Engonopoulos Nikos

Nikos Engonopoulos was born in October 1907 in Athens and completed his basic studies as a boarder at a high school in Paris. In 1927 he served his military service and after his discharge he worked as a translator in a bank and clerk at the University, and in 1930 he was appointed to the Ministry of Public Works as a designer in the Department of Town Planning.

In 1932, he enrolled at the School of Fine Arts, where he studied under Konstantinos Parthenis, while at the same time attending Byzantine art classes in the workshop of Fotis Kontoglou and A. Xyngopoulos, together with Yannis Tsarouhis. He studied freely in Paris, Vienna, Munich and Italy. He taught painting, history of art and scenography at the School of Architecture of the E.M.P. from 1938, successively as curator, temporary, permanent and regular professor. At the same time, he met other important artists, including Andreas Empirikos, Yiannis Moralis and Giorgio de Chirico. Throughout his painting studies, Engonopoulos remained in his position at the Ministry and in 1934 he was assigned to the Topographic Service, where after six years he was made permanent with the rank of 1st Class Draftsman.

In 1945, he was seconded to the National Technical University of Athens as an assistant in the Department of Decoration and Free Design, a position he held until 1956. In 1949, he participated in the founding of the Armos artistic group with the aim of promoting a modern aesthetic proposal in the Greek space, together with other members in which the painters Hatzikyriakos-Gikas, Moralis and Tsarouhis were included. At the same time he worked at the Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction and in collaboration with the architectural team of Dimitris Pikionis designed new buildings.

In the following years he participated in several group exhibitions, while in 1954 he represented Greece at the 27th Venice Biennale with a total of 72 of his works. In the same period, he was elected permanent curator of the Polytechnic and resigned permanently from the Ministry of Public Works. In 1958, he was awarded the First State Prize for Poetry of the Ministry of National Education for the poetry collection En Anthiro Helleni Livo, while in 1966 he was honored for his painting work by King Constantine II with the Golden Cross of George I. The state poetry prize would later be awarded to him for a second time in 1979, as well as the Order of the Phoenix. He was a member of the Artistic Chamber, the Hellenic Society of Aesthetics, the Société Européenne de Culture, etc. He spoke English, French and Italian. He was a permanent resident of Athens (Anagnostopoulos Street). He was a member of the Greek Chamber of Visual Arts (EETE).

His paintings are in the National Gallery, the Municipal Galleries of Athens, Rhodes, Thessaloniki, the Theater Museum at the National Technical University of Athens and in private collections.

He died in 1985 of a heart attack and his funeral was held at public expense in the First Cemetery of Athens.

Eggonopoulos’ poems have been translated into French, English, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Polish, Hungarian and the Venetian dialect. In addition, they have been set to music by Nikos Mamagakis and Argyris Kounadis, who wrote the musical background to the poem Bolivar for the Dionysos record, recited by Eggonopoulos himself.

The year 2007 was declared by the artistic world of the country as the “Year of N. Eggonopoulos”.