Original published in Greek: «Ο μύθος του συλλέκτη και η συλλογή του μύθου. Έργα τέχνης, ιστορίες,
αντικείμενα, σχέσεις του Αλέξανδρου Ιόλα.» [The myth of the collector and his collection. Art works, stories,
objects, relations of Alexander Iolas]. Mouseology, Cultural Politics and Education. Ed. By Asimina Kaniari and
Yorgos Bikos,.Athens: Grigoris, 2014.
In the mid-2000s a group of artists in Athens, Greece, took the initiative of raising publicity around the figure of the late art dealer and collector Alexander Iolas. The group was been formed in 2001 under the name Filopappou Group by recent art graduates. Over several years its members remained anonymous and many changed over time. Their work was mainly comprised of ephemeral projects and discursive events. One of their long-term projects was the Alexander Iolas Project that included the action ‘At a turn we met Alexander Iolas’ from 2011. The action’s press release reads: ‘The group attempts to pose a reflective question with this project concerning the contemporary Greek art, by using a major example: the emblematic figure of Alexander Iolas.’ (Filopappou Group, 2011; see also Kolokytha, 2014) The action was comprised of an exhibition, discussions, lectures and the creation of an archive. Curiously, the group’s character as a collective of anonymously collaborating artists, as well as the discursive character of several of their actions, show little relevance to the figure of Alexander Iolas. Stories about Iolas present him as an utterly self-indulging and ruthless art dealer, interested in artists as individual and with little time for collective, research-oriented or self-reflective art tendencies of his time. So what could it be that both motivated as well as enabled the young artists to turn to the ‘emblematic’, as they called him, persona of Iolas and to appropriate him with such liberty to their own artistic language and ends? To my opinion, it is the ‘myth’ of Iolas and his collection, as it was constructed in Greece: ‘mythical’ was for Greece in the seventies and eighties his eccentric, cosmopolitan personality as well as his large collection. ‘Mythical’ they also remained in another sense, as narrations that cannot easily be examined due to the physical disappearance of both since 1987, when Iolas died, his collection was dispersed, documentation disappeared, and no heir or other legitimate beneficiary objected to the various uses of Iolas’ name. Therefore, any attempt to talk today about Alexander Iolas and his collection during the years of their actual presence in Greece has an inevitable point of departure. Due to the physical loss of them both and inaccessibility of any archives of Iolas, any attempt to approach their history is itself a story based on other stories. Numerous verbal, as well as visual stories or narrations can be found mainly in interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, TV shows, a published biography by Nikos Stathoulis and so on (Stathoulis, 2012)1
In her article ‘Objects as meanings; or narrating the past’, Susan Pearce analyzes relations between objects and their meanings with regard to objects that are connected to historical events. She points out that ‘the past survives in three ways: as objects or material culture; as landscape (…); and as narratives (that may of course take the form of film or tape, as well as of written text’ (Pearce, 1994, 27). In the case of the Iolas collection as part of a historical past that is of interest both for art collecting, as well as for the recent history of Greece, the past before 1987 has partly survived as material culture and landscape: some items from his collection can be located individually in other collections, while also the collector’s house still stands abandoned in the Athenian suburb of Aghia Paraskevi. However predominantly, the past survives in the third way: as narratives. In this article I will maintain that the physical absence of the collector, his collection and any archive, and their existence primarily as narratives, could be turned from the researcher’s impasse into a tool. One could think of these remaining materials in the following way: what could have triggered the production
of numerous narratives around the collector and his once-upon-a-time large collection of modern and contemporary art, antique furniture, antiquities, jewelry, as well as various other valuable or fancy objects and endless series of clothes, if not social, cultural, financial and even political relations that have determined the collection’s symbolic and material functions (see also Appadurai, 1986). By examining the content and form of these narrations one can actually study these relations (Pearce, 1995, 3-38). By turning the absences into a tool, I will focus here specifically on three kinds of narratives. First, on a television documentary and a magazine article in which journalists interview Iolas about himself, his collection and house in Ag.Paraskevi. The documentary made by journalist Maria Karavia for her Greek TV show Ikastika [=Visual Arts] was broadcasted in 1982. The article by Peter Dragadze was published in Town and Country in 1984.2
In both of them, Iolas is presented to be presenting himself and his collection in his Ag.Paraskevi residence. The second kind of narrative is comprised of articles in the Greek press from 1984 onwards, when a scandal around Iolas and his collection started. Finally, I will briefly refer to two exhibitions at the gallery Down Town in Athens in 2000 and 2007 respectively, which included art works, personal and other objects that used to belong to Iolas. The gallery was ran by Iolas’ biographer Nikos Stathoulis. I should also mention here that quite recently, in 2014, two relevant shows were
presented by the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. The first one was about Iolas himself (Fremont, 2014), and the second about the renowned exhibition Bloodflames from 1947 at the Hugo Gallery, the first gallery he directed. These are the only art projects about Iolas that I am aware of in the United States, where he spent the largest part of his life and more materials can be found in archives (e.g., Menil Collection Archives, Houston, Texas).
