Mykonos: From arty to party

“MY SOUL is often a back street on Mykonos when night begins to fall”, wrote Surrealist artist/poet Nikos Engonopoulos back in 1939. I imagine those back streets were pretty quiet in those days, and nothing like they are today, since Mykonos became Greece’s party island par excellence. But this island does have an arty side to it too, for it is here that the Athens School of Fine Arts had set up its first annex, back in 1932. The ‘island of the winds’ had already been pulling a cultured crowd from the early 20th century, due to its close proximity to Delos, and the antiquities there, excavated by the French School of Athens (between the years of 1873-1913).

The current exhibition at the Municipal Gallery of Mykonos (runs till July 31), entitled ‘Mykonos through the Gaze of the Artists. From the Interwar years to 1960’, sheds light on the unique…