MUSEUM
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World
We enjoyed lunch at the Members Dining Room and then an afternoon of Pergamon. The Pergamon exhibit was wonderful. On the way out of The Met we went through the Roman and Greek sections with their permanent exhibits. After seeing the best the Pergamon had to offer, the permanent artifacts in The Met held their own.
Before lunch we went to the roof of the building for a view of Central Park and the city.
"The exhibition's scale and scope are colossal"—The New Yorker
The conquests of Alexander the Great transformed the ancient world, making trade and cultural exchange possible across great distances. Alexander's retinue of court artists and extensive artistic patronage provided a model for his successors, the Hellenistic kings, who came to rule over much of his empire. For the first time in the United States, a major international loan exhibition will focus on the astonishing wealth, outstanding artistry, and technical achievements of the Hellenistic period—the three centuries between Alexander's death, in 323 B.C., and the establishment of the Roman Empire, in the first century B.C.
This exhibition will bring together some 264 artworks that were created through the patronage of the royal courts of the Hellenistic kingdoms, with an emphasis on the ancient city of Pergamon. Examples in diverse media—from marble, bronze, and terracotta sculptures to gold jewelry, vessels of glass and engraved gems, and precious metals and coins—reveal the enduring legacy of Hellenistic artists and their profound influence on Roman art. The ancient city of Pergamon (now known as Bergama, in present-day Turkey) was the capital of the Attalid Dynasty that ruled over large parts of Asia Minor.
The exhibition represents a historic collaboration between The Met and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, whose celebrated sculptures will comprise approximately one-third of the works on view. Numerous prominent museums in Greece, the Republic of Italy, other European countries, Morocco, Tunisia, and the United States will also be represented, often through objects that have never before left their museum collections.
Reaching Peak Greek at the Met Museum
Seen from on high, history is a grand sorting machine, loading on events, parsing populations, dividing time into nameable, datable piles. No one captures this process more grandly than the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And in
“Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World,” which opens on Monday, April 18, it is operating in truly epical form.
But the show also offers something less often encountered: history viewed at ground level, from inside. From that perspective, it’s about binding, not sorting, about single lives threaded together day by day. And it’s not about statistics, but about impressions, personal sensations, evoked by the sight of sculpted cloth falling over vulnerable flesh and the worry lines etched into the brow of a portrait head.Grand exhibitions and historical epochs alike often revolve around a magnetic personality. The Met show does too: King Alexander III of Macedon, better known as Alexander the Great. Although he was born far from Athens, he deeply identified with Greek Classical culture (having Aristotle as a personal tutor helped). At the same time, he moved beyond it with the creative confidence of a superstar.
Gorgeous and beauty-loving, culturally inquisitive and ravenous with ambition, Alexander embarked on what amounts to a world tour based on military conquest. Within a few years, he exerted political control over Greece, staked claims to sovereignty in Egypt and Persia, and reached the edges of India. He spread the Hellenic spirit as he went, but he also absorbed influences from the cultures around him, and shipped those influences home in the form of gold, jewels and precious objects.
The Greek Classical tradition was based on an aesthetic, which was also an ethic, of idealization, austerity and emotional restraint. It represented, at least to some degree, the effort of a peninsular culture to distance itself from, and elevate itself above, what it perceived as a barbaric outside world. Alexander plunged into that outside world and the cargo of exotic fabulousness he sent back from it altered the character of Classical art. By the time of his death in 323 B.C., at 32, a new, hybrid, internationalist art, now known as Hellenistic, had begun to coalesce, and would flourish for nearly three centuries.
Its history is the subject of the Met show and is, to say the least, a complex one. Alexander himself is everywhere in the opening gallery. A marble portrait head — possibly a Roman copy of an original bronze by his court artist, Lysippos — likely reflects what the ruler looked like: generically dishy with a designer haircut, Justin Bieber with gravitas. Two small bronzes suggest distinctive personas that Alexander, a born performer, wanted to market: in one he’s a buff hunk inviting worshipful admiration, in the other an armored equestrian, eyes wide, hair flying, sword-arm raised.
Objects around him give a sense of globalist environment he relished and promoted. Asian elephants lumber over silver coins and glazed plates. Persian courtiers circle a monumental vase. A shimmering myrtle wreath of hammered gold, each light-catching leaf, twig and flower exquisitely formed, seems to await the wealthy wearer who, wherever he lived and whatever he did, was a cosmopolitan member of Hellenistic society.A flair for the theatrical in this new art often expressed itself through exaggerated scale. In a gallery further along in the show, a marble statue of Athena, carved around 170 B.C., towers more than 13 feet tall. A two-foot-high head of Herakles is a fragment of an image that, when intact, must have projected muscle-bound immensity. Both sculptures were found at Pergamon in modern Turkey. The site was the capital of the Attalid dynasty, one of several post-Alexander kingdoms that fought among themselves and eventually faced off with Rome. It’s most famous, though, for its frieze-covered Great Altar, one of the most dramatic of surviving Hellenistic monuments.
