Art: The Masterpiece Road Show

It must be said, straight off, that The Greek Miracle: Classical Sculpture from the Dawn of Democracy, now at the National Gallery in Washington (it goes to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City in March), is a very odd show. Largely composed of loans from the Greek government, it combines a number of profound, exquisite and completely irreplaceable works of art, which wiser owners would not have exposed to the risks of travel, with an utter shallowness of argument about their social and ritual meanings. Insofar as an exhibition can assemble great sculpture and have practically no scholarly value, this one does.

The reason is that The Greek Miracle is an exercise in political propaganda, and has to embrace stereotypes that no classicist today would accept without deep reservations. First, the exhibit wants to indicate how Greek sculpture changed in the classical period, by showing its movement from the frontal, rigid forms of 6th century B.C. kouroi, whose ancestry lay in Egyptian cult figures, to the more naturalistic treatment of balance and bodily movement one sees in works such as The Kritios Boy (circa 480 B.C.), which was found on the Acropolis. And it demonstrates this in considerable detail, through marvelous examples of 5th century sculpture that include the titanically grave and simple group of Atlas presenting the golden apples of the Hesperides to Herakles (from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia) and the famous low-relief carving of the armed goddess Athena, leaning on her spear, absorbed in thought, the body fixed in a space of almost pure geometry (from the Acropolis Museum in Athens).

As an orientation course for those who don't know much about classical Greek sculpture -- and as a source of unalloyed aesthetic pleasure for those who do -- this show ought not to be missed. But neither should its second premise be taken seriously: the idea that there was some causal connection between the advent of the classical style in sculpture and that of democracy in Athenian politics. Both happened at roughly the same time: in the late 6th century an Athenian aristocrat, Kleisthenes, made an alliance with the people of Athens in order to defeat another noble, Isagoras, and pushed through a number of democratic reforms that were permanently enshrined in the Athenian constitution.

These measures gave the vote and other rights to citizens who had not enjoyed them before, though not, of course, to slaves or women. But the idea that the beginnings of democracy in Athens changed the way that rituals, gods and heroes were represented is hokum: exactly the same changes of style occurred in cities, like Olympia, that were run by tyrants. The fact that modern Greeks apparently want to believe it -- this being a time of superchauvinism in Greece, as in other Balkan countries -- means nothing, except in the scheme of simplistic politico-cultural fantasy. You might as well claim that Abstract Expressionism was "caused" by the election of Harry Truman. Nevertheless, such is the show's political motive, and it seems a poor pretext for taking great art and jetting it to America like so many get-well cards, for the sake of political p.r.