Acknowledgements
This book is based on my thesis with the same title, successfully defended at the History of Art Department, University College London in December 2014.
I owe the greatest of debts to my principal PhD supervisor, Emeritus Professor Frederic J. Schwartz, for his constant support and unstinting intellectual involvement. I have benefited a great deal from our collaboration, but most of all, I have learnt to turn my enthusiasm into concrete arguments. His own enthusiasm has often renewed my confidence in my project in those inevitable moments of doubt.
My research and study at UCL would not have been possible without the full grant I received by IKY, the Greek State Scholarship Foundation.
I also thank my second supervisor, Professor Mechthild Fend, Emeritus Professor Andrew Hemingway and the rest of the Department of History of Art at UCL, which has provided an extraordinarily productive atmosphere for inspiration and scholarly debate. I am most grateful to Faidon Zaras and Harriet OâNeill for their friendship during my London days.
I also wish to thank Robin Schuldenfrei for giving me the opportunity to present some of my work in her Kolloquium and test my ideas with her students at the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, shortly before my viva. I also thank the following individuals and institutions for their invaluable assistance: Antje Kalcher of the Universität der Künste-Archiv, Berlin; Wencke Clausnitzer-Paschold of the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin; Renate Flagmeier of the Werkbund-Archiv, Berlin; Beate Ebelt-Borchert of the Zentralarchiv der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin-PreuÃischer Kulturbesitz; and the staff of the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin.
My thesis would not have been started nor continued without the generous support of Lena Gkaripi, Yorgos Pegioudis, Aris Pegioudis and Poppy Sfakianaki. But it would have remained incomplete had it not been for Olga Bezantakou. This book is theirs through and through.