Uncovered by German archaeologists at the end of the 19th century, the altar reliefs are now in Berlin at the
Pergamon Museum, which, currently closed for restoration, is the source for nearly a third of the 265 objects in the Met show. The sequence of high-relief panels that once lined the altar staircase depicts a mortal clash between the major Greek gods and a race of marauding giants. With its near-hysterical tone, the frieze is one of the great coups de théâtre of sculptural history and a lastingly influential one. It is also physically unmovable and couldn’t travel to New York. Two marvelous panels from a second, smaller frieze at the site did make the trip, though it is in a group of sculptures with no direct relationship to the altar that the life-and-death emotionalism of the Pergamon’s style comes through most sharply.
The group makes a startling first impression: of fallen bodies strewn across the ground, as if in the wake of an execution squad that has just moved on. A marble figure of an Amazon lies dead on a patch of earth, her face slack, her limp body thrown open. Nearby is the famous sculpture, on loan from the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, of “Dying Gaul,” an image of a nude man, felled by wounds, making one final, futile effort to rise.
These sculptures are not to meant to inspire pure pity. Their subjects — a mythically fierce female warrior, a real Celtic tribesman of a kind known to pillage Greek settlements — embodied cosmic forces seen as ever-threatening to the Hellenic civilization. They are outsiders, the enemy. But pathos is pathos: The dying man, head hanging down as if he were staring into the earth, is a pitiable sight. One of the grand beauties of Hellenistic art is its insistence on confusing our feelings, on replacing the Classical certainty with emotional complication.
The exhibition’s organizers — Carlos A. Picón and Seán Hemingway of the museum’s department of Greek and Roman art, leading a curatorial team of Ariel Herrmann, Kyriaki Karoglou, Christopher S. Lightfoot, Joan R. Mertens, Lillian Bartlett Stoner and Paul Zanker — have done well to emphasize this complex dynamic, one that gives Hellenistic art an exceptionally modern savor. But after the high Pergamon moment, there’s still a lot of ground to cover, and the show broadens out in a series of mini-surveys devoted to specific features of Hellenistic art: jewelry, glass production coins and intimate sculpture.
Each yields astonishments: onyx cameos with 10 layers of carving, glass bowls with inserted gold sheets and sculptures like the famed “Lo Spinario,” which turns the image of a child pulling a thorn from his foot into a tight Baroque tangle of coiled lines.
In some eras, art loses steam, repeats itself, sputters out. Hellenistic art seemed increasingly fueled by audacity. Decorative glassware goes psychedelic. Portraits turn slightly psychotic. The margin for oddity, always wide, grows wider, and is rife with jokes and surprises. Look at the back of a life-size carving of a sleeping hermaphrodite and you see the smooth planes of an Ingres odalisque, Classical Venus; look from the front and you see an erection.
This marble sculpture is a Roman copy of a Greek original, done sometime in the second century B.C. By then, global political balances had long since shifted. Rome, that power mower of an empire, had picked off the Hellenistic kingdoms one by one. The last Attalid monarch handed over the keys to Pergamon without being asked. With Cleopatra’s suicide in 30 B.C., Alexander’s one remaining direct successor left the scene. The new Roman emperor, Augustus, was a Classicist. He liked pure, was comfortable with composed. Unruly emotion in art was out.
Or was it? After centuries, the Hellenistic spirit had permanently changed art’s DNA. There could be no more Classicism, only Neo-Classicism and Post-Classicism. At the end of the show we find a bronze caldron, made somewhere in the Greek world during the Augustan years: its basic form is old-style but from its surface a little satyr pops out like a jack-in-the-box, snaps his fingers and smiles a gleaming silver inlaid smile. And at a late date we find one of the exhibition’s most moving portraits, the bronze head of a young African king named Juba II, on loan from the Archaeological Museum of Rabat in Morocco.
Juba’s father, the king of Numidia, had killed himself after losing a battle against Julius Caesar in Africa. The boy was brought to Rome as part of the victory spoils, paraded through the streets, then raised in the imperial household. Augustus eventually made him ruler of the African lands to which he was already the natural heir. Records tell us that Juba remained close to Augustus and lived a long life as a loyal Roman citizen. In the portrait, though, as intimate and unguarded as a snapshot, he’s still young, somewhere in his teens. He stares off as if lost in thought. His lip curls in something like anger. His face swells as if he were about to cry.
