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Archaic Greek Sculpture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Extract

Five years ago, in these pages, I ventured to suggest the ‘urgent need of a finely illustrated new book on Greek art before 460’. The new appreciation of the earlier Greek masters, so fervent among young people whose perceptions belong to their own age, and who have had the luck to see ‘archaic’ Greek sculpture at first hand, has long demanded some adequate presentment from the vastly enlarged resources of modern photography for the benefit of the general public. This aspiration is now being gradually realized. The remarkable work produced in Paris (1934) by Christian Zervos, and entitled L'Art en Gr`ce, laid stress on aspects of Greek sculpture which appeal to twentieth-century taste, and supplemented admirably what had already been done for Parthenon and Erectheum art by the Berlin publication, Die Akropolts. The photography of L'Art en Grèce was actually too good for some critics. I have heard it described as tendencious, and its producers have been charged with the serious crime of manipulating light and vision so successfully as to upset the still prevailing academic standards of judgement. They had the audacity to photograph, direct from Greek vases of the fifth century, large-scale details of drawing which might readily be mistaken for products of twentieth-century Paris, distortion and all. That Pericles and Picasso should kiss each other is a notion revolting to staid minds, and the indignation it caused is not surprising to those who know our universities.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1937

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References

page 65 note 1 ‘New Valuations in Greek Art’, Greece and Rome, 10 1931.Google Scholar