New Acropolis Museum in Athens

The cultural event of the year in Greece— of many a year— was the opening last summer of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens. The old museum, which closed in 1979, housed the treasures unearthed in and around the Acropolis: architectural fragments, statuary, figurines, inscriptions and pottery. These hadn't been seen by the general public, except in books, in the 30 years since.

The new museum contains all these treasures, as well as roughly half of the surviving sculpture of the Parthenon: friezes, metopes and pediment sculpture.

It also contains five of the famous columns of the Erechtheion, the representations of young maidens known as caryatids. This means that these pieces no longer stand where they stood for more than 2,200 years, and never will again. They withstood time, earthquake, defacement and military bombardment, but not the relentless effects of modern pollution. The city they were meant to glorify was slowly destroying them with each day's motor traffic. Today replicas stand in their places.

This means that the new museum represents, at least in part, an accommodation to failure— the failure of modern Greeks to preserve their ancient heritage in situ. In fairness, Athens isn't the only city with serious pollution problems, and it has taken at least some steps to address them. On the other hand, no other city has the Parthenon.

A double burden

These circumstances place a double burden on the new museum. It must exhibit the Parthenon sculpture and the figures of the Erechtheion in a worthy manner, while at the same time recognizing that even the most ingenious display can only remind us that they are no longer in the one place where they belong. It must take similar care with the other masterpieces in its keeping. And it must house the entire ensemble in a building of exceptional grace and distinction.

The new museum's directors appear to have no doubts that they have done so. Most of the Parthenon sculptures not housed in it (as well as a sixth caryatid) are in the British Museum in London, where they comprise the so-called Elgin marbles. These works were removed from Greece in 1802 by Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, and they are and long have been the object of the most notorious debate over artistic repatriation in the world.

Intended to shock

To make the case for repatriation more forcefully, the directors have not only indicated where the missing marbles might rest in relation to the pieces on display, but have installed replicas. The contrast between the weathered, darkened surfaces of the originals and the blindingly white replicas is meant to shock, and it does.

Unfortunately, the whole museum is a dud, and the tendentious display of the marbles only caps the fiasco.

Where to begin? The authorities took over an entire square block of the Plaka, the old city quarter that lies below the Acropolis, walling it off like a maximum-security prison completely estranged from the surrounding neighborhood and its history. The entrance, down a ramp bordered by sterile, Hockneyesque shrubbery, is quixotically approached from the rear.

Like cereal boxes

The structure itself, by Bernard Tschumi— not really a building in the architectural sense of the word— seems to consist of three cereal boxes laid flat and piled at angles to each other. I say "seems" because there is no vantage from which the whole can be seen. This is postmodernism with a vengeance— maybe suitable for a high-concept corporate headquarters in, say, Brussels, but not for a house of great art.

One enters over a glassed-in causeway beneath which an excavation site is dimly visible. I suppose this is meant to say archaeology, but since the site is unspecified, it spells rubble instead. Past the ticket booths— the first thing one sees of the building itself— is a bank of subway-style turnstiles. These emit a high-pitched whine as customers pass through— a whine that follows one a considerable distance up a sloping mallway lined with display cases of pottery, coins, and other small artifacts. About midway up, one encounters a cafeteria and a gift shop.

Easy to miss

So far one has seen nothing more than a department store stocked with antique wares. High above, from a projecting alcove of the second floor, the caryatids of the Erechtheion face outward. You can easily miss them if you aren't looking up, as I did on a first pass; the eye is led instead toward a rear staircase, the landing of which is framed by the pediment of the archaic Parthenon, destroyed during the Persian wars.

This is the one impressive vista in the museum itself, but one climbs the stair only to be met by clashing traffic patterns. To the right, a glass wall faces the denuded Parthenon itself, but instead of a quiet, contemplative view perhaps graced by some statuary, there is a still larger gift shop and cafeteria, the latter extended through glass doors to an outdoor café.

Exposed without protection

The exhibits, when one gets to them, are arranged chronologically, but with no particular sense of their relative importance or value. The Girl Adjusting Her Sandal, one of the iconic images in all Greek art, was not only inexplicably ill-lit but also sequestered anonymously among other pieces and exposed without protection of any kind to pawing or worse by child and adult vandals alike.

The few guards, like museum guards the world over, were half asleep, but there was a particularly festive, please-touch atmosphere that, in combination with all the gift shop replicas, all but invited one to sample the bona fides.

Caryatids belittled

The cynosure of the second floor is or should be the caryatids. The point of projecting them from the alcove, like so many ships' prows, is presumably to suggest something of the soaring grace of the original placement. But it doesn't work; the statues are belittled rather than enhanced by the cavernous indoor space.

Worse, they can be approached on the second floor only from behind, where they suggest nothing so much as ladies of the night offering their charms to the trade. Yes, one can see their thick tresses and beautiful modeling up close, but it is impossible to stand more than a few feet in front of them.

This is a disaster. Removed as pillars from their temple, the caryatids are already once diminished by their conversion into mere statues, but the worst possible choice has been made here: The viewer has no distance, no elevation, no sense of scale. Nothing in this misbegotten place is sadder.

As a whole, impossible

The third floor is devoted entirely to the Parthenon marbles. These, in contrast to the caryatids, are set high and back, presented block-by-block and, wrapped around a rectangular space, impossible to see as any kind of whole. The effect is made even more distracting by the white Elgin replicas placed at irregular intervals between them. This was the final disenchantment of the museum, but not its final embarrassment.

That was reserved for the notorious 40-second cut in the redacted version of the Costa-Gavras film on the Acropolis, showing in the museum's theater, which depicted the Sixth-Century defacement of the Parthenon by Christian monks. The Greek Orthodox Church demanded that this episode be cut, and the Greek government spinelessly complied, creating an international scandal. The furor was such that the cuts were restored— at least for the present— but the damage was done.

Athens vs. London

What, then, of the repatriation issue? If the new museum was intended to make the case for bringing the Elgin marbles back to Greece, then the British government could not have asked for a better gift. The friezes in the British Museum are set at eye level on either side of the Duveen galleries in a long rectilinear procession, with the free-standing metopes making a dramatic punctuation at either end. The effect is as close to the original as any indoor placement can be, and the galleries themselves have an understated neoclassic elegance.

I visited them a few days after seeing the Acropolis Museum for purposes of comparison; and, discounting as best I could my long familiarity with the Duveen arrangement, the latter is simply superior on all counts.

Maybe Elgin stole the marbles and maybe he saved them— no doubt there is truth in both contentions— but the relevant question is where they belong today. My own answer is that, since they can no longer be reunited on the Parthenon itself, they should rest where they can be seen to best advantage as works of art. That place, at present, is London.

The Barnes difference

Philadelphians have, of course, our own Elgin marbles question at home in the slow-motion hijacking of the Barnes collection. It is generally assumed that the opponents of moving the Barnes should favor the restitution of the Elgin marbles. But the two cases are quite different.

In the case of the marbles, it's no longer a question of putting them back in their original setting, but in one museum or another. The Barnes collection is still in its proper home. The alternative is not in any sense to "rescue" it, but to pry it loose at great public and private expense to be placed in a vulgar simulacrum.

The Parthenon can no longer be kept from being stripped of its glory. The Barnes Foundation can.