Elli Phaedra Tzalopoulou Barnstone

Elli Phaedra Tzalopoulou Barnstone passed away peacefully on March 26th, 2025, in Columbia, MO, attended at her bedside by her daughter Aliki, granddaughter Zoë, Visiting Angels, and the loving staff at Cedarhurst. Craig, her son-in-law, had faithfully cared for her for the past decade.

She was born June 10th,1924, on the island of Prinkipos near Constantinople (Istanbul) to Maria Agniades, a pianist, and Vassilios Tzalopoulos, a renowned physician.

Elli’s mother, Maria, was from a distinguished Greek family; her maternal grandfather was the lawyer to the sultana. Her father was from Epirus (northwest Greece) and dedicated his medical career to serving the Greek people. He was a captain in the Greek Army and the Director of the Red Cross. When Vasillios heard Maria play piano, he fell in love with her.  After they married, they lived in Vienna for a year.  She studied piano, and he worked as a postdoc. Their marriage’s auspicious beginnings were shattered in the aftermath of the Great Catastrophe (the Greek term for the expulsion from Turkey and the genocide of millions of Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians). The family fled, her mother carrying three-month-old baby Elli at her breast, her jewels stashed in her undergarments.

The family resettled in Athens. They lived through the German occupation of Greece (1941-1945). Vassilios moved the family from their home and his medical office in Central Athens to a villa in Marousi, which was then the countryside (now a northern suburb of Athens). German soldiers occupied part of their home. The family survived the famine by living off the land, growing vegetables, raising a few rabbits and chickens, and harvesting olives and other fruit trees. Even so, they starved, and Elli dreamed of wearing a twine necklace strung with bread and cheese so she could eat whenever she wanted. Vassilios provided free medical care to people, asking for a little food as payment if they could spare it. Elli participated in the Resistance and volunteered with her sister with the Committee of Entertainment for the Wounded Soldiers.

She attended Araskeion Gymnasium in Athens, then studied science for a year at the University of Athens. Her father hoped she would become a physician like him. After the war, she worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which provided food, clothing, shelter, fuel, medical care, and other necessities to the victims of WWII in Europe and Asia. Her boss, Christopher Janus, encouraged her to apply to Wellesley College, where she was awarded a full scholarship.

She came from war-torn Greece to the U.S. on a Liberty Boat. When she arrived at Wellesley three weeks into the semester, the dean asked where she’d been. “Exploring New York City, of course! In Greece, we don’t have to attend class. We just have to take exams.” “Well, here in America, you do have to attend class,” the dean replied, and then she served her milk and cookies. That was the first time Elli tasted cold milk, and she savored it ever after. She excelled at Wellesley, majoring in English and minoring in history and art history.

A year later, her younger sister, Aliki, came to the U.S. to attend Mount Holyoke College, also on a full scholarship, also eager to explore New York. In NYC, Elli and Aliki were introduced to George Ballou and his best friend, Willis Barnstone. Willis attended Bowdoin College, but was a New Yorker and knew the city. The four students stayed up all night together, dancing at nightclubs, seeing one sight after another, not “very tired,” as in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, but certainly “very merry.” It wasn’t until her granddaughter, Zoë, attended Mount Holyoke that Elli saw the campus. “Why would I visit Aliki there when we could have fun in Boston or New York?”

Willis and Elli married on June 1st, 1949, in Paris, France. They moved to Elli’s parents’ home in Athens after the Greek Civil War (1945-1949). Greece was impoverished after enduring eight years of war and political upheaval.

Elli and Willis were not merely fun-loving; they were life-embracing. They’d served the common good from their teens, Elli working for the UNRRA, while Willis spent high school summers with the American Friends Service Committee, digging privies in Mexico. They initiated a successful clothing drive for Greek children, appealing to the World Student Service Fund and other organizations.

They lived on the island of Mykonos to be alone together and pursue their artistic and intellectual aspirations. There, they befriended the painter, Albert Schupbach (later Chubac). When they visited his studio and Elli saw his palette, she recalled, “His paints looked so delicious, I wanted to eat them.” She put aside her ambition to be a writer and committed to painting, though her visual imagination began in Greece as a child. In the memoir she wrote as a young woman at Wellesley, Elli marked the beginning of her real life from the first day she saw Vouliagmeni, the “Athenian Riviera”: “A new world opened the golden gates to me, and my soul yearned passionately toward it. Now, as I close my eyes to see more clearly this period of my life, I see it in abstract color: blue and golden yellow, spots of red emerging from a profusion of green, and all these motley colors fading into a rosy-purple hue, perhaps the transparent flow of hills in the distance or the blush of cyclamens.”

