Up there on the rock of the Acropolis, that’s the Parthenon. Down here on the
lower slopes, that’s the £110m New Acropolis Museum. Inside it is a lot of fascinating
and beautiful sculpture from the Acropolis, exquisitely presented. And in
another museum, 1,486 miles away, there’s quite a lot too. At the British
Museum, they prefer not to call them the Elgin Marbles these days, though it
was our Lord Elgin, ambassador to the Ottoman empire, who chiselled them off
at the beginning of the 19th century and brought them to London. You may
have heard that the Greeks want them back.
If ever a new piece of architecture were politically charged, the New
Acropolis Museum is it. It has been designed and built specifically to
house, among much else, the sculptures originally mounted high on the
Parthenon in 5BC. The Greeks and the British have roughly half each of what
survives. Some pieces are even broken and divided between the two countries.
Other museums, including the Louvre, in Paris, also have bits.
This was the atmosphere that the new museum’s architect, the Swiss-American
Bernard Tschumi, worked in. Athens is all content and context. When you are
building right next to, and in full view of, the work of the Parthenon’s
architects, Iktinos and Kallikrates, when the content of your museum
includes the greatest sculptural treasures of the ancient world, including
that of the Parthenon’s sculptor, Phidias, then a little humility is in
order.
Does the new museum meet the challenge? It’s good inside, disappointing
outside. The best architects aren’t great at humility — I don’t get the
impression Iktinos and Kallikrates were exactly shrinking violets. Tschumi,
known as a “deconstructivist” architect — overlapping and warping bits of
buildings is his thing — generally prefers to stand out rather than blend
in. Here, though, he has had to tread carefully. The composition of the
museum is an intellectual as much as an aesthetic exercise.
Luckily, it’s impossible to upstage the Parthenon. So Tschumi has been as bold
as he could, and he gets his dramatic moments. But I walked round the new
museum time after time, and it never seemed very coherent. It’s big and
fairly clumsy, not least because it has to be engineered to be
earthquake-proof. It’s organised on three clearly differing levels, and its
materials are concrete, glass and, rather oddly, corrugated stainless steel.
The top floor, a black glass box, is skewed as if a giant hand had twisted
it. “This is not a deconstructivist gesture,” Tschumi says, smiling broadly
as he marches you round. “The lower levels of the museum are aligned with
the ancient street pattern. The top floor, the Parthenon gallery, is
aligned with the Parthenon itself.” Fine, but it still feels more like a
built diagram, lacking a level of detail.
The architecture starts to resolve itself, however, in the public approach to
the museum. Here, the building hovers over the incredibly well-preserved,
recently excavated ruins of the merchant city of ancient Athens. Its big fat
concrete columns are carefully positioned to avoid crashing through the more
significant remains, which are partly exposed to the air, but are protected
by a large entrance canopy.
Elsewhere — outside and in — you can see the ruins beneath your feet through
thick glass. Tschumi knows all about the importance of processional routes
and gateways in Athens, and has created his own version, winding its way
from the city into the heart of his building and culminating in the
Parthenon gallery on the top floor — shaped to match the floor plan of
its namesake because it displays the sculptures in the sequence they would
originally have been found.
Altogether, these add up to a sophisticated, 2,500-year-old band of narrative
artworks carved from marble, dealing with gods and mortals, the legends and
festivals of Athens. Originally, mind you, both they and the temple would
have been quite gaudily painted.
Not all of them are there, of course. You’re looking at about a quarter of the
original sculpture, much of which has vanished over the centuries. An
explosion in 1687 blew the roof off the Parthenon and destroyed many of
Phidias’s creations. That was because the occupying Ottomans, besieged by
the Venetians, were using it as a military garrison and gunpowder store. Its
appearance as a ruin dates from that moment of violent deconstruction. When
Elgin showed up in 1801 and cut his deal with the Ottomans, only about half
of the original sculpture remained, and he took half of that. The way he saw
it, he was saving as much as he could from further danger.
The gaps where the sculpture has been lost for good are left as gaps. Tschumi
makes use of the chunk pulverised by the big bang: you enter the gallery
through this missing section, and the first thing you see, through the
glass, is the Parthenon itself, up on its rock. Turn round, and stretching
to the left and right of you is the sequence of sculptural panels, many set
between stainless-steel columns, that used to be part of the decoration of
the temple.
There are other gaps, however: the ones where the sculpture is in the British
Museum. These are filled with plastercasts, made by the BM in the 1840s
after Greece had gained its independence. No attempt has been made to
colour-key them with the originals. They are pointedly white plaster, their
texture different from the great yellowing marble blocks alongside them.
Labels tell you where the originals are.
Don’t run away with the idea that the New Acropolis Museum is only about the
Parthenon gallery. In the lofty Archaic gallery, you wander among smiling
ancient statues, as if they were part of the crowd, with Tschumi’s colossal
concrete columns rising through the space. He achieves grandeur here through
manipulation of light and space.
The entrance approach, up a broad glass-floored ramp, is also a gallery, with
objects from the slope of the Acropolis mounted behind glass to either side.
This is a dramatic and mysterious space. For me, though, the finest moment
was meeting the five maidens of the Erechtheion, a smaller temple to the
side of the Parthenon. These haughty girls are caryatids: they held up the
roof with their heads, columns in human form. And they are very lovely,
especially from the back, their braided hair slightly different in each
case. These were modelled from life, I’m sure. Oh, and there should be six.
A gap has been left for the one in the BM.
Tschumi, then, has remade the Acropolis inside his building. The way you move
through the spaces echoes the way you negotiate the Acropolis itself. The
curators have arranged the sculpture with what looks like affection as well
as scholarship. While the outside doesn’t quite come together, the interior
is hard to fault. It is serious, but it is playing a game with you and
enjoying your response.
And the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum? The BM’s position,
restated recently by its director, Neil MacGregor, is that it legally owns
Elgin’s haul, which is staying put. Just because there is a fine new museum
in Athens, that is no reason to hand it back. This is art for the world, not
just for Greece. “The division allows different and complementary stories to
be told about the surviving sculptures, highlighting their significance for
world culture and affirming the universal legacy of ancient Greece.”
There is a chink of light. There has been talk of a loan — so long as Greece
recognises the BM’s legal ownership. A loan would remove the justified fears
of museums around the world that to return the Elgin Marbles outright would
start a flood of claims, emptying their own collections of ancient
artefacts. The Greek position is that Elgin “looted” the sculpture, so this
solution might seem unlikely. But you never know.
All I know is this. When you stand in the Parthenon gallery, the great temple
before you, and look at those long stretches of slightly pitiful
plastercasts, it’s hard not to come to this conclusion: by loan or by gift,
the surviving Parthenon sculptures need to be reunited. In this building, in
Athens.
hughpearman.com
