Art Details: 6 to 10

 

Image Credits: All images taken by bklynbiblio/Roberto C. Ferrari. Top to bottom:

1. Dying soldier from east pediment, Temple of Aegina, Greece, late 5th century BCE, marble, Glyptothek, Munich.
2. Frederic, Lord Leighton, The Music Lesson, 1877, oil on canvas, Guildhall Art Gallery, London.
3. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Moorish Bath, 1870, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
4. Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873-74, oil on canvas, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.
5. Botticelli, Madonna of the Magnificat, late 15th century, oil on canvas, Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

Gibson the Designer

One of the articles I have been working on for the past few months has now been published in electronic format. Although e-journals still have not garnered the respectability of print journals, particularly in academia, one of their advantages is that the process of writing to publication is much faster than in the traditional print world. (Indeed, another essay I started on back in 2010 still has yet to be released in print format!) A second advantage, in this particular case, is that the article is freely available to the public and is part of the open-access trend in academia, where few ever receive payment or compensation for their scholarly work. bklynbiblio readers will recall my last post about my article in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, another free, open-access e-journal. This latest article is entitled "John Gibson, Designer: Sculpture and Reproductive Media in the Nineteenth Century" (available here for free) and it has just been published in the December issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Art Historiography. At 50 pages with 138 footnotes, clearly there was much to say; fortunately, e-journals make it easier to publish lengthier essays. This essay discusses the sculptor John Gibson (about whom I have blogged before) by re-contextualizing his body of work from the perspective of reproduction--the making and dissemination of multiples rather than single, unique works of art. In the nineteenth century, it was more common for artists to make copies and repetitions of works (read the article to discover the difference between copies and repetitions) than it is today, although sculpture by its very nature, as numerous scholars have noted, is a reproductive media and needs to be studied as a multiple, taking into consideration every part of the work in various media. Taking this premise further, I demonstrate in the essay how Gibson emphasized his role as a designer by the mid-1800s, enabling his drawings (but conceptually also his ideas) to be reproduced by others in the forms of porcelain statuary, cameos, and engravings. In emphasizing his role as a designer over that of a sculptor (i.e. a maker just of works in stone), Gibson was able to disseminate his subjects to a wider audience with different socio-economic backgrounds, reinforcing his role as one of the most famous sculptors of the nineteenth century.

Back in February 2013 I had written up MWA XII: Gibson's Cupid. Since then, I have made more discoveries about his sculpture Cupid Disguised as a Shepherd Boy, and these are included in the article as a compendium. This statue was commissioned in marble at least 9 times, making it one of the most popular (quantitatively) of all nineteenth-century sculptures. The image you see above, however, is but one example of a work designed by Gibson but made by someone else, in this case the cameo maker Tommaso Saulini. This shell cameo was produced after 1850 and depicts Gibson's design of Phaeton Driving the Horses of the Sun, the original drawing for which is in the Royal Collection, signed and dated 1850. He also made a marble relief sculpture with the same design for Earl Fitzwilliam, and an engraving was made of this design in 1851. A copy of this cameo was exhibited in London at Saulini's booth at the International Exhibition of 1862, for which the cameo maker won a medal. The subject tells the story of Phaeton, the son of Apollo, the sun god, who asked permission to guide the chariot of the sun across the heavens. Apollo feared for the boy's safety and begged him not to do this, but Phaeton insisted. He did his best to control the horses, but inevitably the boy was unable to handle the reins, and he plummeted from the heavens to his death on earth. For the ancient Greeks this myth taught a lesson about obedience and hubris. For Gibson, the story provided him with an opportunity to depict a dynamic scene and spread the idealism of Greek art to his contemporaries, not through a large sculpture but through a work of art that would have been worn by women in their diadems or comb mounts.

