The collection owned by the Y. Tsarouchis Foundation was formed by two donations (1981-1987) and a bequest (1989) by the artist to the Foundation-Museum that bears his name, which is accommodated in his house at Maroussi. Yannis Tsarouchis began systematically to assemble his paintings long before he thought of creating a foundation.

    The paintings now in the possession of the Foundation cover virtually all periods of the painter’s creative activity, with varying numbers of examples, ranging in date from 1918 to the end of the painter’s life in 1989. It includes paintings, drawings, preliminary studies and maquette for stage designs. These works make it possible to trace Tsarouchis’s career as an artist: his aspirations at various times, his orientations, and his experiments with styles, which , in combination with his wide-ranging taste, give the paintings his familiar, distinctly personal manner, with regard to both the choice of repertoire and the treatment of the subject.

    The distinctive nature of the Foundation’s collection enables us to enter into the artist’s creative process, and reveals that a profound motivating force behind his creativity and artistic pluralism was his constant aesthetic fluctuation between two cultures – his vacillation between East and West.

    The works in the Foundation also cover Tsarouchis’s complete repertoire and have been classified by subject in smaller groups such as: sailors, months and seasons, zeimbekiko dance, imaginary and real landscapes, people with butterfly-wings, coffee-houses, dancers, portraits, cyclists, flowers and still lives, the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, etc. These groups often form the subject of the temporary exhibitions organised by the foundation.