The Greek Miracle: Critical Reaction

The Greek Miracle attracted negative critical attention. The one positive thing all the

reviewers agreed on was how well presented the exhibition was, as well as the spectacular quality of the art works on display. Recurring words such as awe, contemplative, expressiveness and ‘text book example’ were used to describe the sculptures in the exhibition. Jerry Theodorou in Minerva gave the exhibition a glowing review and commented that in the plethora of events taking place to commemorate 2,500 years of democracy The Greek Miracle was the ‘most visually impressive’. Theodorou concentrates on listing and describing the importance of the key works in the exhibition, such as the Kritios Boy, the bronze statue of Zeus and the Hegeso stele. Another positive review was by Paul Richard in The Washington Post, who positioned the sculpture historically in the context of Egyptian art as well as events in Greece. The review concentrated on art works, their mimesis and the feelings they inspired:

A new idea of beauty was born among these objects. Man-centered, serene, it fused timelessness and movement, poignancy and aplomb. It’s a beauty that’s endured the rise and fall of Rome, the depths of the Dark Ages and the camera as well, and still governs our ideas of bodily perfection. To walk among these fragments, these bronzes and these marbles, is to see the ancient gods of Greece – tall, gray-eyed Athena, mighty bearded Herakles – leaving their transcendent world and entering our on. It’s like the moment in the myth when Pygmalion’s Galatea first begins to breathe. In the first rooms of this exhibit, Apollo comes alive.

When the exhibition opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Economist reviewed it and referred to the Greek ‘masterpieces’, very much stressing the aesthetics of the classical ideal embodied in the show. The reviewer had qualms about the ‘socio-political rot’ driving the exhibition but believed that the exhibition illustrated the aestheticism of the Greeks:

even though it is fashionable now to demean such masterpieces of western art as elitist.

Two longer reviews of Met Show for two more specific arts publications (The New Criterion and Art in America) by Beryl Barr-Sharrar engage more critically with the material and the exhibition’s position within a broader art historical framework. Barr-Sharrar’s article for Art in America begins with Winckelmann and his belief that sculpture made at the height of classical Greece embodied the noble values of the Greeks in the eighteenth century, and then continues with a reference to the morphological evolution of sculpture as described by Brunilde Ridgway in the 1970s and 80s. Barr-Sharrar considers how the transition of the late archaic kouros evolves into the early classical and more naturalistic Kritios Boy in the exhibition and whether the idealisation of beauty was related to ‘high spiritual and mental qualities’. She puts these representational changes in the context of Polykleitos and his Kanon for sculpture, which is reflected in the exhibition in the bronze figurines. In Barr-Sharrar’s review for The New Criterion, she draws attention to the differing perceptions of gender that are represented in the sculpture on display and points out that the Kritios Boy is ‘erotically suggestive’. Neither gender nor the erotics of sculptural representation were referenced in the exhibition. Barr-Sharrar stresses that ‘we are all heirs of Wincklemann’ and poaintsout there is no acknowledgement that the sculptures were coloured or the religious dimension of the demand for art in classical Greece and anthropological readings of the ancient Greek world.

Gary Wills in The New York Review of Books drew attention to the original use of colour on sculpture and the dynamics of art commissions and Greek religion. Wills stresses the superstitious belief system of the ancient Greeks, arguing that a herm as an example of this should have been included in the exhibition. He compares The Greek Miracle with an exhibition on indigenous American art that is on show simultaneously in the Art Institute of Chicago (The Ancient Americas: Art from Sacred Landscapes), which explores more vividly the ceremony and function of art:

One gets closer to the ancient Greeks – and therefore to their art – by studying primitive cultures than by remasticating for the thousandth time the ambrosial reflections of J. J. Winckelmann.