(Image: Phaeton Driving the Horses of the Sun, carved by Tommaso Saulini after design by John Gibson, after 1850, shell cameo, approx. 2 x 4 in., London: British Museum)

Munich-bound

Tomorrow I depart for Munich on a work-related trip associated with the afore-blogged story about Florine Stettheimer, for the exhibition at the Lenbachhaus. This summer got away from me and I never had a chance to blog about my trip with AA to Chicago, or even my recent get-away weekend to Maine. But hopefully I will have a chance to write about Munich. I am actually intrigued to be going here. The sculptor John Gibson visited Munich rather frequently from the 1840s on, and always seemed to enjoy it. Much of the city was destroyed during World War II, so I have been told that the architecture today has a tendency to look as if "something isn't right," to quote my former dissertation adviser PM (who kindly loaned me a little travel guide on the city). This will be a week filled with work-related tasks, but I am hopeful I will get to see many of the important art museums and collections there, most notably the Glyptothek (seen above), which houses some of the more important sculptures from ancient Greece and Rome. It's also Oktoberfest, so I suspect it will be important to drink some beer...to fit in with the locals, of course...

Review: Modernity of Ancient Sculpture

This book review that I wrote last year, transcribed below, was scheduled to be published in the final 2013 issue of Art Libraries Journal (vol. 38, no. 4), but for some reason I still haven't seen a copy of the journal issue (print copy lost in the mail? electronic not released yet?). In any case, word has it that it was actually published in that issue, so I thought I would share what I submitted here as well.

***************************************

The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso by Elizabeth Prettejohn (London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012).

Reviewed by Roberto C. Ferrari, Columbia University

The long-standing ‘march-to-modernism’ approach seen in art history textbooks has begun to break down due to new approaches and interpretations that appreciate the art of the past for its own value and contribution to its own time period. Postmodernist discourse began to disrupt this ideology decades ago, but there has been a persistent block among modernists that in order to be ‘modern’ one had to overthrow the dominant art form of the past: classicism. That is, to be avant-garde one had to be anti-academic/anti-classical. In art museums, only very recently have exhibitions begun to challenge this notion. Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy,and Germany, 1918-1936 at the Guggenheim (2010-11), and Modern Antiquity: Picasso, de Chirico,Léger, and Picabia in the Presence of the Antique at the Getty (2011-12), are just two examples of such shows that offered refreshing views of twentieth-century art as embracing classicism as part of modernism. Elizabeth Prettejohn’s latest book The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso thus is timely in its publication. She cites these catalogs in her text, but she expands upon them in other ways, ultimately proposing that modernism and classicism are inextricably linked.

Focusing on the period 1750-1950, Prettejohn argues that the histories of antiquity and modernism not only were written parallel to one another during this period of time, but they also share methodologies and artistry. The basis for her study is ancient Greek sculpture, specifically its changing perception and appreciation over time: Roman copies (misidentified by Johann Joachim Winckelmann as Greek works); the Elgin Marbles; the Venus de’ Milo; Praxiteles’ Dionysus with the Infant Bacchus; and Archaic-style works pre-dating all of these. She discusses the discovery of these works and their reception by critics and artists. Readers expecting a iconographic analysis of the Apollo Belvedere and Aphrodite of Knidos repurposed in modern art, however, may be disappointed in this book. Unlike the aforementioned exhibition catalogs, Prettejohn’s primary interest is reception theory, not iconology. She does bring in examples of ways artists visually repurposed ancient sculptural imagery in their art, but her underlying interest is exploring why artists were aware of these classical works at a specific time and how their consideration of these works defined modern taste in art. Prettejohn argues that reception theory is critical to understanding the intersection between ancient and modern art, and in fact encourages the reader to see ancient sculptures themselves as modern because they first appeared (i.e. were excavated) during the formation of modernity.

As a specialist in nineteenth-century art, particularly of Britain (having published books and essays on Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Movement artists and critics), Prettejohn in this text seems most comfortable when writing about figures such as Frederic Leighton and Walter Pater, discussing how they saw and interpreted antiquity. For example, her comparative discussion of Rodin’s Age of Bronze, 1877-80, Adolf von Hildebrand’s Standing Youth, 1881-84, and Leighton’s Sluggard, 1886, is fascinating. She argues that they are modern reinterpretations of then-discovered works by Praxiteles, Polykleitos, and Lysippos. She shows that the physical characteristics of each modern work, from contrapposto to muscular attenuation, mirror the different styles from ancient art that classicists have described as evolutionary in their naturalistic development over two centuries. Then, in an interesting twist, she notes how these modern works were all made in a short period of time, leaving the reader to speculate whether the ancient works themselves should be seen as evolutionary. After all, little evidence survives to correctly attribute works to these ancient sculptors or to the dates assumed for their creation.

