Crude, then modern
For a long time nobody found these figures modern. Until the middle of the 20th century, the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens recalls, they were described as “crude”, “coarse” and “primitive”, the opposite of a Greek statue. Taste turned at the end of the 19th century and above all in the early 20th, when sculptors began to look for ways of showing the body that owed nothing to classical realism. The marbles were the same; the taste of the people looking at them had moved.
What those eyes saw was the type that archaeologists call canonical, made on the islands between about 2700 and 2300 BCE: a naked woman with the arms folded, the left forearm always over the right, the head tilted back, a long nose and no other feature on the face. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that figures of the Spedos variety are so regular in proportion that they seem to have been laid out with a compass.
Who was looking?
The Museum of Cycladic Art names a long list. Constantin Brancusi‘s The Beginning of the World (about 1920) was inspired, according to Henry Moore, by a large Cycladic head in the Louvre. Amedeo Modigliani‘s Woman’s Head of 1912 has the immobile, expressionless face of the ancient heads that attracted him. Alberto Giacometti is considered deeply influenced by the rigid, ceremonial structure of Cycladic figures, and Moore’s own figures were, in the museum’s words, directly influenced by Cycladic art. Barbara Hepworth went one step further and used colour for details, as the Cycladic sculptors had done.
So the resemblance runs in a loop: the figures look modern to us partly because modern sculptors studied them, and we now see them through their work.
The paint that has gone
A Cycladic figure did not leave the workshop white. According to the Met, scientific analysis has found mineral pigments on the marble: blue made from azurite, red from iron ores or cinnabar. With them the painters drew eyes, hair, necklaces and patterns on the cheeks and body. A head from Amorgos in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens keeps red marks on its cheeks. Put the paint back and the “pure form” admired by the modernists becomes a painted face, with eyes and hair.
Is it a “plank idol”? No
Cycladic figures are often called “plank idols”, but the name belongs to another island. “Plank-shaped figurines” is what museums call the flat clay figures of Cyprus, such as one in the Met made around 2000-1800 BCE, at the turn of the Early and Middle Cypriot periods. They are fired clay covered with incised patterns, and several centuries later than the classic Cycladic marbles. A Cycladic figure is carved from marble, a Cypriot one modelled in clay. For the flat early Cycladic form, the Museum of Cycladic Art uses another name: “violin-shaped”.
Were they modern art before modern art?
No, and the evidence is in the ground. Most figures that archaeologists have excavated come from graves, and some from settlements, so the Museum of Cycladic Art concludes that their purpose was probably varied. No written source explains them. Like the other cultures of the Bronze Age Aegean, they used images for the dead and the gods, with meanings we can only reconstruct from where the objects lay.
Modern taste did leave one real mark on the figures, though. When collectors began to pay high prices, looters emptied the island villages and cemeteries, and most figures in museums today have no known findspot. Forgers followed. The archaeologist David Gill has written that some of the “masters” defined by scholars from groups of figures without secure findspots turned out to be modern workshops.
Where to see it
The Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, founded in 1986 around the Goulandris collection, is built around Cycladic marbles of the third millennium BCE. The National Archaeological Museum in Athens has the figures from excavated graves, including the largest female statue found so far. In New York, the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art includes both Cycladic figures and Cypriot plank figures. Check opening times with each museum before you go.
Sources
- Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, “From Cycladic culture to modern art”, “Are they ancient or modern art?” and “The human form in Cycladic art”.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Early Cycladic Art and Culture”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (2004); collection records 68.148 and 74.51.1534.
- Foundation of the Hellenic World, caption of the head NAMA 3909.
- D. W. J. Gill, “Why the destruction of the archaeological record matters”, University of Cambridge, Aegean Archaeology Group; D. W. J. Gill and C. Chippindale, American Journal of Archaeology 97.4 (1993).
- E. Hendrix, “Painted Ladies of the Early Bronze Age”, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 55 (1997-98).
