11.1.24 — An Ode Without an Urn
Forget John Keats, at least for a moment. Spare yourself a recital of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The Met looks back far earlier, to the origins of Western civilization in Cycladic art. As far as I know, all its creators were men, and their subjects were female, but this is not the male point of view that you may expect from Greek art. There are no warriors or their rewards, no earthly or unearthly grace. 
There is only the wish to journey together, to trade, and to survive.
Before a Grecian urn, hundreds or even thousands of years before, there was art, but not exactly Greek art. Before the great cities of Greek tragedies and Homeric myths, before there was much so much as a written language to describe them, culture flourished in a broad cluster of islands in the Aegean Sea, about midway between the mainland to the west and present-day Turkey. It had to be seagoing, for its livelihood, and it had to have a tough existence. Much of its art was created to bury with someone’s remains. Now the Met does its best to bring Cycladic art back to life, but it, too, has to move on fast. It has to cover twenty-five hundred years and four civilizations.
The Met announced new galleries for Cycladic art, opening January 25, but did not make a fuss over the matter. There are no signs directing visitors to them, although there is more than enough verbiage inside. In practice, they come down to a single room in the galleries for Greek art, although with space for more than a hundred fifty works. You may rush right past on your way between the museum’s great hall and its southern wing. Two works appear just outside, maybe just enough to arouse your curiosity. How can they look so unlike a hero, a helmet, or a Grecian urn?
Whatever it is, it has its own appeal quite apart from its history. The standing nudes by the entrance, with no need for a pedestal, look downright modern. They influenced Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, and Amedeo Modigliani, who felt a kinship with their very simplicity—their gentle curves, frontal poses, and approach to abstraction. One might mistake their pure white marble, abundant in the region, for limestone. Smaller figures within the galleries, almost like dolls, take the shape of violins, although violins did not yet exist either. Pablo Picasso and Cubism, with all their instruments and music, would have approved.
The Met has rehung it all to acknowledge Leonard N. Stern, the collector who contributed it—and to acknowledge a settlement reached with Greece, which will own the work but leave it on loan to New York. It is also a boast and a correction. Just when Mesopotamian women were giving voice to the early Bronze age, others were active, too, and I work this together with my earlier report on just that as a longer review and my latest upload. I did not know much about the civilizations or the art, although I can take comfort that, when it comes down to it, no one else does either. Written records did not exist, and technical analysis of old marble cannot deliver authenticity or anywhere exact dates. Paint would have covered its seeming brightness, and chemical analysis can identify the pigments, in more colors than a Grecian urn.
The time line is at least as fascinating as the work. It begins before 3000 B.C.E., about as old a look at human creation as there is. It is not yet the Iron Age, so the carving of marble (with glass, the surfaces refined with emery and pumice) is quite a feat. The carvings have almost childlike features, with a recurring motif of crossed arms, and jugs have distinguishing collars and handles, but their purpose is less clear. The figures are women, suggesting hopes for fertility for a people that knew endless deaths. Yet they are barely female—their hips and breasts as flat as, well, a violin.
The room turns to the Minoan civilization in Crete, after roughly 2000 B.C.E., and then to Myceneans on the mainland, after 1000 B.C.E.. More familiar Greek art, with kraters, or (sure enough) vases in red against black or vice versa, did not begin until around 700 B.C.E., and the Green alphabet emerged not long before. Minoan and Mycenean culture also runs to more useful and decorative art, like pins for clothing and seals, with real or imagined animals. The Greeks changed everything with their focus on youths and men, as warriors and most often in groups, in procession. Their patterns are less bold and their figures more sketchy than Cycladic art, and they cannot honor the dead one by one, but they could be more broadly imagined as ancestors. What to make of the new masculine values, even in light of Homer, is a fascinating question in itself.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.