Arranged into an introduction and three lengthy essays, the book resembles in format the author’s earlier Beauty and Art, which surveyed art and aesthetics of the same period in time. In the introduction of Modernity, Prettejohn proposes her argument about the linking of antiquity and modernism to one another and their simultaneous interactive developments. Rightfully so, she begins her discussion with Winckelmann, demonstrating how his reception of ancient sculpture through texts and surviving examples inspired ekphrasis-like writing, teaching others how to appreciate ancient and modern art, and establishing the idea of an art historical canon. Her first chapter discusses the Elgin Marbles as the nineteenth-century’s first awareness of actual Greek marble statues, and discusses their critical reception by scholars such as G.W.F. Hegel. The chapter continues with the discovery of the Venus de’ Milo (image: left) about this time, which gives Prettejohn the opportunity to explore ways this statue has been analyzed and received by classicists, artists, and scholars over time. Chapter two focuses on the Romantic idea of the individual artist as it related to antiquity. With the discovery of more ancient statues during the 1800s, the historical placement of specific ancient sculptors and their works were secured. But here Prettejohn exposes the weaknesses in these attributions, often with biased nationalistic tendencies, and instead emphasizes the importance of the afterlife of these works rather than their inherent ancient histories. ‘Modernism’, the subject of chapter three, will appeal to scholars of twentieth-century art for its emphasis on ancient sculptures from the Archaic period and the parallel interest in primitivism seen in the work of Picasso, Modigliani, and others. Prettejohn focuses on the importance of carving over modeling as a modern ideology, but traces its connections with the rising interest in the stiff, geometric figures from ancient Greece that were carved directly from blocks of marble by unidentified artists’ hands. Prettejohn ends the chapter and book with an examination of works by Picasso that do not specifically draw on any one particular ancient statue but, in a democratized, modernist appreciation of antiquity, shows how Picasso ignored the classical canon but used multiple aspects of antiquity for inspiration.

Prettejohn’s book is part of the ‘New Directions in Classics’ series based at the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition at the University of Bristol, where the author previously worked. The intent of this series is to move beyond traditional views of Greco-Roman culture and offer new methodological approaches and interpretations about antiquity. One might assume, then, that the intended reader for this text would be classical scholars. Indeed, much of Prettejohn’s text relates to archaeological discoveries and the scholarship that helped establish a framework for the study of classical sculpture itself. But the student and scholar of modern art will find the text useful as well, for Prettejohn frames ideas about nineteenth- and twentieth-century modern art as it was influenced by these discoveries from antiquity.

This text is appropriate for academic and museum libraries with researchers interested in expanding beyond traditional approaches to ancient and modern art, and is perhaps most useful for postgraduates, professors, and museum curators. It is not overpriced for an art book (£57.50 hardcover, £18.99 paperback), although all 51 illustrations are reproduced in black-and-white. This is not uncommon for sculpture books. Because Prettejohn’s focus is on methodology and not the aesthetic appreciation of these objects, black-and-white images do make sense, especially that they help keep the price of the book lower. Ultimately, the future success of this book rests in how it is received by scholars, mirroring Prettejohn’s own emphasis on reception theory for ancient sculptures. In reading it I found myself inspired by ways in which her ideas could be incorporated into art history seminars and used as the basis for small art exhibitions. Her numerous ideas about rethinking and merging antiquity and modernism certainly invite responses, and frequently the text reads like a dialogue with half the conversation waiting to be spoken. It will be fascinating to see how in fact her text may influence ideas about how aspects of antiquity and modernism are retaught or rethought. Indeed, if scholars are open to rethinking the development of the history of art itself, then this book will have accomplished its mission.

