Anastasios Alevizos (1914 – 1985)

Anastasios Alevizos, known by the artistic pseudonym Tassos. Tassos attended engraving classes at the other great painter Giannis Kefallinos from 1933 until graduating from the School of Fine Arts (1939). He studied in Paris, Rome and Florence. At the Pan-Hellenic Art Exhibition of 1938 he received the Engraving Award and in 1940, the State Engraving Award. His acquaintance with Demetrius Galanis, an important engraver of the interwar period, seems to have been decisive.

With the declaration of the Greco-Italian War in 1940, Tassos, like other Kefallinos’ students, made posters for the encouragement of the Greek people. With the German Occupation, he joined the EPON and EAM (Resistance Organization) Artists, continuing, underground, the production of propaganda material against the Germans.

After the liberation, Tassos began to deal with other issues besides the war, such as naked, still life and portraits, while at the same time he began to use color in his woodcuts.

Graduating in 1939, he made covers and decorative clichées for the literature journal Nea Estia. Immediately after the end of the German Occupation, he took over the artistic direction of the publishing house “The New Books”, founded by the Greek Communist Party, in 1945 and closed in 1948.

In 1948 he began to work with the School Book Publishing Organization. The fruit of his collaboration with SBPO was the illustration of many books for the Primary and Secondary Schools, at first with the 1949 textbook for the 6th Class of the Elementary School.

In 1948 he became an artistic consultant for the Aspiotis-Elka lithography, and from 1954 to 1967 he designed stamps on behalf of the Hellenic Post, while from 1962 until his death, he designed stamps of the Republic of Cyprus. In 1959 he took over the Department of Graphic Arts at the Athenian Institute of Technology, where he taught until 1967.