Vasilis Dimitriou, Keeper of a Fading Movie Art, Dies at 84

The New York Times

Sept 14, 2020

ATHENS — Vasilis Dimitriou, an artist who sought to keep the venerable art of the painted Hollywood billboard from fading away, creating more than 8,000 works for Greek theaters that virtually chronicled the history of movies since World War II, died on Sept. 6 in Athens. He was 84 and one of the last surviving movie billboard painters in Europe. The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said Konstantinos Giannopoulos, a family spokesman and a third-generation owner of the Athinaion Cinemas , which displayed Mr. Dimitriou’s billboards, reaching more than 40 feet long, for 40 years. Mr. Dimitriou, a self-taught painter from a poor family that survived the Nazi invasion and Greece’s military junta, began immortalizing legends of the silver screen at age 15. For more than six decades he painted one to two billboards a week, inspired by studio handouts featuring stars ranging, over time, from Gary Cooper to Leonardo DiCaprio. Using home-brewed paints suffused with glue to keep the billboards from running in the rain, Mr. Dimitriou created romanticized images that seemed torn from the pages of a comic book. “The Exorcist” was forebodingly illustrated in chiaroscuro, with blood dripping from the title’s Greek letters. For the 1997 remake of “Lolita,” he painted a lithe, prepubescent Dominique Swain stretched on the grass in a wet dress. For “Ali,” Will Smith’s boxer’s face was clenched like a fist.

The billboards’ look, with brush strokes reminiscent of 1940s Noir, turned the Athinaion into the most recognizable movie house in Athens. In recent years, as digitally drawn, mass-produced movie posters became the norm, Mr. Dimitriou made it his mission to keep the art form from dying, though he acknowledged that it remained a throwback to what he called “the golden age” of cinema. “Back then, you would go to the movies in a suit and tie,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “Women would wear beautiful dresses. There was an intermission, and half the theater would go to the foyer to have a drink and discuss the movie. Now that’s gone.” He vowed to keep the craft going as long as he could lift his arms to paint. His work left an indelible mark on the Greek capital, where Athenians have grown up seeing his posters. They were an especially comforting sight during the recent Greek financial crisis, when unemployment reached nearly 25 percent and consumer confidence plummeted.

“People would see me putting my posters up and give me a huge smile,” Mr. Dimitriou said. “Or they would ask to shake my hand and say, ‘thank you,’ for giving them joy.”

Image Mr. Dimitriou, center, with his hand-painted billboard for “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Credit... Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times

Vasilis Periklis Dimitriou was born on Feb. 18, 1936, in Pogoniani, a village in northern Greece, to Periklis and Konstantina (Douka) Dimitriou. His father was a hotel and restaurant manager; his mother, a homemaker. He grew up penniless during World War II in Kypseli, an Athens suburb. His father, a fighter in the Greek resistance, was often away from home as the German Army advanced. When Vasilis was 8, Nazi troops captured his father and took him away to be executed beside a mass grave. He miraculously survived and made his way home covered in blood, only to disappear from the boy’s life again as he rejoined the resistance. To bide time, Vasilis began drawing on sidewalks. He stumbled into painting movie posters after the war ended. He and his friends had been climbing a tree to watch films at an outdoor theater when the projectionist caught him and took him to the manager. Instead of throwing him out, however, the manager offered him work in exchange for watching movies. When the manager discovered that Vasilis had a talent for drawing, he invited him to try his hand at painting movie billboards. “My mother said, ‘If you become a painter, we’ll starve and die poor,” Mr. Dimitriou said. But he grabbed the chance. He is survived by his wife, Angeliki Dimitriou; his daughter, Konstantina Dimitriou; and a grandson. Inspired by his work, Virginia Axioti, a member of the family that runs the Athinaion, will continue to paint billboards for the theater, Mr. Giannopoulos said. Mr. Dimitriou worked silently and methodically, climbing ladders and squatting on stools. To paint his posters he built a low-slung stucco atelier in his backyard with one wall made to the exact dimensions of the Athinaion’s billboards — a rectangular surface 42 feet long and 8 feet high. Each piece, painted on thick brown paper, took three to four days to complete and was then pasted over the previous one (though some were preserved and stored for occasional exhibitions).

In recent his left hand — he painted with his right — had grown stiffer as his Parkinson’s disease advanced; his doctors suspected that it was caused by his boxing when he was younger. (At one point he was a coach for the Greek national boxing team.) He could no longer climb ladders easily, and his painting arm would tire after hours of holding a brush. But none of that stopped Mr. Dimitriou, who continued to maintain a rigorous 12-hour-a-day schedule — with a four-hour nap in the middle of it — to deliver his outsize billboards to the Athinaion, the last theater in Athens to commission them. Mr. Dimitriou professed to feeling sad knowing that he was among the last people working to perpetuate a nearly extinct art. But he had no regrets. “Painting is in my blood,” he said in 2014 . “When I stop breathing is when I’ll stop painting.

Image Mr. Dimitriou in 2014 hanging his “American Hustle” poster at the Athinaion, one of the oldest and most cherished movie theaters in Athens. Credit... Credit: Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times

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