From Buddha to Dickens

I had to do some research at my school's library today, so I thought I would use part of the day also to catch up on a few special exhibitions here in the City. I made my way first to the Asia Society on Park Ave. & 70th St. to see The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Art of Gandhara, which I had included on my list of must-see shows for the fall. The show was fantastic, and I am so glad I went. I have a weakness for Asian art like Chinese landscape paintings, Japanese prints, Chinese/Islamic calligraphy, and Buddhist sculpture. In many ways it is so different from Western art that it allows us the opportunity to look at it with fresh eyes, unadulterated by our expectations of what we assume the artist did or what we know about the school in which he/she lived because we're used to certain things. But I am actually schooled a bit in Asian art, having taken a number of classes years ago and having taught courses on Asian art, literature, and religions in my past, but I would never consider myself a specialist. So I love to see shows like this and simply appreciate the subtle beauty of these works exactly for what they are. Take the Buddha you see here, for instance, from the Lahore Museum in Pakistan. He dates from the 2nd-3rd century and stands just under 5 feet high. The figure shows the Buddha as a teacher, raising his (missing) hand in the mudra of peace, and he wears the ushnisha (knot of knowledge) on his head and the urna (third eye of spiritual awakening) in the middle of his forehead. But what makes this figure so spectacular is the way his cloak ripples down his body, carved in a way that you can sense it is translucent and you can see the contours of his body beneath it. This "classical"-style Buddha is Gandharan, and what makes the art of this period and region so amazing is that it encapsulates a global culture from two millennia ago. Located near the silk route and conquered by the Persians and Greeks, the art of this area reflects an amalgamation of cultures coming together. From the Western perspective, this Buddha looks very Greek. If it were in white marble, one might thing an ancient Greek or Roman carved it. The entire exhibition brought together works from the Lahore Museum, a feat unto itself considering the political instability in which the U.S. and Pakistan find themselves today. The Asia Society also had an exhibition of the watercolors and paintings of Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel prize-winning writer from India, celebrating his 150th birthday. Much of his visual art resembles the work of modernists popular at the time. Paul Klee and Amadeo Modigliani come to mind. It wasn't really my taste, but it was worth seeing. They also had a single-room exhibition of a kinetic sculpture by the contemporary Korean artist U-Ram Choe. The sculpture looked like the skeletal remains of a manatee with sea oats growing out of it, their tips moving in the air like grabbing peacock feathers. There is a long conceptual narrative to the piece, but you can tell I wasn't into it, although the clockwork mechanics of it were interesting.

I ventured over to the Morgan Library today as well, which had four exhibitions that interested me. I started with the show on Islamic manuscript paintings from their permanent collection, some of which were vibrant and delightful. I then moved downstairs to see David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre. Encompassing French drawings from about 1780 to 1860, the emphasis here was on the Neoclassicists and Romantics. Many of the drawings were quite good, but without contextualization of paintings for which some were studies, it is more challenging for the general viewer person to appreciate what it is you are looking at.

I love the art of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, so it was a pleasure to see works of his not only in the exhibition from the Louvre, but also in a separate small exhibition with drawings from the Morgan's permanent collection. Ingres was a skilled draftsman, and he bridged the gap in many ways between the classical and romantic. The image you see here by him is his Odalisque and Slave, 1839, and relates directly to a painting of the same subject. Depicting a fantasy Orientalist scene that exploits the beauty of the female nude and the exoticism of the Middle East, the subject is Romantic; however, the crisp line and detailed precision and balance in the picture allow it to fall neatly into the Neoclassical style. I'm essentializing all this just to keep it simple, but normally I don't like pigeon-holing artists into categories like this because it creates an unnecessary hierarchy of excellence. Regardless, what strikes me most about this work is that when I saw it, I was convinced it was an engraving. In fact, it is a drawing in pencil, chalk, and wash, which is a testament to Ingres's incredible skills as an artist.

I also had to stop in the exhibition celebrating Charles Dickens's 200th birthday as well. There were letters, manuscripts, books, photographs, caricatures, and other related items all on display in cases and hanging on the wall. Now, I confess I've never been a big fan of Dickens. I've read Hard Times and Nicholas Nickleby, and of course read more than once A Christmas Carol, but to me Dickens seemed to focus too much on sensationalizing the poor in a way that objectified them. Then again, he was a journalist and his books did get people to start thinking about social programs for the underprivileged, so it's understandable why he was and is so popular.

