December 19, 2008
Art Review | 'Worshiping Women'
The Glory That Was Greece From a Female Perspective
By
HOLLAND COTTER
It’s funny, given American political ideals, that our museums offer so few major exhibitions of ancient Greek art. The Met had one called “The Greek Miracle: Classical Sculpture From the Dawn of Democracy,” but that was in 1993. It was an expensive, blockbustery thing that told a story we already knew, and one that is only partly true: that Western culture, or whatever is good about it, was a Greek invention.
Some of us asked at the time why the curators, who had been handed loans of almost mythic status — the “Kritios Boy,” the “Grave Stele of Hegeso” — did so little with them. The show could have been an opportunity to break scholarly ground: to examine the role of class in ancient Greece, or to consider the lives of women and children, or to reconsider what classicism means as a value-laden historical concept. What we got was art-survey boilerplate.
Two years later the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore mounted a show on women in ancient Greece, impressively. And now New York has one too. Moderate in size, efficiently presented and somewhat stiffly titled “Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens,” it is not at the Met or any other museum but at the Onassis Cultural Center in Midtown, a kunsthalle-style space, now almost a decade old, devoted to Hellenic culture.
As conceived by its two curators — Nikolaos Kaltsas, director of the National Archaeological Museum of Greece, and Alan Shapiro, professor of archaeology at
Johns Hopkins University — the show’s intention is twofold: to present a nuanced view of a still-elusive subject, and to correct, or at least revise, existing misconceptions.
The main misconception is the notion that women had a universally mute and passive role in Athenian society. It is true that they lived with restrictions modern Westerners would find intolerable. Technically they were not citizens. In terms of civil rights, their status differed little from that of slaves. Marriages were arranged; girls were expected to have children in their midteens. Yet, the show argues, the assumption that women lived in a state of purdah, completely removed from public life, is contradicted by the depictions of them in art.
Much of that art is religious, which is no surprise considering the commanding female deities in the Greek pantheon. Like most gods in most cultures they are moody, contradictory personalities, above-it-all in knowledge but quick to play personal politics and intervene in human fate. Four of them make in-depth appearances here.
Athena comes on as a striding warrior goddess, armed and dangerous, avid as a wasp, in a tiny bronze statuette from the fifth century B.C. This is the goddess who, in “The Iliad,” egged the Greeks on and manipulated their victory against Troy, and the one who later became the spiritual chief executive of the Athenian military economy.
Yet seen painted in silhouette on a black vase, she conveys a different disposition. She’s still in armor but stands at ease, a stylus poised in one hand, a writing tablet open like a laptop in the other. The goddess of wisdom is checking her mail, and patiently answering each plea and complaint.
Artemis is equally complex. A committed virgin, she took on the special assignment of protecting pregnant women and keeping an eye on children, whose carved portraits filled her shrines. She was a wild-game hunter, but one with a deep Franciscan streak. In one image she lets her hounds loose on deer; in another she cradles a fawn.
But no sooner have we pegged her as the outdoorsy type than she changes. On a gold-hued vase from the State
Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg she appears as
Princess Diana, to use her Roman name, crowned and bejeweled in a pleated floor-length gown.
Demeter was worshiped as an earth goddess long before she became an Olympian. Her mystery cult had female priests, women-only rites and a direct line to the underworld. And although you might not expect Aphrodite, paragon of physical beauty, to have a dark side, she does.
She was much adored; there were shrines to her everywhere. And she had the added advantage of being exotic: she seems to have drifted in from somewhere far east of Greece, bringing a swarm of nude winged urchins with her. But as goddess of love she was unreliable, sometimes perverse. Yes, she brings people amorously together, but when things go wrong, watch out:
“Like a windstorm/Punishing the oak trees,/Love shakes my heart.”
So wrote the poet and worshiper of women, Sappho, who knew.
Actual worship took various forms. Some were simple gestures. In several vase paintings we see women pouring wine, milk or honey from flat bowls onto the ground as an offering. In others they lead sacrificial animals to altars, a reminder that the white marble temples we now so admire for their purity were once splashed with blood.
One vase fragment, showing a group of women looking jumpy and frazzled, was long assumed to depict an orgiastic festival in honor of Aphrodite’s boy-toy lover, Adonis, the
James Dean of Greek myth, who died young and left a beautiful corpse and mobs of inconsolable female fans. Recently, though, scholars have concluded that this is a marriage scene, with an anxious bride being prepared by hovering attendants for her wedding night.
The management of weddings was female turf, as was childbirth and the raising of children. So were the rituals surrounding death. Men were in charge of war and killing; women were in charge of washing and dressing bodies for the all-important last rites, without which souls were left to wander the earth. Birth and death — the only real democratic experiences, existentially speaking — were in women’s hands.
There is no more moving image in the show than that of two women, one seated and one standing, facing each other in carved relief on a marble grave stele dated to the fourth century B.C. Both may be priests, or worshipers, in an earth-goddess cult; neither looks young. An inscription identifies the woman commemorated by the stele as Nikomache. The exhibition catalog suggests that she is the seated figure, the one who has settled in and will keep her place when the other walks away. The parting is evidently in progress as the women clasp hands and meet each other’s gaze.
Sappho again, and a poem called “Long Departure”:
Then I said to the elegant ladies:
“How you will remember when you are old
The glorious things we did in our youth!
We did many pure and beautiful things.
And now that you are leaving the city,
Love’s sharp pain encircles my heart.”
Despite this and other illustrations of female agency in ancient Athens, it would be a mistake to argue that the lot of women there was, after all, a fair deal. The record stands: no citizenship, no vote, little or no control over the use made of your time or your body. But the show is not making that argument. Instead it is using art to survey where, within a system of institutionalized restriction, areas of freedom for women lay.
By doing so it makes a valuable, if by now no longer entirely novel, contribution to classical studies. And it presents art with a thematic focus, a historical tact and a relevance to the present that our museums — I am thinking particularly of the Met, with its beautiful but blandly generalizing Greek and Roman galleries — can learn a lot from. As can we. In ancient Athens, as in contemporary America, true democracy was always an ideal, never a fact.
“Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens” continues through May 9 at the Onassis Cultural Center, 645 Fifth Avenue, near 52nd Street; onassisusa.org
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 20, 2008
Picture captions on Friday with an art review of “Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens,” at the Onassis Cultural Center in Manhattan, carried erroneous credits. The pictures of a container for oil and a three-handled drinking cup were from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and the picture of an inscribed grave stele was from the Piraeus Archaeological Museum. The pictures were not from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
the girl looks up in fear, whilst Katrin is just in the middle going crazy.
I loved the first pic a little more either, but this one is fantastic as well! 
the second picture, this campaign is amazing so far.
i really don't like this campaign 
it's almost like they used the "Unsharp Mask" tool in Microsoft Picture it or Photoshop..anyone know what i'm talking about? 
anywho, i think it looks pretty sloppy. just my opinion though.
