The marble figurines
Hundreds of abstract forms that look entirely modern.
Joyofmuseums — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jean Housen — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jean Housen — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jean Housen — CC BY-SA 4.0
Yes, and they **don't compete**. The **National Archaeological Museum** is vast and comprehensive, covering the whole of Greece across the ages — the priority if you can only do one, but exhausting and needing three hours. The **Museum of Cycladic Art** is small, focused and elegant, covered in an hour and a half, and its collection is from **a period the other doesn't treat in the same depth**. The advice: with three days in Athens, do both on different days — don't combine them, you'll tire of museums.
Because they are **radically abstract**, which is what confuses the eye. The form is reduced to its essential lines: a flat elongated body, folded arms, an oval tilted head, and a smooth face with no feature but a nose. No detail, no ornament, no attempt at realism — which is precisely what twentieth-century sculptors were after, thousands of years later. When these pieces appeared in European exhibitions early last century they **startled artists**, who saw in them what they had been looking for, and they influenced Modigliani, Brâncuși and Moore directly.
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An elegant private museum in the **Kolonaki** district, holding one of the most important collections in Athens though far less known than the National Archaeological Museum. Its main subject is the **Cycladic civilisation** that flourished in the Aegean islands between about 3200 and 2000 BC — that is, **two thousand years before the classical Greeks**, and a little before the great Egyptian pyramids. What that civilisation is best known for are the **marble figurines** you see here by the hundred: flat, elongated human forms with arms folded across the chest and smooth faces bearing no feature but a projecting nose. They are abstracted to a degree that makes them look **entirely modern** — and they genuinely influenced Modigliani, Brâncuși, Henry Moore and Picasso when they came to light in the twentieth century. Nobody knows with certainty why they were made: grave goods? gods? portraits of the dead? The mystery is part of their effect. The museum also holds an ancient Cypriot collection and a section on **everyday life in ancient Greece**, with material explaining marriage, birth, sport and death.
Hundreds of abstract forms that look entirely modern.
A section on Greek marriage, birth, sport and death.
Ancient Cypriot material rarely shown in Athens.
Neophytou Douka 4, 10674 Athens