A Cycladic(ising) Journey

In September 2025 New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art returned a number of items, including Cycladic, to Greece. The EC collared jar (inv. 2004.342.1) was significant enough to include in S. Hemingway, "Art of the Aegean Bronze Age." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 69 (2012), 21, fig. 34, and it is a reminder that as recently as 2004 the museum had been receiving suspect Cycladic material.

The controversial long-term loan of the Stern collection of Cycladicising material will be celebrated today by a symposium, "Journey to the Cyclades: Exploring the Early Cycladic Culture of Greece". Hemingway is due to be speaking about cultural patrimony. One hopes that the Director, Max Hollein, will talk about the reason why the Met has had to return so many hundreds of Etruscan, Greek and Roman antiquities to the countries where they were found. 

It is disappointing to see that issues relating to context and authenticity are not addressed as explicit topics by specific speakers. Will the issue of the figure that appears in the Becchina photographic archive be rehearsed? And will the Greek position on figure fragments derived from the Keros Haul [not a "Hoard"] be made clear?

For further discussion of the Stern collection see:

Gill, D. W. J. 2025. "Artwashing the Cyclades: The Leonard N. Stern Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art." BMCR. 

—. 2025. "Leonard Stern Collection of Cycladic Antiquities". Museum of Looted Art. 

—. and C. Tsirogiannis. 2025. "The Stern Collection of Cycladic Figures and the Metropolitan Museum of Art." MeditArch 38: 1–24.

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