Modern Classicisms

THE FUTURE OF ANTIQUITIES?

The future of antiquities?

Michael
Squire met
with Christian Levett to discuss the history of his collection – and to ask
about his interest in ‘Modern Classicisms’…

Christian
Levett has amassed one of the world’s most important private collections of
antiquities. In 2011, he opened his own museum in southern France to house part
of the collection: the MACM (Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins).
Over the last few years, and increasingly since his retirement, Levett has
sponsored archaeological excavations, exhibitions and outreach projects – which
included The
Classical Now show at King’s College London. He is owner of Minerva, and
sits on the Board of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and on the Arms and Armour
Committee at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

MS: Christian, can you start by telling us something
about the history of your collection: what were the first things that you remember
collecting?

CL: Collecting has always been a passion of
mine. As a young boy I used to visit shops selling old coins and medals.
Whenever I could afford them, I tried to buy inexpensive items like cheaper
Victorian coins and First and Second World War campaign medals. I also loved
toy soldiers and making aeroplane models – those were the first things I remember collecting.

MS: So what led you to
antiquities specifically?

CL: I think I had always been inspired by
family visits to museums, castles and cathedrals. But it was only later that I
became interested in ancient objects. Around 20 years ago work took me to
Paris, and I often spent Sunday mornings in the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay. I
had started collecting again – above all, to furnish my apartment and
my house in London. Back then, ordering auction catalogues in my 20s, I
had always overlooked ‘antiquities’ – I thought they were restricted to places
like the Louvre, Met or British Museum. Discovering what was available on the
market was like a bolt from the blue: I had been financially successful, and I
was drawn to these amazing ancient works.

MS: Part of your collection is
now on display in southern France – at MACM (Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins).
What led you to found your own private museum?

CL: The MACM really just evolved naturally
from those early purchases. The collection became so large, and was clearly way
beyond what I could display at home in London (and, by then, a newer house in
France). I therefore decided to put the pieces on public display: I wanted them
to be available for everybody to see – members of the public, as well as
scholars.

MS: What’s particularly distinctive about MACM is its
mode of display, showing ancient pieces alongside modern artworks that respond
to Graeco-Roman art. Outside the museum,
visitors to the town are greeted from below by Antony Gormley’s Reflection. Inside, we find unexpected
pairings: a Marc Quinn bust amid your Roman portraits, for example, and various
‘Venuses’  – by Yves Klein, Salvador Dalí
and Andy Warhol – next to a
Roman statuette. Can you say something about the rationale?

CL: It appears that, however unwittingly, I
was at the forefront of a trend. I’ve been connected with the twentieth and
twenty-first-century art market for some time – not least through my
partnership in Vigo Gallery in London. The idea for those juxtapositions really
came from when I was buying antiquities and noticed so many classically
inspired artworks along the way. I started actively looking for pieces
with interesting, classical themes – pieces that would encourage visitors who
were interested in the contemporary as well as in the ancient.

MS: So that’s how the collection got its
broad ‘classical’ remit?

CL: Despite the eclecticism of the
collection, I wanted to make sure the museum had a coherence – above all, that
it would tell a story for visitors. At the same time, it’s absolutely
astounding how many artists had a classical period in their work, emulating
ancient works, drawing pieces as part of their training, responding to them. The
more I collected, the more I realised the interconnection. I can’t think of
anywhere else in the world that demonstrates the point better than Mougins.

MS: Among your many current projects is the
exhibition you sponsored at King’s College London, dedicated to The
Classical Now – part of a larger project on ‘Modern
Classicisms’, which explores the interface between ancient visual
culture and modern and contemporary art. Why do you think this project is important?

CL: The aim here – and it’s very much
aligned with our work at MACM – is about challenging how people look at
antiquities. When they’re displayed in museums, ancient artefacts are usually
presented as pieces of history rather than as artworks: their significance is
often presented in terms of how bewilderingly old they are. But clearly, over
the years – including in modern times – artists saw things quite differently: ancient
artefacts provided materials for artists to study, emulate, respond to and challenge.
What appealed to me about this project is the way in which it encourages public
audiences to look to antiquities through the eyes of modern and
contemporary artists: that’s why The
Classical Now has had such traction, in my view – it’s engaging new
audiences, and across traditional divides of ‘classics’ and ‘art history’.

MS: Let me end by asking you about your
future collecting plans – both for MACM, and for your own extended collection.

CL: MACM has become a living museum: local
members of the public want to see new things, so there have to be some changes
in the permanent displays. At the same time, it’s now become extremely
difficult to buy antiquities with decent provenance – something that has always
been central to my own collection. For many years I’ve wanted clearly defined
provenance prior to 1970 (something which Sotheby’s also requires for its
antiquities auctions), although now I’m really looking much further back than
that ­– normally to the early twentieth century for me to even look at a piece.
Partly for that reason, and in part for others, I’ve been collecting more and
more works by twentieth- and twenty-first century artists. As the collection
grows, MACM is prioritising loans of objects around the world, which in turn
allows space for temporary installations: a case in point is our current Léo
Caillard exhibition, Past
is Present, which forms the partner-show to The Classical Now in London. This interview is extracted from an interview
for Sotherby’s in London. Want to know
more about Chris Levett and his collection? We have uploaded the film of an interview
with the King’s team from November 2017 here.

by Modern Classicisms

A MODERN DAY MINOTAUR

Artists Mary Reid Kelley (b. 1979) and Patrick
Kelley (b.1969) discuss with us ancient Graeco-Roman objects, themes
and myths – and how they have helped to inspire their own modern-day films. The
artists work in collaboration to create video works that combine painting,
performance and poetry; their films tell surreal stories inspired by history
and mythology. Played by Mary Reid Kelley, the multifarious characters speak in
poetic verse filled with wordplay and puns, and narrate stories that imagine
unrecorded histories. From November 2017 to March 2018, Tate Liverpool
presented the artists’ first solo exhibition in a UK museum, and Swinburne’s
Pasiphae (2014) was featured in our 2018 exhibition on The Classical Now. Mary Reid Kelley is a 2016 MacArthur Fellow and
received the Baloise Art Award at Art Basel in 2016.