Let me start with a short biographical account. Alexander Iolas was born Konstantinos Koutsoudis in Alexandria, Egypt, sometime between 1907-1912, to a family of well-off merchants. As teenager he fled to Athens, where he hoped to become involved in the arts. Between the late ninety-twenties and early forties he passed from Berlin, Rome, Salzburg, Paris and finally New York. He had a successful career as ballet dancer and afterwards less success as short-lived director of the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas. He posed as model for artists – various stories mention Giorgio de Chirico, Raoul Dufy, Andre Derain και Leonor Fini – and acquired also a few art works. Narratives of his life between Alexandria and New York abound with personalities and celebrities from the worlds of arts, letters, aristocracy and
fashion: Constantine Cavafy, Dimitris Mitropoulos, Nelly’s, Kyra Nijinsky, George Balanchine, Theodora Keogh (Roosevelt), Gertrude Stein, Sergei Prokofiev, Paul Valery, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Elizabeth Arden…. Iolas had social, professional, personal and sometimes also private relations with them. Between 1944, when he abandonded dance and became director of the newly established Hugo Gallery in New York, until 1976 when he closed all his galleries except for one, he had expanded his art dealing business to Paris, Geneva, Milan, Rome, Zurich and Madrid. He played an important role in the establishment of surrealists in the American art market, later of the American Pop Art especially through Warhol, of French Nouveau Realism through Jean Tingueli, Niki DeSaint Phalle και Martial Raysse, and also supported Greek artists living abroad.3 He was an advisor for big private collectors, most notably the De Menil in Houston (USA), as well as donor to public institutions such as the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The National Gallery in Athens and the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki – the last two in Greece.
Towards the late seventies he decided to settle down in Greece. In 1984, accusations by a transvestite combined with his anyway eccentric public and private life gave rise to a multifaceted scandal in the Greek press. Though he had established himself with and despite his eccentric and pompous behaviour in the largest art centers of Europe and North America, the yellow press in Greece didn’t spare him, targeting especially his possession of antiquities and his homosexuality. In the end, depressed from the scandal and with deteriorating health, he cancelled various ideas that could had made significant 20th century art accessible to the Athenian public, which saw the first contemporary art museum only in 1997. Only members of the newly established, then, Macedonian Center of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki embraced a donation that formed the core of the homonymous museum collection.
The collector’s house, or, ‘the empty canvases, where fantasies can be created and lived out’ (Bayley,
1991).
Maria Karavia: I . I have to interrupt you :You don’t regard yourself either a collector, or rich, or an art dealer! How do you see yourself then?
