A recently published review essay in Bryn Mawr Classical Review was fresh in my mind when I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last week. In “Artwashing the Cyclades,” David Gill highlights several problems with the ongoing exhibit called “Cycladic Art.” In brief: too many of the objects in the collection lack a secure archaeological provenance; that is, we have no idea when or where they were found in modern times. Some of them, Gill points out, may be modern fakes—there is no way to tell. And the arrangement by which a collector, Leonard Stern, acquired the objects and donated them to the Greek government, which then lent them to the Metropolitan for at least fifty years, seems a little dodgy. It skirts the now widely accepted principle that objects taken from the soil of a country after 1970 or so should be returned to that country.
With all this in mind, I stopped by Gallery 151 in the Greek and Roman wing to see what the fuss was about. The objects in the Stern Collection (161 of them, some in an upstairs gallery that I didn’t visit) stand out against a red background. Most of them are the familiar female-with-folded-arms, but there are other types as well.
As I moved along, looking and reading labels, questions emerged: What were these? Why were they made? What purpose did they originally serve? All these questions would be easier to answer, and even to ask, if we knew where the sculptures came from. Were they found in tombs? In houses? In temples or other non-domestic contexts? About this Gill is right. The lack of secure archaeological provenance deprives us of information that seems essential for interpreting any object in the collection. We don’t know, and will never know, what these objects mean to history.
For Gill, this hermeneutic obstacle is enough to make the entire collection valueless, at least to classical archaeologists and historians. But as I looked at the exhibit, I wondered whether looking at these sculptures as data points in a story about Bronze Age culture is the only way to see them. The Met’s labels certainly suggest another way. “Over thousands of years,” one declares, “sculptors in the Cyclades developed various manners of expressing the human body.” Neolithic figures appear both naturalistically and “in abstract form.” This is the language of art, not archaeology.
In the absence of archaeological context or provenance, even art history is impossible. All that remains to a visitor gazing at the enigmatic figures on their red background is an aesthetic response. In seeing the Cycladic figures in this way, as arrangements of form and volume outside of time and history, we may be coming closer to the way in which our Neoclassical prececessors looked at the Apollo Belvedere or Medici Venus; if so, then Gallery 151, at the beginning of the Met’s Greek and Roman collection, is the right place for them.
~Lee T. Pearcy
July 15, 2025
Further reading:
Marlowe E. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Provenance: A Response to Chippindale and Gill.” International Journal of Cultural Property. 2016;23(3):217-236. doi:10.1017/S0940739116000175
Chippindale, C., and Gill, D. W. J.. 2000. “Material Consequences of Contemporary Classical Collecting.” American Journal of Archaeology 104: 463–511. Talks about San Antonio collection—should I tell UT anecdote?