Wills’ main issue, however, was with the equation that Democracy equals ideality equals humanism equals rationalism equals naturalism equals individualism and equals Athens, as well as the Athenocentrism of this equation. The exhibition, displayed a significant amount of objects from sites external to Athens and beyond Athenian control. Wills pointed out that there was more than democracy taking place in Athens and the wealth in Athens was due to its empire and not least to its use of slaves in the silver mines, but that these issues were not referred to even when a slave is depicted on the Hegeso grave stele. Wills also commented on the ‘nervousness’ of the Greeks in lending the antiquities and the sponsorship by a tobacco company Philip Morris Companies Inc as completing “the impurities necessary to pull off this Greek miracle. Despite all that it is miraculous.”

Theodorou in Minerva also mentioned the ‘nervousness’ of Greek archaeologists in loaning the sculptures for an international exhibition and the conservation concerns that were raised. There were more than conservation concerns driving Greek protests about the loan – though these were important. Concerns related to nationalist and leftwing politics were also raised about this loan of antiquities to an overseas exhibition. Eleana Yalouri describes the attitude to the antiquities in Greece as being ‘part of the national body’ and that members of the Archaeological Society of Athens were divided over the decision to send antiquities to The Greek Miracle exhibition. The pro-government supporters argued that the antiquities acted as ‘global ambassadors’ for Greece, while those in opposition to the loans, who were generally on the left politically, considered that the national meaning of the sculptures was in danger of erosion and that through travel physical harm could come to the antiquities themselves. This issue was picked up by Michael Kimmelmann in his review for The New York Times, which commented that the Greeks were ‘understandably concerned about risking through travel some of the central monuments of Western civilisation on the basis of such an intellectually meagre excuse’.

The New York Times ran two reviews, one after the opening of each exhibition in Washington DC and New York. Each of these reviews was highly negative about the political agenda explicit and implicit in the exhibition, but complimentary about the display of the sculptures. In an article headed ‘Sublime Sculptures in a Dubious Setting’, Michael Kimmelman reviewed the DC exhibition as an opportunity to see ‘masterworks’ of Greek art and that if people concentrate on the art they will enjoy the show. However, Kimmelman had problems with the lack of up to date contemporary scholarship on Greek art or ancient Athens in the exhibition and, as he saw it, poor historical integrity. (This was an issue highlighted about the catalogue in otherwise positive reviews of The Greek Miracle, for example Paul Richard in The Washington Post described it as ‘long on generalities and short on focused scholarship’). His review finishes with a condemnatory broadside about the prevailing emphasis on ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions in American museums:

Intellectually unambitious masterwork exhibitions like this are about power as much as anything else, about the power of the National Gallery and the Metropolitan to act like big game trophy hunters, mounting on their walls the bounty of over nations. Audiences have become accustomed in the television age to having everything made easily available. And museums are so loathe to sully their triumphs by raising the possibility that a plane or truck carrying one of these priceless objects might actually get into an accident that even to bring up the issue of risk and responsibility, as archaeologists have done in this case, sounds alarmist.

Unspoken in Kimmelman’s review is the politicising of the sculptures within an equation that equates ancient Athenian democracy and concepts of freedom with modern democracy (specifically American democracy) and liberty, though clearly his attack on the incoherence of the narrative driving the exhibition references this.

Barr-Sharrar commented that the exhibition at the Met in New York focused on the aesthetic quality of the sculptures, ‘leaving politics behind in DC’. The exhibition in New York was considered to be less politicised, which raises a number of questions. Was this due to the enlarged exhibition at the Met? Where there new panels around the exhibition when it changed location? Or was it simply because it was no longer in the political centre of America? Although it is difficult to gauge, the answer is probably a combination of all three. In the review of the enlarged exhibition at the Metropolitan in The New York Times, Holland Cotter stressed the visually enthralling power of art works and the ‘international commodity exchange’, but his main issue was with the lack of ‘an original thought in its handsome head’:

The world renowned objects have been gathered not in the interest of new scholarship nor in an attempt to see with fresh eyes the complex society that produced them, but as a kind of travel brochure, replete with a jingoistic promotional title meant to perpetuate clichés about art and its meaning that recent art history has been trying to dislodge.