Now if you've read this entire post (for which you get my applause!), you may be wondering what the heck the image at the top of this post has to do with Buddha or Dickens or anything in-between. In truth, nothing. But it does relate to the end of my day in the City, for as I was heading toward the subway, I was drawn into Banana Republic like a moth to a flame. As I walked in a shop girl said, "40% off everything!", flailing a coupon in my face. "40%," said I, "off everything?" "Yes, everything!" she exclaimed. Needless to say, I couldn't resist adding a few items for my work wardrobe for the fall/winter season...but don't you just LOVE what I bought?! By the way, they're saying we may get snow flurries tomorrow...I'm pretty sure I'm ready.

Exit Irene

The name Irene comes from the ancient Greek word Eirene (pronounced in 3 syllables), which means peace. In ancient Greece, Eirene was the goddess of peace. She was represented in art holding in her arms the infant Plutos, the god of wealth, as you see here in this sculpture from the Glyptothek in Munich (image: Wikipedia). The allegory beyond this implies that peace nurtures wealth. It's an admirable ideal, but I'm not sure everyone in today's world would agree with that. Then again, I don't think the statue was meant to suggest that wealth only meant money. In any case, it seemed rather appropriate to end the Hurricane Irene saga with some peace. As I'm writing this post, the trees are blowing about in the residual gusts of wind and the rain is sprinkling down, but the sun is also gleaning through the clouds and birds just flew in the sky, sure signs that beauty can follow disaster. When all is said and done, this hurricane was really quite mild as compared to others I've been through. I never lost power (lighting the Santeria candle apparently helped!). My neighborhood seems fine with just some tree damage, and overall NYC itself seems to be rallying rather well. Suburban and beach areas in Long Island and NJ suffered more damage and will be dealing with flooding issues and loss of power for a while. Hopefully they'll be back to normal soon. This was a slow-moving storm, but it looks like we can file it under history for now. I wish I could end this post saying that the rest of this day will be peaceful, but this is NYC and the noise of traffic on the BQE and other areas has already begun.

Archaeology in 2010

I have been subscribing to Archaeology magazine since at least the mid-1990s. A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America, the glossy bi-monthly magazine offers easy-to-read news-like updates on new discoveries, conservation issues, black-market crimes, and other related bits of information regarding things found underground and underwater. Their website often provides free the full-text of some of the articles too, which is rather nice of them. I always read the articles about ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, India, and China, but occasionally there are great articles about newer bits of archaeology like the discovery this past summer of an 18th-century ship during construction at the World Trade Center site.

The latest issue online for January/February 2011 has a recap of the top 10 discoveries in 2010. From the list, I found the article on "The Tomb of Hecatomnus" in Milas, Turkey to be of interest. The picture above shows the king's sarcophagus with what may be a carved representation of the king himself (source: AP Photo/Durmus Genc, Anatolian). This 4th-century B.C.E. king of Caria in southwestern Turkey arguably is most famous today only because of his son, Mausolas, who was buried in the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world (and from whose name we get the word mausoleum). Another major discovery that fascinated me was the decoding of the genome for Neanderthals. Contrary to what had been believed, that Neanderthals had nothing to do with Homo sapiens (that's us), in fact studies of extracted Neanderthal DNA now have shown that they are part of our modern DNA structure too. Author Zach Zorich writes: "A major insight came when researchers compared the Neanderthal DNA to the DNA of three modern people (one French, one Han Chinese, and one Polynesian). The team found that all three had inherited between 1 and 4 percent of their DNA from Neanderthals. They also compared the Neanderthal sequence to two African individuals (one Yoruba and one San) and found no indication that they had inherited genes from Neanderthals, who are known to have evolved outside Africa. The research supports the idea that Neanderthals interbred with Homo sapiens between 100,000 and 80,000 years ago as our anatomically modern ancestors left Africa and spread across the globe."

