| "Why
do you collect? How and when did you start?" I keep being asked.
It all goes back to my adolescence. I lost my religious faith, studied
philosophy and became a Marxist. I was looking for God, for the truth and
for the absolute. In 1949 I went to Greece and I found my answer. The light
was the light of truth and the scale of everything was on the scale of
man. And Greek art exuded a spirit which I was much later to perceive
as what I believe to be the spiritual birth of man in the same fashion
that this physical birth took place in East Africa some two million years
ago.
What is that spiritual birth? It is the awareness that man is the centre of things and that the elements or the gods must be placed in their right contexts. A new anthropocentric but not ethnocentric approach that achieved fulfilment in Athens, in the 5th-4th century B.C. It is a humanism wherein the rational mind helped by observation, pragmatism and logic has the potential to seek everything there is to learn about man and the cosmos. It is a search after the truth and the universal principles in each man, leading to universal concepts, guided throughout by a moral approach. It is the need perpetually to call into question oneself, one's beliefs, one's attitudes, one's stance, one's image of oneself and others. For as Polonius says in "Hamlet": "This above
all? to thine own self be true,
It is the realization that man is a political animal, and the choice of democracy as the most appropriate system within which there is absolute political equality for all, embodying discussion and debate and the right for each to express himself. Each citizen protected by the sacred inviolability of the law. It should ensue that each man assumes his full dignity and responsibility in freedom within an ethical context propitious to the fulfilment of his potential, each contributing thus to the evolution of humanity. The acceptance of this spiritual birth should enable all men to understand and to relate to each other, the above concepts being the same for all, regardless of race, religions or mores. Already in Greece, in late Summer 1949, I realized that the answer to all my problems and anguish was to be found within myself. It was no fault of others, of systems or circumstances. It was within myself that lay all the answers. I soon gave up my Marxism, realizing that its implementation, the putting into practice a theory in contradiction with human nature, could only become a depraved deformation of an utopia - however beautifully moving and appealing the "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" (K. Marx and F. Engels, Complete Works,vol. 19, p. 20). Back in Paris in the Autumn of 1949, I went to see a dealer who had a "Cycladic" forehead and whom I had met in the Herakleion Museum and said: "I want to collect Greek art, will you help me?" And that is how I started. Possibly I instinctively hoped that by acquiring ancient Greek objects I would acquire the spirit behind them, that I would be imbued with their essence. I had no knowledge; I had never studied archaeology and I did not go to museums. My approach was purely intuitive, instinctive. The vision of certain objects struck me viscerally, then they came to fascinate and move me, I let them speak to me, I let their content and spirit nourish me. I began to go to museums and looked with intensity. I learnt by looking, by feeling, and then reading the labels and comparing. Why, what, when? One of my earliest acquisitions was the Neolithic idol, no. 42. She moved me when I first saw her, and amazingly when I looked at her in moments of anguish or doubt these disappeared. I wondered why. In her time she was an idol of fertility, a protection against the fates, fire, flood, drought. She was a promise of plenty and the continuation of the race. What is it in this idol that alleviated the anguish of Neolithic man and mine though of an apparently different nature? I once read that in Africa certain immensely fat women are held in the highest esteem, for in time of famine, they survive longer thanks to their fat. Was not mine also an existential anguish? Thus the idol's steatopygous forms are not only physical but contain a spirit, the answer to man's most primeval needs, still a part of all of us, however deeply buried. |
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