New York Met reaches deal on antiquities in Greece – NBC New York

New York, October 11 (EFE) .- The Metropolitan Museum of New York (Met) announced this Tuesday that starting in January 2024 it will exhibit 161 Cycladic antiquities collected by Leonard N. Stern, one of the major collectors of this art, after a 50-year agreement with the Greek government.

Under the agreement approved in September by the Greek parliament, the Met will display Stern’s entire collection for 10 years, and for the next 15 years it will periodically send some items to Greece in exchange for loans of other pieces from the Cycladic period, the museum in a statement.

Greece will therefore continue to lend important works from this period to the Met for another 25 years.

The senior executive of the Museum of Cycladic Art, Kassandra Marinopoulou, who is also a party to the agreement, said these are “exquisite and unknown” antiquities that may return to the European country and hopes there will be more historical evidence in the future. that return.

Before going to the Met, a selection of fifteen of the most important pieces from the collection will be exhibited in Athens for a year.

Separately, the Met noted that Stern, an American businessman and philanthropist, donated a large donation to the museum to support the Cycladic art exhibition and studio.

The aforementioned collector noted that he fell in love with this art during a visit to the Met when he was 14 and thus began his work of several decades to collect and protect what was then a little known field in the world of antiquities.

“With the growing awareness that my collection, in its scope and size, had become unique outside of Greece, I decided to work with Greece, the Cycladic Art Museum and the Met so that visitors (. ..) can appreciate the magnificent beauty and mystical simplicity of these incredible objects sculpted about 4,500 years ago, “he said.