But of all the articles published last year in Archaeology, my favorite has to be the September/October issue that had a series of articles on dogs in ancient cultures. Authored by Jarrett A. Lobell and Eric Powell, "More Than Man's Best Friend" discussed the different ways in which dogs have been part of human culture for more than 15,000 years. We know all dogs descended from wolves that were domesticated (such as the beautiful creature you see here; image copyright Staffan Widsrtrand/Nature Picture Library). The article talks about specific cultures and aspects of how dogs were part of our lives, as companions, guardians, even in some cultures food (ugh!) for thousands of years. The story of dogs in Roman Britain showed how they were more integrated into our lives both as pets and working creatures, as evidenced by found artefacts and fossilized pawprints. Fascinating stuff for us dog lovers!

Week of the Arts in NYC

You would think that after passing my Oral Exam in art history I might want to avoid art-related things this week, but as it turns out, I've had a great week for doing artsy things that one can only experience in NYC.

Last Friday, for instance, I went with JHC to see the Marina Abramovic retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. I'm not into performance art all that much (requires patience!) and I really don't like video art (I get migraines!), but I decided to go because we wanted to see the naked people. Yes, in this retrospective, the Yugoslavian-born Abramovic has men and women--clothed and unclothed--reenacting her performance pieces from the 1970s to the present, including one in which a nude man and woman face one another and visitors are invited to walk between them (and not touch them as they have become works of art, but a few people can't resist copping a feel). As you can tell from what I've already written, I loved the exhibition. It was so much more interesting because it was arranged in one exhibition space. Most performance pieces are individual works in isolation; to see them in one group like this as an unfolding of a life's artistic career with archival film footage and live demonstrations made it more thought-provoking. Abramovic successfully uses the fourth dimension of time/temporality to make sculpture (i.e. the body) come to life. Her current live performance in The Artist Is Present, in which visitors are invited to sit across a table from her and gaze at one another in silence, seemed at first dry and boring, but the more you watched them the more you found yourself feeling the discomfort and tranquility of non-verbal communication. My favorite performance piece was Nude with a Skeleton, in which a naked man lies on a table with a human skeleton on top of him. As he breathes, the skeleton rises and falls along with his chest. It makes for a fascinating presentation of the memento mori, juxtaposing issues of life and death, and by framing it with a sexy nude Abramovic encourages us to challenge our ideas about what is sexual, erotic, and fetishistic.

On Wednesday evening, I invited RL to join me at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for a special talk given by the Director, Thomas P. Campbell: "Discovering History: The Met and the Ancient World." The presentation was about the Met's long history and interest in participating in archaeological digs, preserving artifacts, and educating people through publications and exhibitions on ancient cultures such as Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Mesopotamia. In part the talk served to offer an alternative perspective from the current trend of blaming museums of illegal acquisitions of ancient works. The talk was very interesting from a historical point of view, as Campbell used numerous historical photographs and a film showcasing this early part of the museum's history. The talk also was related to the exhibition Tutankhamun's Funeral that recently opened. (This, of course, has nothing to do with the highly-touted traveling exhibition of the treasures of King Tut from Cairo. Critics have been panning the blockbuster exhibition for focusing more on the spectacle of the pharaoh rather than presenting an accurate, scholarly exhibition to educate people, even though National Geographic is apparently a major sponsor of the show. Opening near Times Square with tickets selling for $28.50 each, I have no doubt that the exhibition is going to rake in a small fortune.)

Then on Thursday night I went with DC to the opening for the Hungarian Modernism show at the Shepherd & Derom Gallery on the Upper East Side. There weren't too many works on display that I liked all that much, but it was fascinating to see how early 20th-century movements like Cubism and Der Blaue Reiter influenced artists who may not have been in Paris or Munich at that time.

Last but not least, for my birthday PR & AM got me a ticket to go see with them the revival of La Cage aux Folles. We went last night. This new version opened a few weeks ago and stars Kelsey Grammer as Georges and Douglas Hodge as Albin. When it began, I felt like it was a bit campy (okay, aside from the obvious fact that it was about a drag queen night club), with lots of overacting and heightened melodrama. It also seemed outdated somehow, as if we'd heard all this before. But as the show continued, it got better and better. The music became more engaging, the acting improved, and the dance numbers with the "Cagelles" (see the image above) were fabulous. In fact, one of the great strengths of the musical was that the chorus of drag queens were all very muscular male dancers whose ability to do flips and twirls in heels and corsets made the whole performance even more amazing. Grammer was fine as Georges (sometimes his singing was off-key), but Hodge absolutely stole the show as his partner Albin (aka Zaza!). It's amazing to think this is Hodge's Broadway premiere. By the time the first act ended and he sang in full drag the song "I Am What I Am" you want to cry because of the intolerance that we know still exists in our world today. In that sense the show turned out to be more relevant today than ever before. To top it off, Georges and Albin share a big smooch at the end that makes you stand up and applaud for them. All in all, it was a fabulous way to end a week of great art-related events. What can I say: it's great to live in NYC.

