The Fundamental Venus

"Repulsively ugly" wrote a German archaeologist, Paul Wolters, of his finds on one of the Greek islands in 1891. By the artistic canons of his day, the classical Greek figure was the ideal of feminine form and the hourglass Gibson girl in her geegaws and gilded garters the height of fashion. To Wolters, the pinched sculpture found in the Cyclades, as the isles south of Troy and north of Crete are called, must have seemed pretty slim pickings. Yet these ostensibly crude figurines, despite their small scale, emerge as the first monumental sculpture in the Western world, and in their search for symmetry are the direct forerunners of the Venus de Milo.

Preclassical sculpture is now back in fashion, largely because the work of such modern sculptors as Giacometti, Arp, Brancusi, and even the nudes of Modigliani, have changed what constitutes the canons of beauty. But Cycladic sculpture itself is as rare as golden fleeces. A recent show at Manhattan's Andre Emmerich Gallery had 29 marble figures from the Cyclades, ranging in price from $100 to $37,000, and outnumbered the Metropolitan Museum of Art's total collection of them by better than 3 to 1. The Greek government bans their export, but as long as the farmers on Naxos, Paros or Amorgos islands turn them up with plows, a small number are smuggled out, guaranteeing that the Cycladic market will stay open, opulent, small--and pregnant with pre-classical Greek significance.

Marble Passion. Actually Cycladic figures, as rudimentary as they seem, are the end product of many millenniums of sculptural development. During the Stone Age, the female figure was treated in sculptural artifacts as a talisman of motherhood, with thighs and stomach huge in relation to arms and head. With the arrival of the Bronze Age, Cycladic sculpture of 2600 to 2000 B.C. trimmed these fetishes down to a sterner, more geometric expression. The bodies flattened out, the frontal silhouettes took on the lines of violins rather than double basses, with elongated necks topped by heads mostly undetailed save for straight, almost abstract noses. This delicacy carried over from female figures into slender statuary of male musicians playing harps and the syrinx, or pipes of Pan.

As Greece rose toward its golden age, the rigid canons of Cycladic art, ready for change, submitted to many influences. In its ivory and gold bull dancers, Minoan art from Crete mixed in the snaky rhythms of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Later inhabitants of the Greek peninsula added the black, angular stick figures of early vase painting. By the 6th century B.C., Greek archaic sculpture, with its faintly smiling athletes, elevated the male figure to an aggressive human presence in nature. From the period of the figurines of the Cyclades, the contours of sculpture gained more and more grace until one ancient historian, Diodorus, could say that Praxiteles, the 4th century B.C. sculptor, "informed his marble figures with the passions of the soul."

Fundamental Femininity. While Cycladic figures do not seem to breathe, they are still for the connoisseur intensely alive objects. "A Cycladic idol of a woman is very much like the figure of the woman we see on the beach today," points out Dealer Emmerich. "We are in contact with the man of 5,000 years ago, because we have something to share with him--the experience of what is fundamental in femininity." And for Manhattan Collector Allan Emil, there is an added attraction: "If you buy a Henry Moore, which costs more, you know at least half a dozen copies of the same sculpture will be cast and sold. With an ancient piece, there is only one --the original."

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