Alexander Iolas: Oh, I won’t tell you that! This is my secret, much too personal. You cannot ask me things like that! First of all, because I cannot answer in a direct way. I will take a hundred different ways to answer! Because I am like the head of Janus that changes colors every second! I cannot have you nailing me down. It’s not that I don’t want to say, but it’s impossible. To start with, I don’t consider myself either an art dealer, or an artist, a dancer, an actor or anything else. I am Iolas, and I love art, and I have intoxicated myself with art, and have experienced the greatest pleasures in life, though art! Call me art’s pimp and that’s it! (Karavia, 1982)
Ancient columns, Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Byzantine pillars from Ravenna, Baroque columns from Venice, ancient statues, doors, pieces of furniture and staircase handles designed by the Lalannes, Surrealist paintings and sculptures, Byzantine icons, ancient funerary stelae, antique silverware, mixed with works by Andy Warhol and Dennis Oppenheim, tapestries made for Fontainebleau, silver chandeliers Louis XVI, nudes in contemporary paintings and sculptures, tapestries by Mattiaci, chalices from the House of Hapsburg, door handles made of semiprecious stones, the magnetic sculptures of Takis, kinetic sculptures by Jean Tingueli, Niki de St Phalle… the verbal and visual enumerations of the collections in Iolas’ residence as presented by Maria Karavia bring to us the amounts, as well as the idiosyncratic arrangement of objects in space. In his seventies, Iolas had lived an extraordinary life, had created an impressive collection (though not everything was surely an original and probably the dealer’s depot occasionally merged with the collection) and indulged in exposing them both. Both Karavia’s documentary and Dragadze’s article could had been directed by himself. They communicate vanity and leave behind an impression of a mix of private game and public performance, with the collection and the villa functioning as something between a personal universe and performance setting (Baekeland, 1994: 206; Belk, 1994: 322) .
Photography plays a major role in both narrations. The camera moves slowly from one room to the other, creating a sense of ritual, and inviting the gaze of the spectator to examine objects and spaces. The collector appears sometimes walking in ritualistic fashion, sometimes reclining in a sofa, or posing next to a column and always wearing different outfits, reminding us also of his past as dancer and model. In voiceover we listen to him unfolding his life to Maria Karavia. But there is no single shot where the two meet on the screen, nor does any of them speak in front of the camera. In other scenes of the documentary we see waiters walking up and down on the terrace preparing tables for a party. Everyone moves in silence, as part of a choreography that includes objects and humans arranged in the collector’s kingdom.
Iolas had given names to the rooms we see in the documentary – for instance, ‘Egyptian’, ‘Venetian’ and ‘Byzantine’ room – but the names did not necessarily match the objects inside them (Dragadze; see also Stewart, 1993: 151-152; Belk, 1994: 321).4 Moreover, differentiations between objects of special cultural value – artistic, historical or other – and functional objects in daily use were often played down. In modern cultural practices of the West objects of cultural value in collections are usually spared the wear and tear of daily use. Rather, they are safeguarded and conserved. In Iola’s villa several objects of practical use were simultaneously part of a whole, within which they also had symbolic
functions either due to artistic status, or other special value (see also Jones, 2010). For instance, some objects were designed by artists, such as a bar-sculpture designed by Francois-Xavier Lalanne, candlesticks by Dali; certain antiques had historic associations to earlier owners, such as a couch of Marcel Proust (or his mother); other objects were made of valuable materials, like the door handles of semiprecious stones. Yet other objects, such as the white parchment-dressed books in a white library, were incorporated to the formalist aesthetic of the library’s interior, which looked more like an artistic installation than a room in use (Stewart, 1993: 151-155; Danet and Katriel,1994: 229, 232). Accordingly,
the collector appears within his residence as the master and orchestrator of the collection in space and in time (Bayley, 1991: 70-71; Stewart, 1993: 151-155). However at the same time, when, for instance, he shows up dressed in white and sitting at his desk inside his white library, right in the middle of a quite strict, centralized interior arrangement, he becomes himself a part of the interior arrangement of furniture and objects, formally ‘orchestrated’ himself as part of the whole (Belk, 1994: 321-322)..
Mixing together different styles and periods, the symbolic and the artistic with the useful, Iolas reached sometimes a provocative and snob kitsch (for ‘kitsch’ see Stewart, 1993: 168; Pearce, 1998: 37. For instance, he had transformed a 13th century marble baptistery from Florence into a bathroom sink and the giant feet of a Roman statue into bases of library shelves. While for the TV show Ikastika wait staff is shown as they prepare an elegantly decorated, formal dinner table with silverware, candle lights, flowers etc., in his biography there is a passage where Iolas is receiving another journalist for an interview, this time lying on a camp bed, covered with military blankets (Stathoulis, 1998).