Elli was a luminous and skilled visual artist and a passionate writer. Her work has appeared in galleries and museums in Athens, Munich, Escuela de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Bowery Plus, Manhattan, School of Fine Arts, Indiana University, and elsewhere.

From 1948-1953, Elli and Willis traveled Europe, living in Greece, Spain, and France. They returned to the U.S. for a year while Willis did his Master’s at Columbia. Then he was drafted for the Korean War and stationed in France for two years. In those seven years abroad, they made friends with artists, poets, and intellectuals: among them were the Dadaist Tristan Tzara in France, the poets Pedro Salinas, Luis Cernuda, and Nobel Laureate Vicente Alexandre in Spain, the composer Manos Hadzidakis, poets Yannis Ritsos, Nobel Laureates Odysseus Elytis and George Seferis in Greece.

In 1959, their translation of Margarita Liberaki’s The Other Alexander appeared in the U.S. with Noonday Press; in 2021, it was rereleased with Aiora Press in Athens. During the Greek military junta (1967-1974), Elli, Willis, and Edmund Keely embarked on a dangerous project to translate contemporary Greek writers. 18 Texts came out with Harvard University Press to much acclaim in 1972. Neither Elli’s nor Keeley’s name appeared in the book because they wanted the option of returning to Greece. Upon 18 Texts’ publication, two of the authors were jailed without charges.

In 1956, they returned to the U.S. Willis pursued his doctorate at Yale University. Elli and Willis welcomed their firstborn, Aliki, in September 1956, at the start of the academic year. Elli continued to paint before and after her pregnancy. She showed her paintings to the German-American artist and color theorist, Josef Albers, and he helped her gain admission and a full scholarship to the Yale University Art School.

Willis’s first teaching job was at Wesleyan University. Robert, their second child, was born in 1960, and Tony, their youngest, in 1961. Willis was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in Madrid, Spain. The family moved to Spain and lived there from 1961 to 1962. In 1962, when Willis got the job at Indiana University, Elli exclaimed, “Indiana! What’s that?”

Nonetheless, with her characteristic gusto, she seized the day (and the years) and became a vital member of the Bloomington community. She was instrumental in the founding of the Bloomington Area Arts Council, for which she tirelessly advocated. Willis’s brother, Howard Barnstone, designed the family home, a reconstructed barn in the woods (finished in 1966). She asked the contractor to put a slot in the wall between her studio and the kitchen/family room so she could check on the stove and the kids, and paint in peace. The house was made for hospitality and entertaining. She made her kids’ friends welcome, and a half century later, they fondly recall her warmth and Greek cooking. There was always an extra place or more at the table. She and Willis threw legendary parties, always with great food, music, and dancing. On weekend mornings, they’d rouse the kids to dance.

In 1962, the Barnstones went to Vermont to visit the poet Ruth Stone. They ended up buying a white clapboard early nineteenth-century colonial house on fifteen acres outside Brandon, Vermont. Until the mid-70s, the two families got together regularly, adults and kids writing and painting, making up plays, and exploring. Every summer, they drove from Indiana to Vermont hauling a trailer with Elli’s portable dishwasher—she said she’d never paint if she had to wash dishes by hand. She didn’t allow a television set and even forbade a phone. When she relented, it was a party line. She wanted her kids to read, write, paint, play games, and walk the pastures and woods surrounding their home. They had picnics and swam in the lakes. They frequently went to the Middlebury College Language School and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference to socialize in several languages, and attend readings and lectures. Elli was fluent in Greek, English, French, and Spanish. She could communicate well in Italian and Portuguese, and knew Ancient Greek and Latin.

After the fall of the Greek dictatorship, she returned to her motherland, dividing her time between Greece and the U.S., first in Bloomington, IN, and, in the last decade and a half, in Columbia, MO, where she lived with Aliki, Craig, and Zoë. She established a life in Greece with the property she’d inherited, determined to give Greece to her children, grandchildren, and all who came after.

