A Giant Step Into the Light

By Richard Lacayo

! The Greeks held so firmly to their past that we forget how far back they had to reach for it. It is easy to lose sight of the long centuries -- there were eight of them -- that separate the heroes of the Trojan War from the age of Socrates and Aeschylus, which paid homage to them. Much of what lay between was not an unbroken line of glory but a dim interregnum. The Mycenaean Greece that leveled Troy around 1200 B.C. was itself in ruins a hundred years later, smashed by Dorian invaders from the north. There followed a dark age that lasted three centuries, when even the alphabet was lost, and then a long, slow crawl back up to the light.

"The Human Figure in Early Greek Art," an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, charts the upward trek through the ripening depiction of the human form. That pivotal Greek effort laid the basis for Western art until this century, when the modernists exploded the assumptions of symmetry, rationalism and realism generally. The show, which after closing in Washington on June 12 will move on to Kansas City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston, is a collaboration of the National Gallery and the Greek government, in which contributions from 18 Greek museums have been assembled. Scaled to a museumgoer's tolerance for fractured antiquities -- just 67 items -- the exhibit still covers a wide range, from early pottery and terra-cotta figures to archaic marbles of a quality rare in American collections.

For all that, a visitor might at first be disappointed that the show's chronological reach ends in the early 5th century, just as sculpted form is approaching the perfected classical style. Several works, however, look ahead to that style and even beyond it: the overlapping figures of the hero Theseus carrying off the Amazon queen Antiope, in a broken 5th century sculpture, lay the seed for the upwardly spiraling corkscrews of the baroque.

Everything in the show, even the virtual stick figures that march across very early pottery pieces, is enlivened by the Greeks' emerging confidence in human capabilities. But the most riveting works are inevitably the later ones. These include half a dozen examples of the free-standing marble figures called kouroi ("youths") that in the 6th century became the chief expression of the Greek belief in the human figure as the earthly signifier of the divine. Advancing rapidly in style from decade to decade, the kouroi appear to be the first examples of art for art's sake, their function as temple statues and grave markers taking second place to the opportunity they offered the sculptor to reach ever closer to ideal form.

In both respects these works embodied the new spirit of their time. A surge in population had fattened the cities and fostered Greek colonies from Sicily to Asia Minor, creating the prerequisites for free inquiry and sophisticated taste: prosperity, cosmopolitanism and leisure. An individual voice was being heard, graceful but down to earth, in the new lyric poets like Sappho and Anacreon. Artists began signing their work. On a red-figure drinking cup that shows a young athlete bending over a washbowl, a blunt autograph bends over the image: "Pamphaios made it."

The female figures, three of which are included in this exhibit, were always shown in lightly clinging garments, falling in what now seem the sinuous lines of an art nouveau lily. It was the nude, however, that the Greeks regarded as the perfect vessel for their deepest intuitions, and the greatest advances in naturalism came in the unclothed male figures. Depicted with arms at their sides and one foot stepping forward, the earliest, especially, show traces of the immobile Egyptian statuary they were modeled after. But Greek marble was stronger than Egyptian stone and Greek sculptors freer than the artists who took orders from pharaonic priests. The Greeks could cut away the supporting mass of stone around the legs, unfettering their self-images.

The most formidable kouros in the show is a magnificently rendered figure, more than 5 ft. tall, that shows the century's formal advances at the very edge of consolidation. The subtly rendered back, the nearly perfected slope at the waist -- a chief sticking point for archaic sculptors -- even the flesh that stretches over the knobs of bone at the wrist, have arrived almost at the classical ease of transition from form to form. Through the youth's skin, the merest membrane, can be seen the quickening pulse of the time. Even his slightly stupefied "archaic smile," a sculptural convention contrived to animate the face, appears to mark the general awakening. This is creation's singular mammal, with his freshly minted awareness, stepping into the Mediterranean light.

"The Human Figure" may be a small show. But in these days of the art exhibit as juggernaut, rolling hugely from city to city, how many, like this one, leave the viewer longing for more?