New York has added another jewel to its glittering cultural crown, and it takes up little more than a medium-sized wall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
You will find the wall in Belfer Court, the first space on the right as you enter the Greek and Roman Gallery from the Great Hall. Walk too fast and you might miss it. Slow down and prepare to be amazed by the largest display of ancient sculpture from the Greek islands known as the Cyclades ever seen in New York. It has a title “Cycladic Art: The Leonard N. Stern Collection on Loan from the Hellenic Republic.”
Five large display cases, usually three pairs of shelves each, line the wall, their red felt interiors highlighting the gleaming white chipped marble of the 120 figures and vases. The shelves are dominated by about 70 small, lively female figurines or idols, averaging about 16 inches in height and with one rare piece reaching just over four feet. These are the glories of Cycladic art, distinguished by their stylized figures, folded hands and white faces—except for small wedge-shaped noses—as well as their restrained sensuality and resonant stillness. They are like tuning forks.
The display cases also contain some relatively large free-standing, disembodied heads that look like miniature versions of the Easter Island giant heads. And there are lots of vessels: vases, bowls, plates and a few palettes, including two that are narrow, thin and slightly curved and appear to have been cut from a single leek leaf. Five additional pieces occupy five individual display cases nearby, and another 36 pieces can be viewed in a display case in the Greek and Roman Studies collection on the mezzanine, overlooking Leon Levy and Shelby White Court.
All 161 works were made 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 referred to as Proto-Cycladic I and II. The figures are especially among the greatest achievements of mankind, serious and cool, but immediately familiar and indeed essentially realistic, like skeletons. They look like they might fold up, like designer dummies.
They were collected starting in the early 1980s by Leonard N. Stern, CEO of Hartz Mountain Industries, who as a teenager was enthralled by the Cycladic art at the Met. Stern gave his collection to Greece, and in an agreement made between himself, the Met and the Greek government, most of them will remain at the museum for the next 25 years—with select works periodically returning to Greece—and a possible 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 his assistant curators.
Cycladic sculpture begins the great tradition of Greek sculpture that is considered to culminate in the Classical sculpture of the Greek Golden Age, centered in Athens, nearly two millennia later. They are also an important origin of Western abstraction. Like African sculpture, it was colonial plunder, imposed before the turn of the 20th century at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris, where it influenced contemporary artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Amedeo Modigliani and Picasso.
The basic elements of the postures and postures of the figurines rarely change: Their hands are folded in the middle of the torso, one above the other, just below the stern indications of the chest. These arms usually end in four short, shallow notches, fingers that look like brushes or tassels, but point to hands. The inverted triangles drawn on the lower abdomen of the female figures resemble bikini bottoms. Curves usually come into play in the thigh and lower leg area.
Smooth mask-like faces with their wedge-shaped noses sit atop long necks. Often their heads are tilted back, looking up, meditatively if not adoringly, at the stars. In other cases, the faces look straight ahead and convey more modern nuances. For example, some can be almost caricatures of women in wet bathing suits at the beach, shaking a little, trying to get their children out of the water. I’m always amazed how some figures can bring New Yorker cartoons to mind.
The purposes of the Cycladic figures remain largely mysterious. They were made in a time before the written word, and the vast majority were dug up by people looking for something to sell. These researchers had little regard for the niceties of the archaeological discipline, such as when, where, with what, and how deep (into the ground) the pieces were found. Some of them were discovered placed horizontally in graves and tombs, part of burial rituals. Others may have served as fertility idols or been used in private sanctuaries. They might as well have been toys, which speaks to their immense appeal and accessibility. They remain 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-minded. The spectacle can teach you in an unforgettable moment that much of what we call fashionable is really nothing new. But some Cycladic modernity is relatively recent: The forms were not originally bare white marble. most were painted — hence the palettes. Faint blushes and tiny flakes of color can be found on some of the figures, and there are obvious areas of light orange and red highlights on some of the plates.
Seeing so many figurines 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 knowledge. You can’t help but notice and compare.
On the top two shelves of the first showcase you can almost see the style come into focus. Two headless figures have guitar or violin shaped bodies. two others have their hands bent at the hips, opening small gaps at the elbows and one of them has chests suggestive of closely spaced bricks. A rotund figure suggests a bouncy toy bag with wonderfully curved arms and hands that appear folded in her armpits.
Sometimes the folded hands look like matchsticks, sometimes they are fleshier, even loose, almost naturalistic. The arms slide up and down the torso somewhat precariously, looking like spines in some pieces and a dropped waist in others. The most extreme displacement of the hands is found in the last of the large red-lined panes: a torsoless figure, so the folded hands are just below the chin, as if our idol is carrying small logs to build a fire.
The Stern Collection of Cycladic Art transforms Belfer Court into one of the Met’s largest galleries. The tradition that begins with the Cycladic sculptors is generally considered to reach its zenith many centuries later, when their Golden Age descendants finally arrived at an accurate if idealized treatment of the human form. I doubt if I am alone in thinking that something was missing from this idealized realism and that the sculptural tradition of Greece was never better than 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.