In his book, Taste. The Secret Meaning of Things, Stephen Bayley writes: ‘If there is a meaning in good taste, it is pleasing peers, while bad taste insults them. However cultivated bad taste or kitsch can actually achieve both. Taste has more to do with manners, than with appearance’ (Bayley, 1991: 70-71). Manipulation of taste and kitsch seems to have played a significant role in the ways Iolas had arranged his environment, including objects, people as well as himself among them (see Karavia, 1982; Dragadze, 1984). One could relate all these to his well-off middle-class family background (Bourdieu, 1984), to the young teenager who learned to move in circles of intellectuals and a cosmopolitan jet set, to the dancer and the model, the admirer of the Surrealists, the long-term acquaintance of the artist and idiosyncratic collector Warhol (see Bright, 2001; Smith, 2002), to New York’s artistic, pop and gay scene of the sixties
and seventies, and to a lot more (Robson, 1995; Meyer, 2001; Smith, 2002), but without reducing his identity primarily to any of these paradigms. According to the Greek author Tachtsis cited in Iolas’ biography: ‘He could had been a nobleman in the court of the Medici who out of reverse snobbism indulged in playing the laundress’ (Stathoulis, 1994: 149-150).
By means of his collections as much as through the many international and local guests from the arts who came to visit, Iolas had turned his private house into a kind of art space. Social prestige and impressing peers, are motives behind art collecting often mentioned in the bibliography about collectors (Pearce, 1995; Baekeland, 1994; Belk, 1994), an approach that seems to fit well to the way Iolas is presenting himself in the documentary and the article. Moreover, he had bought more land around his estate in Ag. Paraskevi, where he wanted artists to settle down. In the early eighties in Greece, very few people had contact with international contemporary visual art and artists, in the lack also of any modern art museum in Athens. However the eccentric collector became more broadly known due to appearances in cultural and social columns of magazines and newspapers, and particularly between 1984-1987 to the scandal. In this context, the collector’s public image was inextricably connected to his collection, its size, variety and monetary value (Baekeland, 1994; Belk, 1994). The objects as cultural capital lent to their collector prestige, through the social and cultural practices and respective symbolic capital inscribed in them. Simultaneously and in reverse, Iolas imposed also the mark of his personality on the objects by means of their idiosyncratic arrangement in space and use, as he played with manipulating symbolisms, mixing the culturally high with and low, the useful and the daily.
At the beginning of this section I quoted Iolas response to a question by Karavia in thedocumentary Ikastika. His playful negations – ‘I am not an art dealer, I am not a collector’ – all the while we watch him surrounded by art works and antiques, seems to be very much in tune with another game found in his (auto)biographical narrations, which were also in themselves like a collection of events, between reality and myth. For instance, his biographer mentions that before leaving Alexandria, the poet Cavafy had provided him with reference letters for the poets Sikelianos, Palamas and the conductor Mitropoulos. In Karavia’s documentary we hear: Sikelianos, Palamas and writer Gryparis. With inconsistencies like these, his autobiographical narratives balance between reality and legend, and I am using here the term ‘legend’ in the sense of not completely true. However regardless what exactly is true in the variations of such stories, historical truth about Iolas is connected to people and events of such cultural importance, that metaphorically his life was a bit of a legend anyhow.
When I talk about a kind of mythology here, there is a reason why I insist in the example of relations. One could maintain that relations also formed part of an expanded collecting practice. Series of personalities – artists, writers, intellectuals, politicians, patrons – old aristocrats, celebrities and sometimes controversial figures appear in accounts of his life in a manner not unlike the counts of valuable items in his house (Eco, 2009). Iolas’ social environment and life were anyway closely intertwined with the space and the practice of (art) collecting (Pearce, 1995). To be more precise, already as a young dancer and model he got himself acquainted with a mixed milieu of artists, intellectuals and
wealthy tycoons, where he became accustomed to the symbolic and practical functions of artistic and precious objects, as well as how they operated within relations (Bourdieu, 1984). When he became an art dealer, he played an active role in the art world by representing artists, advising, selling or gifting works to collectors and institutions (Baekeland, 1994, 214). Later, this entire world of artists, art lovers, celebrities etc. – through relations with whom he had created his own fortune, collection and public image – he brought over to his personal universe in the house in Ag.Paraskevi.
Greek Press 1984- : ‘The other side of the same coin’
(i) ‘Good society and the underworld in Iolas’ arms. A reception in honor of his guest and equally pervert dancer, Rudolf Nureyev’, Avriani, 29 April 1985
(ii) Paris Kelaidis, ‘Iolas for interrogation in a silk scarf’, Ethnos, 29 January, 1986
(iii) Ammy Papaioannou, ‘[T]he basements of the palace, when they were filled with undeclared relics of our race.’ Ethnos, 24 April, 1985.
