That ancient Greek Slave who Hiram Powers turned young through a chain

 

Copying styles or interpreting themes coming from Ancient Greece has been the business of countless artists for the last 25 centuries. Along this line, Hiram Powers’ sculpture of “The Greek Slave” might be the earliest example of a modern political critique delivered through the use of classicism – actually the same kind of critique that is at the basis of the recent “Portable Classics” exhibitions at Fondazione Prada in Milan and Venice.

 

Born at the beginning of the 19th century in rural Vermont, Powers moved to Florence in the middle of his career to benefit from the Italian expertise on marble and bronze craftsmanship. He found himself closer to a community of fellow neoclassical sculptors from all over Europe and North America, who had settled in the country (Rome in particular) to source inspiration for the fashionable style they were adopting. Just like these contemporaries of his, Powers mainly focused on portraying the wealthy and reinterpreting ancient mythologies on demand from the buyers of the time. Though what gained Powers his fame was the depiction of an unknown female slave imprisoned during the Greek revolution against the Ottoman empire, chained and violated by her captors, victim of the historical moment she found herself living in.

 

Modern values of equality and individual rights stemming from the philosophies of Enlightenment had inspired the building of the United States since their independence. The very first state to abolish slavery – Vermont – is, perhaps without coincidence, the one where Powers was born. We could speculate that what unconsciously inspired him to adopt the cause of a Greek slave as the content of his art in 1843 came from the sensitivity of a young boy growing up in a place where no human being could own another human being.

 

After the first clay model of the statue was completed in Florence, casts and authorised reproductions of the Greek Slave toured the United States. The pamphlet of the exhibition read: “the Greek Slave is an emblem of the trial to which all humanity is subject”. And in such collective trial at the time, the accusations grew from one specific situation in Greece to broader ones, as the Greek Slave became a symbol for the abolitionists during the American civil war as well as one for the first intellectuals denouncing gender based oppression.

 

When seeing the dissonance between the connoted forms of neoclassic beauty and the cruelty of the subject of the Greek Slave, one is reminded of very contemporary artists similarly breaking the viewer’s expectations to engage in political critique. Two examples can be easily given, both related to the negative legacy of slavery in our present times.

 

The first is the work of Kehinde Wiley where generic old master techniques and styles are used to portrait street-cast African Americans. It comes with no surprise that the Brooklyn Museum, an institution in giving voice to the unrepresented through the arts, both keeps a copy of the Greek Slave in its permanent collection and recently hosted an exhibition of Wiley’s work.

 

The second is the work of Yinka Shonibare MBE, who’s currently having a retrospective show at DHC in Montreal. Almost the perfect opposite as the The Greek Slave or Wiley’s work, the protagonists of Shonibare MBE’s pictures, videos and installations are known to the mainstream history (philosophers, politicians, theatre play characters, etc) but their aesthetic (the African connoted Dutch-wax fabric in which they are dressed) comes across unexpectedly to question what we know about history and art.

 

Even though we cannot be sure whether Hiram Powers was conscious of the political force of the Greek Slave, this 172 years old statue talks to us as loudly as more recent artwork, perhaps still inspiring people willing to tackle today’s issues of oppression and inequality as it did in the 19th century when it was contemporary art.

November 25, 2020