The Presidents’ Gifts: Greek Antiquities in Political and Ceremonial Diplomatic Exchange between Greece and the USA from 1946 to 1967
Presented By
American School of Classical Studies at Athens
Annual Archives Lecture
Speaker(s)
Nassos Papalexandrou, David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History at the University of Texas, Austin, pursued his undergraduate studies at the Department of History and Archaeology, National Kapodistrian University of Athens. In 1998 he received his doctorate at Princeton and since 2002 he has been member of the faculty of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author or Bronze Monsters and the Cultures of Wonder: Griffin Cauldrons in the Preclassical Mediterranean (2021) and co-editor (with Amy Sowder-Koch) of Hephaistus on the Athenian Acropolis: Current Approaches to the Study of Artifacts Made of Bronze and Other Metals (2023).
Location
Cotsen Hall, Hybrid Lecture, Anapiron Polemou 9, Kolonaki 10676ABOUT THE LECTURE
Based on archival research and the study of the objects themselves, my lecture enlightens the agentive role of antiquities as diplomatic gifts in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Although the practice is documented before 1940, several factors imbued antique objects with unprecedented roles and significance. The disastrous civil wars in Greece (1944-1949) and the immediate involvement of the US in every aspect of Greek political or economic life from the late 1940s onward, reinforced local the politically expedient ideology of ethnikophrosyne. In political and ceremonial exchange, well-chosen antiquities spoke eloquently about ethnikofrosyne and its pro-western values of democracy, liberal economy, and a free Western world premised on ancient Greek values. Archival research in both Greece and the United States sheds light on the provenance of these antiquities, how they were chosen, and their ceremonial function once they arrived in the USA. Their story is no less fascinating than their biography and the roles these objects have played in Presidential Libraries and Museums under the auspices of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).