(iv) Manos Charis, ‘Since the time of the Dictatorship the same archaeologist supposedly oversees the antiquities of the ‘roman palace’, Avriani, 5 July, 1985
(v) Manos Charis, ‘Karamanlis opens the exhibition of his ‘beautiful girlfriend’, promoted by his friend and dealer in illegal antiquities’, Avriani, 17 July, 1985
(vi) Efi Polyzoi, ‘The environment of a Maecenas. Exhibition and auction, valuable objects of the collector A. Iolas’. Vradyni, 12 December, 2000
(vii) ‘Iolas, twenty years after… Exhibition of works from his collection inaugurated by Y. Voulgarakis’, Kathimerini, 30 January 2007.
Between 1984-1987 the frequency of references to the Iolas scandal in the press was occasionally impressive, especially in the flagship newspaper Avriani. It started with allegations of illegal trade in antiquities, moved on to drug dealing, as well as pimping and sodomy. Allegations were made by a transvestite known as ‘Callas’ (pseudonym after the opera singer). I selected here titles and captions of press photos that directly or indirectly relate to the collection, and which show what could trigger the public’s attention. For instance, Greek society in the mid-eighties was not used to homosexuality coming out (see i), or to eccentric public appearances and ostentation of wealth (ii). Explicitly or implicitly, such public appearances are linked here to perverse extremities of a very ‘high’ or very ‘low’ society. I think it
is obvious that terms such as ‘good society and the underworld’, ‘pervert’, ‘palace’, ‘roman villa’, ‘beautiful girlfriend’ και ‘promoted’ aimed at creating negative media effects. The scandal expanded beyond Avriani. Most other newspapers were more reserved, but they covered extensively the Iolas scandal once it entered court in January 1986, and continued after his death in June 1987.
Illicit trade in antiquities played a key role in the scandal. There is nothing strange about this, as public opinion in Greece has always been oversensitive to implications of abuse of what has broadly been regarded as the country’s largest national capital, namely its ancient past (Kokkou, 1977; Apostolakis, 2006; Hamilakis and Yalouri, 1995; Hamilakis, 2007). In titles iii, iv and v the private collection appears to usurp that what Greek society understands as its national heritage and legitimate property only of the Greek state (with all the problems caused by what is considered ‘national’). It made little difference whether part of the Greek antiquities that seemed to had been legally acquired by the collector and were declared, were under the proprietorship of the state.5
It is quite impressive how the author of the two citations from Avriani on July 5th and 17th 1985 (iv and v) has managed in very few words to relate the ancient collection (‘the antiquities’) and in the second citation (v) also contemporary art (‘the exhibition of his beautiful girlfriend’), on the one hand with politics (‘Dictatorship’ and ‘Karamanlis’, the former – then – President of Greece, and on the other with indirect sexual implications at the verge of morals or legality (‘roman villa’, ‘opens the exhibition of his beautiful girlfriend’, ‘promoted’). Cultural and social symbolisms that relate to the possession and handling of cultural capital (antiquities, art) seem to be employed with considerable liberty for the
promotion of interests different to culture.
Thirteen years later (vi), when ‘the environment of a patron’ is exhibited for an auction, the collector and his collection are part of the past and they have merged into one narrative. The collector is virtually there through the physical presence of his objects. The objects are brought together for the exhibition and auction, because they once belonged to Iolas.
Commemorative exhibitions. Uses and interpretations of a ‘myth’.
People who used to enter the house in the early eighties sensed the presence of the owner first through their encounter with the interior, where the collections dominated. This is the impression communicated also by Karavia’s documentary and photos accompanying Dragadze’s article, where the richly decorated entrance of the villa, as well as first views of the interior upon entering are given special attention. In the mid-1980s, when Iolas’ health deteriorated and he was also affected by the scandal, the removal ofitems from the house – a removal that very likely he had started earlier himself due also to financial reasons – was intensified by third parties. Shortly after his death in 1987, the evacuation was completed, signalling the dispersion and disappearance of the collection. As in Greek society Iolas was identified with his collection, the disappearance of the physical body of the collection in a certain sense completed
the biological death of the collector (Belk, 1994). Extremely few archival or other material remains were accessible in Greece that could be used to claim some historical truth, apart from twenty works donated to the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki. As the story of the collector and his collection remained available primarily through narratives and very few and dispersed material leftovers, a space was left open for multiple interpretations and appropriations of Iolas’ myth or legend.
