modernism in mid-century Greece. Art is always made in specific social and institutional contexts.