This paper will explore the relationship between Theophilos and the generation of the 1930s on the basis of two parameters. On the one hand, an attempt will be made to reconfigure the image of Theophilos as a ‘spontaneous’ bearer of an immaculate and uninterrupted national tradition; on the other, the paper will address the reasons that determined this interest in the ‘illiterate’ (even ‘lunatic’) painter from Lesbos. It will be argued that what impressed the young intellectuals of the 1930s generation was not only Theophilos’ ‘primitive’ visual idiom but his idiomatic modernist idiom, precisely because it found an echo in their own contradictions as bearers of European modernity.
