How Nicholas Panayoti Zorakilli, as an artist, can enjoy continued international popularity while simultaneously being totally forgotten by Greeks in the United States is beyond understanding.
Zorakilli’s current status as an artist can be judged, not simply, by the fact that his original paintings and ink illustrations increase in influence and value every year but that the mass produced covers of magazines featuring his work are now themselves highly valued collector items. In point of fact any of Zorakill’s cover illustrations, interior illustrations in books, posters, sheet music, theater posters or artistry from any venue are now avidly sought. Nevertheless there is a decided contemporary dis-connect between this artist, the enduring popularity of his art and knowledge about the artist himself.
Inexplicably, regardless of Zorakilli’s international status, most of what is publicly available in North America on this artist stems from a 1912 newspaper report. Via the national wire service this article saw reproduction in newspapers around the nation; Pittsburgh, Shreveport, St. Louis and elsewhere. Entitled “Nicholas P. Zorakilli” this account appeared with a half page illustration by the artist. The unnamed reporter begins with something of a riddle: “The name ‘Nikolaki,’ signed to snappy covers of the Saturday Evening Post or to the color pages of in Collier’s Weekly, conveys a foreign suggestion, though the work itself is as unmistakably American as Uncle Sam or Miss Columbia. The explanation of this seemingly paradox, as in the cases of several others of our most famous American illustrators, is that while the person was born abroad, his development is entirely native to this soil.
“Nicholas P. Zorakilli was born in Trebizonde, in Asiatic Turkey, in 1879, of a prominent and ancient Byzantine Greek family. As a boy he studied art in Constantinople, more as a congenial accomplishment and pastime than anything else. His family for generations have been identified with the ownership and exploitation of great magnesium mines in the Caucasus, and Nicholas himself was a professional mining engineer until a very few years ago.
“Coming to the United States on a combined business and diplomatic mission, he felt himself attracted irresistibly by the artistic and literary life of New York, and determined to make a thorough experiment of launching upon a practical career as an artist-illustrator. He even left off his ‘miner’ name of Zarokilli, and signed ‘Nikolaki’ the Greek diminutive of his Christian name to his earliest commercial work, which was in the line of calendars, gift books and advertising leaflets. At the same time he painted portraits, and sent sketches to the illustrated magazines. From the very first, the success of this work fully justified his choice of a career.
“In five years he has become one of our most facile and popular artists, both in black-and-white and in color, has illustrated several novels, and had landscape paintings and portraits accepted for the Academy exhibitions. ‘I account for my luck with art editors,’ declared Mr. Zarokilli, ‘mainly from the fact that from the time I first began art study in my own country I had as models some of the most beautiful women in the world the native Circassians, Mingrelians and Georgians, celebrated for their dark-eyed, languishing loveliness from earliest historic times. There is a wonderful variety of feminine beauty here in the United States and it is combined with qualities of intelligence, self-reliance and energetic character that make it doubly fascinating to the artist (Pittsburgh Press October 13, 1912).’”
Today, Trebizonde, is known as Trabzon and remains a city on the Black Sea coast of the Turkey. This port city was one of the key locations on the Silk Road and as such over the centuries became a melting pot of religions, languages and cultures for centuries and a trade gateway to Persia and the Caucasus to the northeast.
Zarokilli was active in New York from 1912 to the late 1920s, providing illustrations for such publications as Modern Priscilla; Woman’s Home Companion; Saturday Evening Post; The Green Book; Collier’s Weekly and McCall’s. Most often those images were of strikingly lovely young women. Zarokilli’s work then spanned the pre-World War I era, through the war and then on into the Roaring Twenties. This being the case the artwork of Nicholas P. Zorakilli was as easily recognized and cherished by the average American as Frederick Remington, Charles Dana Gibson or Howard Chandler Christy.
In 1915, New York publishing firm Reinthal and Newman released a series of postcards with Zarokilli’s signed drawings of his “average” American beauties. Again, as evidence of his status as a well-recognized artist, between 1915 and 1917, two advertisements (one for Woodbury Soap, the other for Pompeian Massage Cream) invited readers to send in a dime to get their own reproduction of one of his paintings. Among his oil paintings that illustrated books see: An Imperial Marriage; Sylvia’s Experiment; A Reconstructed Marriage; The Top of the Morning; The Lovers of Skye; Are You My Wife?; and The Growing Up of Anne Carter.
Zarokilli also designed quite a number of American WWI posters. The most famous of which was one released in 1916 depicting a shapely young woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty, but known as “Lady Liberty,” holding a telephone. Its caption read: “Hello! This is Liberty Speaking–Billions of dollars were needed and need now!” (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, WWI Posters, LC-USZC4-8046).
In Europe, Zorakilli is perhaps best known today for his portraits. He painted such luminaries as the Queen of Spain, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Grand Duchess Anastasia, the King of Portugal, and Mr. and Mrs. Solomon Guggenheim, among many others.
Scattered among the news accounts of Zorakilli as an artist are those which report on his continuing role as a diplomat for Greece. On a bright Sunday morning, it was May 11, 1919, the Courier-Journal (Louisville) carried an especially lengthy news story entitled, “New State in the Black Sea.” Known as the “Pontic Plan” Greeks in Asia Minor, the United States and elsewhere argued for Trebizond to become the capital of an independent Greek state. As a well-known public figure Zorakilli, with known ties to this region, was sought out when this story first began to appear. Zorakilli’s quotes, comments and pronouncements can be found in newspapers across the United States. In the Courier-Journal Zorakilli clearly presented the case for such a state:
“’It is not generally realized,’ Mr. Zorakill said, ‘that the coast of the southern Black Sea was settled by the Greeks centuries before Christ, and that these people have preserved their racial integrity ever since, even under the successive oppression of warlike rulers. Their religion has helped to keep them apart, for one thing. Commercially and educationally they have dominated the country.’”
In the first issue of American Art News for 1920 we again see this mix of reporting on Zarokilli as both artist and diplomat: “Nicholas P. Zarokilli (Nikolaki), who recently returned to this country from Paris where he served as one of the Greek peace delegates, is settled for the winter at 33 West 67 St. He purposes going to Spain and England in the spring. In Spain he will make dry-point portraits of the King and his children. He has already completed two successful presentments of the Queen (Vol 18 (14) January 24).”
By all available accounts, Nicholas Panayoti Zorakilli was and remains an extremely popular and influential artist who never forgot his homeland. The question remains: why did this notable Hellene disappear from the pages of the history of Greeks in the United States?
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