This edition represents the first comprehensive and extensive presentation of the artistic contribution of Kostis [Konstantinos] Parthenis, which until now has been only fragmentarily known, both to the wider art-loving public, to which this volume primarily addresses, and to the small scientific community of art historians in Greece.

The painter with his multifaceted and legendary life, and with his even more complex artistic creation, which emerged as a leading and exemplary form in his time, was one of the most important creators of Greek art, with an undoubtedly decisive presence for the development of the visual arts in our country.

Parthenis' exhibition activity coincides with the reception of modern artistic quests at the end of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century in Greece. Through his high-quality works, the tendencies of symbolism and Viennese Secession, impressionism and divisionism, fovism, and later cubism, and to some extent, I would say, abstraction, were relatively timely presented in the Greek space, as Parthenis vigilantly and absorbently followed the morphological quests of European artists until the late 1930s. However, I believe that through his work, not only the modern tendencies were adopted in Greece, but something more substantial: the fundamental aesthetic demand of modernism was legitimized here - the demand for the formal self-sufficiency of the artwork and the continuous renewal of its visual language. His metaphysical disposition and his authentic initiation into the theosophical quests of the late 20th century allowed him to timely perceive the secret ideological background of pioneering quests and, therefore, he was able to creatively assimilate the technotropic developments, not as unarmored stylistic tendencies of the mainstream, as a common torchbearer seeking domestic recognition, but in their internal significance, as a mystic seeking knowledge, experience, and expression. [...]

(from the book's preface)