In 2001 the gallery Down Town in Athens, ran by Iolas’ biographer, organized an exhibition and auction under the title ‘Alexander Iolas: My Environment’. It included objects such as eccentric shoes, fur coats and letters that belonged to Iolas. In 2007, for the 20 years anniversary of his death, the same gallery organized a new exhibition that combined art works from private collections abroad, personal items of Iolas and works by artists who had once collaborated with Iolas regardless whether the particular works had ever crossed his hands. These public presentations relied on the capacity of objects to maintain an additional symbolic as well as material value due to a metonymic relation to Iolas either as their previous collector-owner, or previous dealer of their creators. For as long as the collector was still alive he drew prestige from the value of the artistic and other precious objects he was surrounded with. After his death, the objects drew additional meanings and prestige from their association to the history of Iolas and his collection. Nonetheless, being in themselves meager and dispersed remains, rather unrepresentative of the once substantial collection and flamboyant collector, their exhibition practically contributed to the survival of history as a legend.
Let me return here to Susan Pearce and her analysis of relations between objects and meaning, with regard to objects and collections associated with histories from the past (Pearce, 1994: 21-23). At the time when Iolas was alive and the collection still located in his home, the objects had a metonymic relation to one another as parts of the same whole, namely the physical body of the collection and the environment of the villa. Their symbolic status and material value as works of art, antiquities, jewels etc., lent social prestige to their owner. After the collector passed away and his collection was dispersed, the history of both survived in Greece primarily through narratives of Iolas’ ‘legendary’ life (his professional success first in dance and then in art dealing, his friendship or acquaintance with historic figures, his
wealth, the Greek press scandal, etc.). The objects – now in the possession of other owners – continued having a metonymic relation to one another as parts, once, of the lost Iolas’ collection.
Taking the collection and the collector as parts of yet another whole, namely the Iolas case – the press scandal that started in 1984 and the subsequent court case – the objects as remains maintain also a metonymic relation to the history of that case due to the collection’s central role in it. However as time passes and the history of the Iolas case – as the case of the collector and his collection – moves from one frame of reference to another, its content and significance shifts along. For instance, between 1984-1987 the Iolas case referred to the multifaceted press scandal and related litigation. Following the death of the collector, and as negative press gave way to articles about a will with which Iolas intended to bequeath a significant part of his ancient collection to the Greek state, as well as articles that recalled his earlier professional successes, public opinion was partly shifted. What’s more, the impossibility of executing the will, due to the removal of the collection from Aghia Paraskevi under unclear circumstances, underscored weaknesses of the Greek state in fighting illicit antiquities trade. Later, during the nineties, yet another dimension was added to the Iolas case that mobilized the press once again – namely, the future of Iolas’ villa. It seems that the deserted building attracted drug users, causing reactions from locals. Moreover, the villa also kept reminding of the Greek state’s failure to make the collections public. Various voices asked for the conversion of the villa into an art centre.
Returning to the remaining objects – for instance the objects shown at the Down Town Gallery – due to their once direct association with the collector and his collection, they maintain until today a metonymic relation to the Iolas case, despite any shifts in its content. Besides, as these shifts are often associated with broader issues in the recent history of Greece – e.g., illicit antiquities trade, the socio-political phenomenon of yellow press (Avriani) in the eighties, intolerance against homosexuality in the eighties – the Iolas case functions as example for all these issues. Accordingly, the house and remaining objects, as physical remains of that case, maintain also a symbolic relation to those issues (Pearce: 1994, 23).
