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Cycladic Art, classical, eternal, modern
Lorena Mingorance, Interview with Ali Aboutaam
Misunderstood and appreciated, the art of the 20th century plunged its roots in the wonderful and unknown art of the Cyclades Islands. The discovery of Early Cycladic art spread from the beginning of the 20th century along with artists like Giacometti, Picasso, Brancusi or Henry Moore, who evoked the elementary simplicity of its sculptural shapes and its lack of superfluous details. The masters of Avant-gardes were looking for an alternative to classical painting, so everything primitive, either African, Polynesian or Cycladic, opened a door to new ideas for them. Thanks to this new valuation of the primitive, the general public discovered the Cycladic aesthetics, so different from the Greek one.
When these mysterious figurines were discovered in the late 19th century, many were those who underestimated their beauty, considering them as pieces with no artistic value. Only a few visionaries like Picasso knew how to appreciate the value of its lines' pureness; Henry Moore also possessed many of them, inspiring much of his work, and one knows that Giacometti came assiduously to the Louvre Museum (Paris) to contemplate them.
Nor is it difficult to notice how the almond-shaped heads of these figurines influenced Modigliani's portraits.
Cycladic art took place during the 3rd millennium B.C., in the first phase of the Bronze Age. The inhabitants of these islands originated from the Anatolian shores. These small communities exchanged different products between the islands.
Along with the sea, white marble quarries are one of the natural landscapes in islands like Naxos or Paros. Ancient Cycladic craftsmen worked a great variety of vessels out of marble polished with abrasives, as well as the so-called idols.
Characteristical are the women with their arms crossed horizontally under the chest and with the pubic triangle indicated. Some figures' prominent belly indicates pregnancy; the grooves on others, childbirth. Their immaculate whiteness is due to the high quality of the compact, very fine-grained marble. Their incredible shapes resulted from the technique used to their production, using emery stone (crystalline carbon), so the artist should focus only on the most significant parts, forgetting all subsidiary elements.
But, what were they use for? why were they created with such delicacy? Many meanings and religious functions converge: they could be offerings to gods and even divine images. Numerous female figures could be linked to the cult of fertility or to the Great Mother-Goddess, given their exceptional size (1.5 centimeters) but, to what divinity were connected male figures? Taking into account that most of these figures have been found in graves beside the funerary trappings, that they do not on average measure more than 30 centimeters and that they do no stand upright unsupported, experts theorize about the idea that they were used for funeral rituals, serving to protect the deceased in his journey to the afterlife, like amulets, or to transport his soul to the other world, just like, in Egyptian culture, the ushebtis or servants accompanied the dead to his new life.
Scholars have classified them according to their most schematic features (the violin-shape type, one of which was Picasso's) or their realism in representing the female body. They have also been labeled regarding their origin or the artist who made them, since there has been observed a sort of author's signature on some of these figures.
To the unknown of their purpose joins the mystery of their ending, because in spite of their expansion (examples are attested in Crete, in mainland Greece, on the shores of Asia Minor and in Palestine), their production barely survived the passage from the Ancient Bronze to the Middle Bronze, at around the turn of the 3rd millennium B.C., when the Minoan and Cretan culture replaced the Cycladic culture in the mastery over the Aegean Sea. The Cyclades slowly extinguished and their art fell into oblivion, waiting for the artists of the 20th century to recognize it as the most sublime representation of the human being.
