Greek Women Gain Entry into Art Museum! Posted on January 28th, 2009 by

This is overdue (in a couple of ways), but better late than never.  It’s well worth reading the whole thing.

The Glory That Was Greece From a Female Perspective

It’s funny, given American political ideals, that our museums offer so few major exhibitions of ancient Greek art. The Met had one called “The Greek Miracle: Classical Sculpture From the Dawn of Democracy,” but that was in 1993. It was an expensive, blockbustery thing that told a story we already knew, and one that is only partly true: that Western culture, or whatever is good about it, was a Greek invention.

Some of us asked at the time why the curators, who had been handed loans of almost mythic status — the “Kritios Boy,” the “Grave Stele of Hegeso” — did so little with them. The show could have been an opportunity to break scholarly ground: to examine the role of class in ancient Greece, or to consider the lives of women and children, or to reconsider what classicism means as a value-laden historical concept. What we got was art-survey boilerplate.

Two years later the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore mounted a show on women in ancient Greece, impressively. And now New York has one too. Moderate in size, efficiently presented and somewhat stiffly titled “Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens,” it is not at the Met or any other museum but at the Onassis Cultural Center in Midtown, a kunsthalle-style space, now almost a decade old, devoted to Hellenic culture.

As conceived by its two curators — Nikolaos Kaltsas, director of the National Archaeological Museum of Greece, and Alan Shapiro, professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University — the show’s intention is twofold: to present a nuanced view of a still-elusive subject, and to correct, or at least revise, existing misconceptions.

The main misconception is the notion that women had a universally mute and passive role in Athenian society. It is true that they lived with restrictions modern Westerners would find intolerable. Technically they were not citizens. In terms of civil rights, their status differed little from that of slaves. Marriages were arranged; girls were expected to have children in their midteens. Yet, the show argues, the assumption that women lived in a state of purdah, completely removed from public life, is contradicted by the depictions of them in art.

 

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