In 1975, she landed on the island of Serifos and, entranced by Hora, a mountaintop whitewashed Cycladic village, searched all over home to buy there, but no one would sell to her. Exhausted, she went down the mountain to a cafe in the port and had an omelet and a beer. She complained to the cafe owner about her troubles. “I have a place I’ll sell to you,” he replied. She bought his small building on the marble square (plateia) that was once a cafe and barber shop. At that time, the island was undeveloped. The square, which is now busy with restaurants, bars, and gift shops, was in ruins, except for the grocery store, the 17th-century church, the neoclassical town hall, the theological library, and the house Elli renovated. Eventually, she bought and restored a house for each of her three children.

As she had in Bloomington and Vermont, she made Serifos a haven for family, creativity, freedom, and fun. When her first three grandchildren were born in the late 1990s, the family came together and spent every summer on Serifos. Her grandchildren grew up on the beaches, swimming, running wild through the village, and playing in the square. Elli swam and played with her grandchildren, taught them how to pick capers, and surrounded them with love.

Elli was always the life of the party. She danced at her 100th birthday on Serifos among her children, grandchildren, and the many friends she made around the world.

In 1948, Elli wrote in a love letter to Willis: “The New Year comes and I’m filled with new resolutions. I’m in a blessed state of mind, filled with a tremendous desire to be more deeply human, to achieve more dignity even in the smallest matter, to find strength to be creative, to understand you, my treasure, better, and to be less selfish with you. Darling, I have such a burning desire to be good and great, I have such a need to love and be loved by everybody, and above all, I don’t want to hurt anybody. I know all ways should be used in attaining one’s end except cruelty to others. These few days alone, no longer moving about, I have thought these things and as I was thinking my heart was filled with a balm. I love life so much, that I think hatred, fear, cruelty, to be the end of life.”

Elli fulfilled her resolution to live her life to the fullest. She laughed and gave love like no one else. She taught us all how to live freely, creatively, lovingly, and joyfully.

She and Willis divorced in 1978, but they remained close and loving friends from their first all-night encounter until her death, nearly eight decades later. In 1983, she married her second great love, Bill Wagle. He tragically died six months later. She was a devoted stepmother and was especially close to Danny. Her last great love was Luis Beltran.

Her memory lives on through her children Aliki, professor of English at the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO, Robert, architect and sculptor in Sydney, Australia, and Tony, professor of English at Whittier College in California, her grandchildren, Alexi, Zoë, Maya, and Blake; her son- and daughters-in-law Craig (Aliki), Deborah (Robert), and Helen (Tony), her stepson Daniel, and her first husband, Willis. She is predeceased by her mother, Maria, her father, Vassilios, her sister, Aliki, her second husband, Bill, her stepson, Perry (Bill), and her longtime companion, Luis.

Since 2008, Elli loved going to Calvary Episcopal Church with her family. She participated in the ministries and social gatherings of the church with joie de vivre and became a beloved member of the community.

Her memorial service will be held on Saturday, April 5th at 4 pm Central at Calvary Episcopal Church, 123 S. Ninth St., Columbia, MO. The service will be livestreamed and recorded. You can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVZJ67jTmXI

In lieu of flowers, please consider donating to the Hellenic Initiative https://thehellenicinitiative.org/.

Below are reviews of her artwork:

From critic and poet Lydia Stephanou:

“It is the energy of life that the wave possesses more than anything else,” Helle replies to my observations. In its most intense moments, the energy is expressed with curves suggesting the meeting of the very first light with the archetypal wave. In Helle Tzalopoulou-Barnstone’s work, nothing is cut off from the whole. The only element that is ostracized is darkness itself. Light, as it falls on the water becomes compressed and condensed. You might say that the old contradiction between light and darkness has been transposed. While in this particular world something is happening incessantly, like a bridging from one element to another, from one sense to another: sight-touch or “a transparency I hear.” Elements of primordial nature and of human nature, before history, mysterious workings “in the depths of things.” But also perhaps an opening to some future, with the exaltation of the wave in its upward motion toward light.

From art critic Lydia Finkelstein:

“All [her] pastels or acrylics on paper exude the sensuousness of a season in full, whether it is the summer light in a Greek olive grove or an Indiana hillside ripe with autumn corn husks. Her gift is the ability to treat both subjects, so far apart in their cultural heritage and understanding, as something uniquely understood, beautiful, and to be internalized in the artist’s visual memory bank. Barnstone is a master colorist who can work effectively with difficult tonalities within a single color, such as green, and not get the tones muddy or mixed down to an emptiness within a composition. Her greens are grayed olives, terre vertes, intense phthalos, yellowed greens, greens shot with white or pink, to create a kind of incandescent light that seems to come off the page. You can literally see the light and feel the warmth on your skin.”