The painter Alexandros Barkoff (Alex Barkoff) was born in Helsinki in 1870 (?) and passed away in Athens in 1941/42.
He was of Russo-Polish descent, with Helsinki as his probable birthplace.
He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg and abandoned Russia after the 1917 Revolution. Initially, he traveled to Paris and Palestine, and he must have arrived in Athens shortly after the mid-1920s. He lived in Thessaloniki for about three years, before settling once again toward the end of his life in Athens, where it appears he died of starvation during the Axis Occupation. The main body of his work consists of watercolors and a very small number of oil paintings. A painter of the urban landscape, he renders monuments of Athens and Thessaloniki, houses, streets, open-air markets, and gathering places, utilizing a rapid and simplifying drawing style.
We know of only one exhibition of his, at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1923.