However, the most damning review of The Greek Miracle, in New York or DC, was by renowned art historian and critic Robert Hughes in Time magazine. Hughes commented on the loans from Greece and the dangers of the objects’ travel to an exhibition ‘with an utter shallowness of argument about their social and ritual meanings’ and ‘practically no scholarly value’. Hughes, like the other reviewers, thought the show should not be missed by those who have not seen this art before but is dismissive about the ties between sculpture and democracy – pointing out that women and slaves did not have any political freedom – and terms it ‘political PR’. Hughes considers The Greek Miracle to be an uncritical appreciation of Greek art in the manner of Winckelmann and quotes a poem (Autumn Journal) written by Louis MacNeice in the 1930s to illustrate how this stereotypical vision of Greece has been challenged. MacNeice’s poem on ‘the crooks’ of Greece finishes with:

and lastly / I think of the slaves

Hughes pointed out that there is no mention of the role of slaves or slavery in the exhibition, ‘as important an institution for Periclean Greece as for America’s antebellum South’, in the exhibition. With this comparison, Hughes implies that there was also a lack of mention of the role of slavery in America’s celebration of ‘two hundred years’ of democracy. Hughes’ main problem, as with other reviewers, was that there was no reference to the ritual role of religious ‘votives’ or to the superstitious belief system that lay behind the construction of art works and temples. The ‘neoclassical’ vision of the show did not recognise the startling colour of the sculptures or the frightening imagery of classical Greek art:

And far from rising above anxiety, classical Greek art polluted with horrors: snakes, monsters, decapitated Gorgons, all designed to ward off the terrors of the spirit world. One sometimes wonders if ancient Greece, more lurid than white, so obsessed with blood feud and inexpungible guilt, wasn’t closer to modern Bosnia than to the bright world of Winckelmann. But you cannot put that kind of ‘classicism’ in a museum, or relate it to democracy.

The Greek Miracle took place during a year full of conferences and scholarly meetings discussing democracy, ancient and modern, and in fact a symposium was held as part of the exhibition. The only immediate and direct academic response to The Greek Miracle is in the remarks made by Ian Morris and Karl Raaflaub in a volume of papers and responses from a conference at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC in September 1993. Morris and Raaflaub contended that The Greek Miracle had been taken over by the politicians at a time when ‘democracy was on every one’s mind’. They pointed out that the historical stories behind The Greek Miracle were not as simple as represented in the exhibition, that there was no reference to Athenian imperialism, nor to the fact that democracy was hated by many (particularly in Greek city states outside of Athens) and also dared to ask ‘how Greek was Athens?’

Conclusion

The politically bipartisan views expressed in the exhibition, the unproblematic representation of Athenian democracy as an ideal and the overtones of Greek nationalism arguably served to estrange academics in the areas of ancient history and classical archaeology from The Greek Miracle. Coupled with this was the exhibition’s remoteness from contemporary scholarship. Even if the exhibition’s prime purpose was to simply to display art works from Greece, it seems clear from the reviews that analysis of the role of colour on sculpture and the function of art in religious cults and ceremonies did not play a part in the interpretation of the objects.

Many reviewers were critical of the exhibition and even hostile to it. There are a number of reasons for this, including the political dimension and potential partisan ‘party politics’ behind the reviews. The New York Times was (then - 2008) known for being ‘liberal’ and, on the whole, a Democrat supporting paper. It is likely that it and its reviewers would be hostile to an exhibition endorsed by the incumbent Republican President George Bush, particularly at time of a general election when the economy is in a recession. There were also concerns about the expression of Greek nationalism while a vicious and ethically divisive war was tearing Greece’s Balkan neighbour Yugoslavia apart. Hughes’ reference to Bosnia draws attention to the atrocities of the Serbian army and government.

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