UPDATE 5/2/10, 7:45am: As I was writing this post last evening, in particular about having been in Times Square to see a Broadway musical, someone was parking an SUV loaded with a bomb on the corner of 7th Avenue and 45th Street. NYC was saved from another potential terrorist attack because of the vigilance of a t-shirt vendor who noticed smoke coming from the car and smelled gunpowder. The entire area was evacuated last night. This morning, things are slowly getting back to normal. NYC is still an incredible place to live, especially for its arts scene, but it is worth remembering that 9/11 was only 8 & 1/2 years ago and we need to be aware.

Elgin Marbles: Ownership & Installation

In the early 19th century, Lord Elgin traveled to Athens, discovered marble fragments of sculpture on the Acropolis, and negotiated with the then-governing power, the Ottoman Empire, for the removal of the marbles. He shipped them back to his home in Scotland, where word spread about their beauty. Those who had been on the Grand Tour had seen Rome, so they were familiar with the Colosseum, the Forum, and Trajan's Column. But these new works from ancient Greece, hundreds of years older than Rome, were considered a marvel to behold. Elgin sold the marbles to the British government in 1816 because he was facing bankruptcy and needed to liquidate his assets. This act of desperation, however, became one of the greatest gifts of cultural heritage in the history of the Western world.

The simplicity and purity of the 5th-century BCE fragments of marble sculpture from the Parthenon became world famous once they were installed in the British Museum. And there they have sat since then, with tourists, artists, writers, art historians, and classicists visiting them for nearly 200 years. For more than 20 years now, the Greek government has been arguing for the return of the Elgin Marbles. The opening of the state-of-the-art Acropolis Museum in Athens has brought the dilemma of what to do with the sculpture into the forefront of cultural debates. This new museum does house the parts of the marbles that Elgin left behind, and the Greeks have been fighting to have them reunited with the larger portion that is in London. The debate seems to divide people. Those in favor of Greece getting them back see it as a form of patriotism. Those in support of the British recognize that the sculpture has had a new life in modern times thanks to Elgin, the works having influenced generations of art and literature production, and can now be seen in the context of other world cultures. What really is at stake here for the museum world is the ongoing debate over who owns cultural artifacts: museums who obtained them (legally or illegally), or modern-day nations that claim to have a right to repatriate the cultural artifacts of their ancestors. It is worth pointing out that neither the British nor the Greeks seem to be squabbling over how Elgin obtained the marbles. Nothing was apparently done illegally; the Ottomans had the right to sell them if they wished.

I have to confess, I'm somewhere in the middle of all this, but I seem to lean more on the side of the British Museum. I do see both sides of the argument. However, I feel as if the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece will open a proverbial can of worms, and museums around the world will begin to be forced to return millions of objects. It would shift cultural studies and economies in ways that one cannot even begin to imagine. It isn't as if change is bad. It could be good. But in truth many of these countries like Greece are only now just beginning to establish themselves economically in a way that they can properly house the artifacts and still make them available to the public at large. The British Museum may not be willing to return the sculpture, but they continue to want to engage in discussions over a loan exchange program with the Greek government. Apparently the Greeks are not willing. You can read more about all this and the new museum by reading these articles from The New York Times: "A Home for the Marbles" by Christopher Hitchens and "Elgin Marble Argument in a New Light" by Michael Kimmelman. CultureGrrl also had a recent post on the British Museum Director's "whopper" of a comment regarding the Greek government on the debate.