James Cahill spoke with the two artists in connection with our
‘Modern Classicisms’ project at King’s.

JC [James Cahill]:
I’d
like to ask you how the idea for the trilogy of films
about the Minotaur came about – and why you decided to focus on the figure in
your three films (2013–2015):

Priapus Agonistes (2013), Swinburne’s Pasiphae (2014) and The Thong of Dionysus (2015).

MRK [Mary Reid Kelley]: We had the idea of
doing something with an ancient theme after living at the American Academy in
Rome for a year. It wasn’t a question of wanting to do something thematically classical
so much as the experience of living in Rome and recognising the historical
process of the deconstruction and reconstruction of the city through spolia –the use of discarded and recycled elements. Ancient materials
might be recycled into a medieval church, or ancient marbles cut up and used in
mosaic floors. Before going to Rome we had done historically themed works: we
did four films set in the First World War, and one in mid-nineteenth century
Paris. But it was living in Rome that gave us an idea of putting things from
different times, cheek-by-jowl with each other...

For
a while I’d been identifying the way that I write – with all the puns and
wordplay and rhymes – as ‘Dionysian’. So when we came to consider making three
films about the Minotaur, the myth was an extra impetus – an opportunity to
make something that was not just structurally or linguistically Dionysian, but
also thematically Dionysian. And in terms of how the Dionysian plays out in the
work, it’s something inescapable, like the sense of drunkenness: you can’t opt
out of being drunk once you are drunk, you just have to wait for it to wear
off. That’s one of the reasons we keep the films short. We want it to be an
intense and overwhelming feeling.

JC: The opposition between the
Apollonian and the Dionysian could be a useful way of thinking about your
embrace of the irrational and the taboo. One line that comes to mind when I
look at your work is Walter Pater’s reference to the ‘sharp bright edge of
Hellenic culture’, although he of course he had a particular vision of
antiquity. Your videos have a ‘sharp bright’ quality, but they’re very much the
opposite of what Pater was describing in relation to the classical statues.

PK [Patrick Kelley]: Mary generally
writes all the scripts, but the second film in the trilogy, Swinburne’s Pasiphae (2014), was drawn entirely
from a pre-existing text, a fragmentary poem by Charles Algernon Swinburne.
It’s Swinburne’s story of Pasiphae and describes the moment of Daedalus
building the cow for Pasiphae so that she can fulfil her desire for the bull. It’s
about Daedalus’s own ego and desire in creating the cow. We made our version of
Swinburne’s poem, using his text, word for word.

MRK: One of the interesting things about
working from a mythological basis, rather than making a historically based film,
is that while for a historical film you read memoirs and use photographs, with
mythology, you’re basing your work on other artistic interpretations – in this case,
Swinburne’s, but also those of artists like Picasso, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and
other mid-century artists for whom mythology was really pertinent…

JC: What bearing do you
feel the Minotaur story has on the present day? Do its elements of subversion,
transgression, creative genius or bestial coupling have an enduring relevance?

MRK: I think all those
elements you listed still come into play in contemporary culture. The only one
that seems archaic is the bestial coupling, which serves as a nice marker in
the drift of taste in metaphor from ancient times to now. Of course, it’s not
just taste that’s intervened; it’s science, Darwin, genetics. But the
acquisition of this knowledge hasn’t made us very much better at tolerating
difference, which is what the Minotaur represents. The Minotaur is the ultimate
unwanted being…

JC: Art historically, there are lots of
different voices being brought into the mix besides your own, and in that sense
it becomes a kind of Modernist poem. I can’t help thinking of the dilution of
the self into the chorus of voices. And ‘chorus’ is a word that I think of in
relation to the work. When I hear your voice over the top of each video, Mary,
it reminds me of the chorus of Greek tragedy.

MRK: Yes, in the first film, Priapus Agonistes, there is a chorus
which reinforces the story. That was part of the classical theme – working with
ideas of the mask, the chorus and the verse play. I was very much inspired by
Eliot’s ‘Sweeney’ poems, in which Sweeney was inspired, I guess, by a bartender
that Eliot knew. And my character of Priapus was based on my first boyfriend from
when I was in high school.

The
thing that I think is really strange about the Minotaur story and other Greek
myths, is that it is very difficult for us to deal with is the idea of fate, of
being stuck in something against your own choosing. That was the Greek way of
explaining bad things: it was because the gods had thrown bolt at you or had
you on their blacklist. We’ve grown a counter-mythology to that, saying that we
can ‘bootstrap’ our way out of bad situations, to use American terminology. That
idea of fate is one part of Greek thought that has not come along with everything
else that we readily claim as our heritage from the ancient world.

A full version of this interview can be
read in the catalogue accompanying The Classical
Now, published in February 2018.Want to find out more? We have uploaded a more
detailed interview with the artists here.

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SOCIAL MEDIA

In case you missed them, here are some of our favourite social media responses to The Classical Now.

A short blog: we hope the responses speak for themselves….

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A BLOG ON BLOGS...

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