Modernity of yesteryear: Cycladic art at the Met
New York City has added another jewel to its glittering cultural crown, and it takes up little more than one medium-sized wall in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
You'll find the wall in Belfer Court, the first room on the right as you enter the Greek and Roman Galleries from the Great Hall. If you walk too fast, you might miss it. Slow down and prepare to be amazed by the largest exhibition of ancient sculptures from the Greek islands known as the Cyclades ever seen in New York. It's titled “Cycladic Art: The Leonard N. Stern Collection on Loan from the Hellenic Republic.”
Five large display cases, usually three pairs of shelves each, cover the wall, their red felt interiors highlighting the gleaming white chiselled marble of 120 figures and vessels. The shelves are dominated by about 70 small, feisty female figurines or idols, which average about 18 inches in height and in one rare piece reach just over four feet. This is the glory of Cycladic art, distinguished by their stylized forms, folded arms and empty faces – except for small wedge-shaped noses – and also by their subdued sensuality and resonant silence. They're like tuning forks.
The display cases also contain some relatively large, self-contained heads, without bodies, which resemble miniature versions of the giant heads of Easter Island. And there are numerous vessels: vases, bowls, plates and a few palettes, including two that are narrow, delicate and slightly curved and appear to have been carved from a single leek leaf. Five additional pieces occupy five individual display cases nearby, and another 36 pieces are on display in a display case in the Greek and Roman Study Collection on the mezzanine floor, overlooking the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court.
All 161 works were created in the Cyclades, a group of small islands in the Aegean Sea east of Greece, between about 5300 BC, or the late Neolithic period, and 2300 BC, the beginning of the Bronze Age, a time period also called as Early Cycladic I and II. The figures in particular are among humanity's greatest achievements: serious and cool, yet immediately familiar and even essentially realistic, like skeletons. It looks like they can fold up, like drawing dummies.
They were collected beginning in the early 1980s by Leonard A. Stern, CEO of Hartz Mountain Industries, who as a teenager was fascinated by Cycladic art at the Met. Stern has given his collection to Greece, and in an agreement between him, the Met and the Greek government, most of it will remain on display at the museum for the next 25 years – with selected works returning to Greece periodically – and a possible return to Greece. extension of the loan for another 25 years. The exhibition is curated by Sean Hemingway, head of the Met's Greek and Roman Department, and Alexis Belis, one of its assistant curators.
Cycladic sculpture begins the great tradition of Greek sculpture that is seen as culminating in classical sculpture of the Greek Golden Age, centered in Athens, almost two millennia later. They are also an important origin of Western abstraction. Like African sculpture, they were a colonial plunder, housed before the turn of the century in the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris, where they influenced modern artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Amedeo Modigliani and Picasso.
The basics of the statuettes' postures and poses rarely change: their arms fold across the center of the torso, one above the other, just below the austere chest markings. These arms usually end in four short, shallow incisions, fingers that resemble brushes or tassels, but point to hands. The inverted triangles cut into the lower abdomen of the female figures resemble bikini bottoms. The curves usually come into play in the thigh and lower leg area.
The smooth, mask-like faces with their wedge-shaped noses sit atop long, tapering necks. Often their heads tilt back and they gaze up, meditatively, if not worshipfully, at the stars. In other cases, the faces look straight ahead and convey more contemporary nuances. For example, some are almost caricatures of women in wet bathing suits on the beach, shivering a bit, trying to get their children out of the water. I'm always amazed at how some characters can be reminiscent of New Yorker cartoons.
The purposes of the Cycladic figures remain largely mysterious. They were created at a time before written language, and the vast majority of them were dug up by people looking for something to sell. These searchers had little regard for the finer points of the archaeological discipline, such as when, where, with what and how deep (in the ground) the pieces were found. Some of them were discovered horizontally in graves and graves, as part of burial rituals. Others may have served as fertility idols or used in private shrines. They could also have been toys, which speaks to their enormous charm and accessibility. They are still among the most popular forms of ancient art.
Encountering Cycladic figurines for the first time can be an important rite of passage for today's art lover. The sight can teach you in an unforgettable moment that much of what we call modern is actually nothing new. But some of Cycladic modernity is relatively recent: the figures were not originally made of bare white marble; most were painted – hence the palettes. Faint blushes and tiny flakes of color can be found on some figures, and some plates show noticeable areas of light orange and red brushstrokes.
Seeing so many statues in such close proximity has its own kind of shock. We learn that this figurative formula accommodated an unusual range of proportions, emotions and body language, encouraging a kind of elemental connoisseurship. You can't help but notice and compare.
In the top two shelves of the first display case you can almost see the style coming into focus. Two headless figures have blocky bodies in the shape of a guitar or violin; another two have their arms tense at the hips and open small spaces at the elbows and one of them has breasts reminiscent of closely spaced stones. A figure with a round bottom is reminiscent of an inflatable toy bag with beautiful curved arms and hands that seem to be folded into her armpits.
Sometimes the folded arms resemble matchsticks, sometimes they are fleshier, even relaxed, almost naturalistic. The arms slide somewhat precariously up and down the torso, resembling cummerbunds in some pieces and dropped waists in others. The most extreme displacement of the arms is found in the last of the large, red-lined showcases: a figure with no torso, so the crossed arms are just below the chin, as if our idol is carrying small logs to light a fire to make.
The Stern Collection of Cycladic art transforms the Belfer Court into one of the Met's largest galleries. It is generally believed that the tradition beginning with the Cycladic sculptors reached its zenith many centuries later, when their Golden Age descendants finally arrived at an accurate, if idealized, treatment of the human form. I doubt I am the only one who thinks that this idealized realism was missing something and that the Greek sculptural tradition was never better than in the hands of its Cycladic ancestors.
Cycladic Art: The Leonard N. Stern Collection on Loan from the Hellenic Republic
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; (212) 535-7710; metmuseum.org.