When I was in London I thought it might be interesting to take a few pictures of the Elgin Marbles, not so much as objects, but as an installation. Part of the discussion about the marbles has to do with how they are (or would be) exhibited. One of the things I discovered as I walked throughout the entire gallery is that the British Museum is definitely on the offensive about staking its rightful claim. One of the introductory wall labels in the gallery reads: "Elgin's removal of the sculptures from the ruins of the [Parthenon] has always been a matter for discussion, but one thing is certain--his actions spared them further damage by vandalism, weathering and pollution. It is also thanks to Elgin that generations of visitors have been able to see the sculptures at eye level rather than high up on the building. In London and Athens the sculptures tell different and complementery stories. In Athens they are part of a museum that focuses upon the ancient history of the city and its Acropolis. In the British Museum, they are part of a world museum, where they can be connected with other ancient civilizations, such as those of Egypt, Assyria, and Persia." Here's a picture of one of the other wall labels to educate visitors about the construction of the Parthenon and its respective sculpted parts: the frieze, the metopes, and the pedimental figures.



This is an image of the frieze. Sculpted in low-relief, the frieze ran around the inner wall of the Parthenon and was one continuous scene. The image at the very top is just one panel from the frieze. In the background of this shot you can see the sculpture from the east pediment.


Here is a shot of the free-standing pedimental sculpture. I have no idea who the man is, but he serves to give you a good sense of high high the sculpture is on the pedestal. In the background are two of the metopes that decorated the outside of the temple separated by architectural triglyphs.


Finally, this is one of the metopes depicting the battle of the Greeks and Centaurs (half-man/half-horse creatures). These were carved in high-relief, making the figures practically pop out of their frame as if they were free-standing sculptures as well. And here's the crux of all this. Did you know that all of this sculpture was at one time painted? The only reason why it's white today is because the paint has faded.

King Tut

While I was eating dinner this evening, I watched the documentary Tut's Treasures on the National Geographic Channel. I've always had a passion for ancient Egyptian culture, so this made for interesting dining entertainment. The documentaries on ancient cultures that you often see on this channel, Discovery, TLC, etc. are often hyped to make you feel as if the episode has information that shocks you and that you cannot live without, like "Tonight! The Truth Behind How King Tut, The Boy King, Died. Was It Murder? Was It An Accident? What Can Today's Forensic Experts Tell Us? Come Excavate The Truth As We Solve This Mystery Three Thousand Five Hundred Years In The Making!" It's unfortunate that they always have to exaggerate the effect of these documentaries, but I imagine they feel like average Joe Plumber would never watch it otherwise. (Then again, why do they care if Joe Plumber watches? When the heck is he ever going to run off to Egypt or see an Egyptian exhibition at a museum?) All the hype aside, the episode was actually quite interesting. Just about everyone has heard of King Tut. The discovery of his tomb rich in treasures by Howard Carter in 1922 was one of the most spectacular moments in Egyptology and archaeology. The image you see here is Tut's gold death mask in the collection of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. They have many examples of Tut's treasures online, so it's worth taking a look. The 1970s grand tour of artifacts from his tomb was a tremendous popular success, and for the past couple of years there has been a new (and controversial) version of the same tour traveling around the globe. Tutankhamen was the son of Akhenaten, the radical pharaoh who altered the traditional polytheistic culture into what some call a monotheistic culture, with the worship of a single chief deity, Aten the sun. Akhenaten was married to the world-famous Nefertiti, and their daughter Ankhsenamen was married to Tutankhamen. The boy came to the throne at the age of nine, but he was dead by eighteen. This documentary used CT scanning on his skeletal remains in combination with other new investigations to determine that, contrary to what people have believed for the past few decades, Tut was a healthy adolescent and he was not assassinated. It appears he probably died from an infection after breaking his leg from a chariot accident while hunting (or so they claim). The premise behind the entire episode was that the current Earl of Carnarvon, the great-grandson of the fourth earl who discovered the tomb with Carter, was returning to Egypt to seek out new answers on the life and death of Tut. Of course the ubiquitous Zahi Hawass, Egypt's Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, was in the documentary and he was able to express the final opinion as to how Tut died. In case you weren't aware of this, there isn't a single documentary or book about ancient Egypt these days that does not include Zahi Hawass. You have to check out his website to see what I mean. He is the celebrity face of Egyptology.