AS A LONGTIME FRIEND of Chryssa, I was saddened to learn of her death in an Athens hospital on December 23. I met her in the 1960s, when she was gaining critical recognition for her paintings, reliefs, and pioneering neon sculpture. She showed extensively in the United States and Europe through the ’90s and was given solo exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. Her works are found in the collections of these museums as well as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Tate Modern, London.
As an idealistic young woman with vivid memories of the brutal occupation of Greece, Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali planned a career in social service, but her disillusion with government incompetence prompted a radical change of goals. In 1953, determined to become a painter, she left for Paris, studying briefly at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, meeting Breton, Ernst, and other Surrealist luminaries. At a time when New York was rapidly supplanting Paris as the major center of advanced art, Chryssa traveled to San Francisco, where she attended the California School of Fine Arts for a short time but left no footprints. Her life as an artist really began in 1955, when she settled in New York, where she was immediately captivated by the visual excitement of the city, especially the calligraphy and color of its public spaces, which she would celebrate in the monumental steel, neon, cast-aluminum, and Plexiglas construction, The Gates to Times Square, 1964–66. Reflecting in her journal on the time as well as the physical and emotional energy expended on the Gates, she wrote, “For two years I’d had no desire to see anyone.”
Among her earliest works were the Cycladic Books, 1955–56, white-plaster reliefs cast from discarded, disassembled cardboard packing boxes. For Chryssa, the resulting T-shaped forms recalled the stylized geometric language of third-millennium Aegean sculpture. As Sam Hunter noted in his 1974 book on the artist:
“These were unlikely and esoteric sources for contemporary sculpture and Chryssa . . . stood quite alone in her interests and strikingly original plastic formulations. . . . The reliefs also offered the first evidence of what was to become a dominating obsession with the problems of visibility and legibility in art. . . . Chryssa’s Cycladic Books may also be seen as a prediction in terms of flat relief . . . of the Minimalist rage which followed in the sixties.”
Over the next few years, Chryssa produced metal and plaster reliefs, sometimes encased in frames or boxes, containing arrangements of letters. Arguably, she was the first artist to employ words as the exclusive subject of paintings and sculpture. As a young woman and a foreigner with limited professional and social connections, she had to rely on her keen visual intelligence and instinct for structural order, and she discovered the latter in what she called “newspaper images.” Large canvases such as Newspaper, 1958–59, proclaimed their content in capital letters above four columns of abstracted text created by the repeated application of an inking stamp.
As she became increasingly visible to the art world with her first solo exhibitions at the Betty Parsons Gallery in January 1961 and later that year at the Guggenheim Museum, Chryssa expanded her investigation of the formal and expressive possibilities of the printed image. Between March and October 1962, she worked intermittently on Newspaper Book, a suite of twenty-one offset lithographs, of which seven complete editions were printed. The range of possibilities—advertisements, weather maps, stock-market charts, and crosswords—elicited a variety of responses and prompted an amazing gestural freedom.
Despite wide recognition in the ’60s and ’70s, Chryssa suffered from emotional problems that required periods of hospitalization, caused her to alienate dealers, and gradually marginalized her in a rapidly changing New York art scene. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, she began to create large-scale, painted honeycomb aluminum reliefs with fluorescent and neon elements inspired by the signage of Chinatown, which were shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery and documented in Chryssa Cityscapes, published in 1990 by Thames & Hudson. She continued to work intermittently, producing a remarkable Pentelic marble version of the Cycladic Books for a 1997 exhibition at the Museum of Cycladic Art.
Deteriorating vision and other serious health problems caused her to leave New York and settle in Florida at the end of the decade. Restless, no longer able to work, she returned to the city she had left as a twenty-year old and resided outside Athens until her death.
Diane Kelder is professor emerita of art history at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
