Art: Modern Greek

When he was a 13-year-old schoolboy, a tousled Greek youngster named Nicolas Hadgikyriaco saw his first "modern" painting—a tortured Matisse street scene—in a Paris gallery. "I was terribly shocked," he remembers. "I was as shocked as if I saw a woman walking on the Boulevard de la Madeleine stripped naked." Young Nicolas soon got over his astonishment at the new art. He began to paint himself, grew up to become a pupil of the modern school and, eventually, Greece's best living painter. Last week he was in London giving the city its first good look at the work he signs with...