Greek REVIVAL

Along the Aegean, a cadre of major art players has been steadily setting up shop. Here's what to see—and where to be seen—this season By Nate Freeman

- By Nate Freeman

CONTEMPORARY ART HAS been thriving in Greece for a long time. Eleven thousand years ago, Ice Age scrawlers were making cave paintings of dwarf deer on the island of Crete. Remarkable figurative clay sculptures emerged in the Neolithic period, around 4000 BC. The art of classical Greece, in the fourth and fifth centuries BC, is where you get the good stuff: red-figure vases, the marble and gold Athena Parthenos, friezes, reliefs, steles, and amphoras.

But in all the millennia of Greek art history, one year stands out: 2009. That's because in 2009, Larry Gagosian, one of the world's most celebrated art dealers, hung his shingle in Athens, opening a gallery in what was then pretty far-flung from the culture hubs of Europe. But he was committed. The first show consisted of four new paintings by Cy Twombly, one of the century's most devoted Hellenophiles, each drenched in the cerulean of the Aegean Sea. Eli Broad immediately snapped up one of the paintings, and now it resides in the museum that bears his name in Los Angeles.