Mass Invasion of Greek Art Comes to the New York Met
The Pergamon Museum in Berlin houses one of the world’s leading collection of antiquities. But World War II badly damaged the building—bullet holes from large-caliber machine guns still pockmark it—and it’s finally in the early stages of a much-needed renovation. “The building was absolutely rotten,” said Dr. Andreas Scholl, the director of the Staatliche, the museum and research group that oversees the Pergamon. “The fire brigade kept threatening to close the entire place.” Most of the museum will stay closed, with the collection off limits to the public, until 2019.
For New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the rotting of the Pergamon gave it a rare opportunity to get its hands on the some of the most prized objects of the Hellenistic period. Next week, the Met will open one of the most ambitious exhibitions of Greek art in the museum’s history, “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World.” At the heart of the show are 73 pieces on loan from the Pergamon. “We lent very, very liberally,” said Dr. Scholl.
“This won’t happen again,” said Carlos A. Picón, the curator in charge of the Greek and Roman Art department at the Met. “Once the museum reopens, they won’t send one-third of its collection here.”
Dr. Scholl said the only piece he was unwilling to send was a famous marble head of the ruler Attalus. The piece is renowned for its tousled hair, and a curator was worried that the many curls were too fragile to withstand the rigors of travel. (Classical sculptors loved playing with the contrast between a figure’s smooth marble skin and the gnarly, robust beards of figures like Zeus.)
Thanks to the core provided by the Pergamon collection, “this is the largest and most comprehensive show” the museum’s Greek and Roman department has undertaken, said Mr. Picón. It’s also the department’s first major show since the Met completed its own renovation in 2007, a 15-year, $223 million project that Mr. Picón presided over.
Experts say “Pergamon” is the first major-museum show to focus on the art of the Hellenistic period, which dates from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to the suicide of Cleopatra in 30 B.C. The exhibition, which opens Monday and closes July 17, will not travel outside of New York.
Pergamon, in modern day Turkey, was one of the wealthiest cities of the ancient world, coming into its own as Athens was in decline and before the rise of Rome. “It is one of the top-five hit-parade ancient cities,” said Mr. Picón.
For the past six years, Mr. Picón and his staff have made dozens of trips to nearly 50 museums in 12 countries, pulling together loans for the blockbuster show.
One of the most dramatic pieces they were able to borrow is an Athena statue that weighs over three tons. It was shipped in three sections from the Pergamon in Berlin and carefully reassembled in the Met galleries.
The Hellenistic period is a challenging time for art historians. It is not marked by a single school of artistic development, and artists worked in many styles with many materials. So instead of having a thematic show, the Met focused on what the museum trade calls “an objects show.”
The galleries are filled with exquisite ancient glass, opulent jewelry, engraved cameos, mosaics, lifelike bronze sculptures and dramatic marble statues. Many have never traveled to the U.S. before. “I can’t claim that every single object is the best of its type, because I would be boasting,” said Mr. Picón, but “this is the top 1% of what has survived in terms of quality.”
Mr. Picón—who speaks five languages and has a reading knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin—did his undergraduate work at Haverford and Bryn Mawr colleges and got his Ph.D. from Oxford University. He grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and when he announced his plan to become an art historian, specializing in Greek art, his businessman father, speaking on behalf of parents around the world, was taken aback by the impracticality of the profession. Mr. Picón recalls that his father then added, “You could at least have done pre-Columbian art.”
Touring the Met galleries last week as the Met installers put the finishing touches on the show, Mr. Picón was in a state of high excitement. Pausing before a marble Alexander in the first room of the exhibition, he declared it “the most beautiful Alexander, at the height of his youth.” A nearby small bronze of Hercules was “the best.”
In a nearby gallery he paused before “a spectacular” piece of ancient glass. “You would walk a mile to see something like this,” Mr. Picón said. Even the damaged pieces were perfect. Admiring a marble head that was split in half, he said, “If you had to break it, you couldn’t break it better!” Stopping before a glass plate borrowed from the British Museum, the curator exclaimed, “It’s a glass of staggering quality—one of the best pieces in the world.”
He delights in the tiny details, pointing out an Eros admiring himself in the mirror on a tiny plaster cast.
Mr. Picón is mischievous as well. One prone statue is displayed so that its shapely backside greets the approaching viewer. “You get a nice surprise when you walk around,” he said. The piece turns out to be a hermaphrodite. One of the workers installing the statue, he said, “went white” after discovering the statue’s dual nature.
Hermes + Aphrodite = Hermaphrodite.
A creature (person) with breast and a penis.
A boxer's hand with protection for his knuckles.
