Sculpture after the ancients
Two thousand years separate Phidias from these sculptors.
Sp!ros — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Deiadameian — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Deiadameian — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Deiadameian — CC BY-SA 4.0
The sculpture branch of the Greek National Gallery, occupying two restored nineteenth-century military barracks in Goudi Park in eastern Athens. The collection covers modern Greek sculpture from the nineteenth century to today — a period usually neglected, because visitors come to Greece for ancient sculpture and so never see what came two thousand years afterwards. What the collection reveals is interesting: nineteenth-century Greek sculptors worked under a heavy shadow. How do you carve marble in the country that produced Phidias and Praxiteles? One generation studied in Munich and Rome and attempted neoclassicism; a later one looked for another language in folk and Byzantine art and in abstraction. The building is part of the experience: high-ceilinged barrack halls on iron columns, with the sculpture distributed among them and in the grounds outside. Relatively far from the centre and very rarely crowded.
Two thousand years separate Phidias from these sculptors.
How do you carve marble in the country of Praxiteles?
Outdoor works distributed across the barracks land.
Goudi Park, eastern Athens
The National Gallery in central Athens near the Hilton shows painting: Greek art from the nineteenth century to the contemporary, plus European pieces including an El Greco. It reopened after a major extension. The Glyptotheque is its branch devoted to sculpture alone, in an entirely separate location east of the city. Anyone wanting one should go to it directly rather than expect both in one building.
If you have three days or fewer in Athens, no — the Acropolis and its museum, the National Archaeological Museum and the Agora come far first. But if you are staying longer or returning to Athens, it is among its quietest and least crowded places, and the collection fills a real gap in understanding modern Greece. The park around it is a large green space Athenians use for exercise.
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