New Acropolis Museum at the foot of the Acropolis, competition image, 2003. Computer-generated rendering
Photograph: Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects

Bernard Tschumi, “Viewing the frieze and the Parthenon, simultaneously,” sketch, June 2001
Photograph: Courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects

Gallery installation, The New Acropolis Museum, Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York
Photograph: Francesco Benelli

Exhibition Review

The New Acropolis Museum

Curator: Ioannis Mylonopoulos

Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York
21 October to 19 December 2009

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Few monuments loom as large in the cultural imagination of the West as the half-ruined temples occupying the summit of the ancient Acropolis in Athens. The complex has inspired various political, cultural, and aesthetic ideologies that continue to shape contemporary debates on topics as disparate as the function of Greek nationalism and the formation of modern museum collections. Thus, given the highly charged nature of the site, it comes as a mild surprise that the current exhibition in the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, The New Acropolis Museum, fails to explore the relationship between the complex history of the monument and the design of the new institutional landmark built to commemorate it.

Curated by Ioannis Mylonopoulos, a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia, the exhibition addresses three separate but loosely related subjects: the design of the museum, its collections, and the history of modern scholarship on the Acropolis. The objects on view thus fall into three corresponding categories: architectural drawings and models of the museum complex designed by Bernard Tschumi; full-scale casts of some of its major artifacts; and materials related to the work of the influential archaeologist and art historian, William Bell Dinsmoor (1886-1973), whose scholarship arguably represents the most significant research conducted on the Acropolis in the modern era. Obtaining loans of such an impressive array of material—from Bernard Tschumi Architects, the Organization for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum, and the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia, respectively—represents a curatorial feat, especially considering the relatively small scale of the exhibition, and suggests an ambitious attempt to conceptualize the museum as a polyvalent institution defined by the congruence of its physical environment, assembled collection, and institutional history.  The extent to which this theme constitutes the explicit organizing principle of the show remains unclear, however, and closer examination of the selection and arrangement of objects on view indicates that their resonance with each other may not be wholly intentional.

Several items in the exhibition stand apart for the way in which they illuminate the relationship between the New Acropolis Museum (opened in June 2009) and the ancient site.  Early design diagrams by Tschumi—a professor at Columbia and former dean of its Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation from 1988 to 2003—clearly illustrate the architect’s approach to coordinating the individual components of the complex museum project. Two large site models of the building zone, one depicting the relationship between the museum and the Acropolis and the other describing the archaeological remains preserved beneath the structure, are similarly enlightening. Less helpful are architectural drawings depicting schematic computer models of the museum project set within larger compositions of confusing structural details. Five cases of casts, modeled after artifacts excavated on the museum site, serve as physical proof of the extraordinary efforts made to accommodate archaeological work during construction but seem tangential to the rest of the exhibition.

More interesting in regard to preservation efforts are reproductions of letters that Dinsmoor, executive director of Columbia’s Department of Fine Arts and Archaeology from 1933 to 1955, wrote to colleagues about the maintenance and restoration of monuments on the Acropolis. These documents illustrate some of his intense archaeological work on the site and also reveal him to be a prescient preservationist who identified the detrimental effects of using concrete in restoration work long before many of his peers. Lithographs depicting the Acropolis in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ostensibly serve to contextualize Dinsmoor’s pioneering work but remain little more than historical curiosities since they receive such little critical commentary. This is symptomatic of a larger weakness in the exhibition as a whole: the absence of any fundamental sense of thematic integration. Although most of the objects on view are somehow related to the Acropolis, their connection with each other is often tenuous at best, thereby inhibiting one’s ability to understand the site as a single historical or architectural phenomenon.

The exhibition section dedicated to casts made from prominent sculptures installed in the New Acropolis Museum perhaps best exemplifies this problem. The room contains a series of life-size votive statues discovered either on or near the Acropolis as well as various architectural sculptures from the Parthenon itself. These latter objects include five slabs from the cella frieze, four metopes from the exterior colonnades, and the fractured head of a monumental horse from the east pediment. The quality of the casts—particularly the Parthenon sculptures—is impressive. But their presence is puzzling. Nothing in the exhibition either clarifies the criteria for selecting the objects or provides much information regarding their historical or archaeological context. This suggests that the subject of the exhibition is not the sculptures themselves but rather the museum that houses them—a conclusion consistent with the title of the show. Since the aforementioned horse head fragment and several other objects on display currently reside in the British Museum rather than the New Acropolis Museum, though, it seems the exhibition’s focus is not strictly limited to the Athenian institution. This flexibility would be understandable if it were exploited to highlight the ongoing controversy surrounding the repatriation of the so-called Elgin marbles from Britain to Greece—a high-profile dispute largely responsible for spurring the construction of the New Acropolis Museum in the first place. But the international debate goes unmentioned, suggesting the exhibition organizers wished to avoid the subject of the Elgin marbles altogether. Such evasion only undermines the thematic unity implied in the title of the show and reduces it to a visual spectacle lacking any larger ideological framework.  Neither the museum nor the ancient temple emerges from the resulting ambiguity as a comprehensible spatial entity.

One wonders how much more insightful the exhibition would have been had it been limited to a careful examination of the work of Tschumi and Dinsmoor, using their engagement with the site as a paradigm for understanding the impact of modern attempts to safeguard and study the Acropolis. Despite its deficiencies, however, the exhibition nevertheless provokes important questions about the identity of the contemporary museum and its role in facilitating the display and reception of artistic objects.

Zachary D. Stewart
[Columbia University]

Publication related to the exhibition:

Rosand, David, Bernard Tschumi, Ioannis Mylonopoulos, Angelos Chaniotis, and Dimitrios Pandermalis. The New Acropolis Museum.  3 vols. New York: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University in the City of New York, 2009, 48 + 48 + 19 pp., illus., $ 20, ISBN: 978-1-884919-24-4.