24
Jun/17

LAST CHANCE — A WORLD OF EMOTIONS: ANCIENT GREECE, 700 BC – 200 AD

24
Jun/17
(photo courtesy the Onassis Cultural Center)

“A World of Emotions” takes a unique approach to Greek antiquities (photo courtesy the Onassis Cultural Center)

Onassis Cultural Center
Olympic Tower
645 Fifth Ave. at 51st St.
Saturday, June 24, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
onassisusa.org

Saturday is the last day to see the outstanding exhibition “A World of Emotions: Ancient Greece, 700 BC – 200 AD,” at the Onassis Cultural Center in Olympic Tower in Midtown. “The Greeks were not the first people who felt something; they were not the first who wrote literature or created art because they felt something. But they were the first who made emotions the subject of their literature and their art,” curator Angelos Chaniotis says on the audio tour. The show consists of more than 125 archaic and classical works dating back nearly three thousand years, from statues, coins, and vases to masks, amulets, and a painting that portrays a surprising depth of field. The exhibition is divided into ten categories and subcategories, including “The Art of Emotions,” “Spaces of Emotions,” “Enslaved by Emotions,” “The Battlefield,” “The Cemetery: Space of Grief and Hope,” and “Medea,” and features small monitors with excerpts from mythological poems and tales. The works depict romance and murder, joy and sorrow, relating stories about Apollo, Artemis, Agamemnon, Iphigenia, Zeus, Herakles, Leda and the Swan, Penthesileia, and others. There’s also a clip from Yukio Ninagawa’s modern all-male staging of Euripides’ Medea. Looking at ancient Greek artworks can be cold and distant, but Chaniotis’s approach brings a warmth and sense of humor to a collection that boasts numerous treasures from the Onassis Cultural Center, the Acropolis Museum, the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Vatican Museums, among others. Be sure not to miss the stele of the man and his beloved pig.