In closing, let me return to the actions of the Filopappou Group. At the beginning of this article I maintained that the character of this young artists’ group (collectivity, members’ anonymity, ephemeral interventions, research projects, etc.) bears little if any resemblance to the personality and activity of Alexander Iolas, despite them claiming his ‘emblematic figure’ as their point of reference in the homonymous project. As I have tried to show, from a variety of perspectives the history of Iolas has survived as a kind of ‘myth’ within narratives, the historical accuracy of which cannot easily be examined. The content of the Iolas case in the press has undergone different phases that relate to a broad and fluid
range of social, cultural and political issues. As a consequence, both the legendary character of narratives and range and flux of issues touched upon by the press, render the emblematic figure of Iolas quite flexible as well – a kind of reference point susceptible to reinventions following different times and interests, as in the case of the Filopappou group. The physical loss of the body of the collection plays a key role here. While our perceptions of objects and collections depend upon interpretational frameworks we carry along – social, cultural, political or other – these perceptions are ever reshaped through the continuous renegotiation of interpretations occurring between the contact, experience and study of physical objects against the various frames of reference. Nonetheless, in the case of the collector Alexander Iolas and his collection, the objects that one is able to have direct, physical experience of for study and interpretation, are primarily the verbal and visual narrations with their own physicality, and physical objects as represented through them.
1[According to Nikos Stathoulis, Iolas’ biography is based on tape-recorded interviews of autobiographical narrations by Iolas, as well as on other materials collected by the biographer. Sources are never mentioned in the published biography and therefore it cannot be relied upon for historical enquiry.]
2Dragadze’s presentation is also comparable to an earlier article by H. Dorsey (1981).
3 Curiously, Iolas’ career as modern art dealer is often forgotten by art historians today. He was the dealer of Rene Magritte in the United States over thirty years, and largely responsible for the acquisition of numerous works of Magritte by the De Menil collectors in Texas (see Helfenstein and Schipsi, 2010). Since 1952 he was the dealer of large part of Max Ernst’s works and assisted in providing the financial circumstances for Ernst’s 1953 return from Paris to the United States. Also in 1952, as director of the Hugo Gallery in New York, Iolas gave Andy Warhol his first one-man show, Andy Warhol: Fifteen Drawings based on the writings of Truman Capote. He supported Warhol financially with continuous purchases also later, and they
collaborated again for Warhol’s solo-show Last Supper at the Palazzo Stelline in Milan in 1986, the last exhibition for both, who soon after died of AIDS.
4One could also compare here the historical evolution of interior arrangement of collections inside private houses of collectors who intended to turn their homes into museums, see, e.g., B. Lasic (2009), as well as posts on http://homesubjects.blogspot.de/)
5 According to Alexandros Lykourezos, friend and lawyer of Iolas in the lawsuit against the accusations of 1984-1985, before the press scandal started Iolas intended to turn his villa into a museum based on his collections and to establish in Lichtenstein a foundation for the administration of his estate postmortem. Due to the scandal he gave up these plans. See K. Chardavelas, TV show anthropos.gr, MEGA Channel, broadcasted 14 October 2001. After Iolas passed away a will was made public, in which Iolas bequeathed to the Greek state all antiquities in his collection. Nonetheless, before the will could be executed, it seems that all antiquities had already been removed under unclear circumstances from his house in AG. Paraskevi.
Reference list
Apostolakis (2006) Archaeokapileia kai Emporio Arxaeotiton. Mouseia, Emporoi Technis, Oikoi Dimoprasion, Idiotikes Sylloges [Smuggling and Trade in Antiquities. Museum, Art Dealers, Auction Houses, Private Collections]. Athens: Agras.
Appadurai A (1986) The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baekeland F (1994) The psychological aspects of Art Collecting. In: Pearce S M (ed) Interpreting Objects and Collections. London, Routledge, pp.205-219.
Bayley S (1991) Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things. London: Faber & Faber.
Bright D (2001) Shopping the leftovers: Warhol’s collecting strategies in Raid the Icebox I. Art History special issue: Other Objects of Desire, Collectors and Collecting Queerly, 24(2): 278-291.
Belk RW (1994) Collectors and collecting. In: Pearce S M (ed.) Interpreting Objects and Collections. London: Routledge, pp. 317-326.
Bourdieu P (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Nice R (transl.). Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Danet B and Katriel T (1994) No Two Alike: Play and Aesthetics in Collecting. In: Pearce S M (ed.) Interpreting Objects and Collections. London: Routledge, pp. 220-237.
Dragadze P (1984) At Home. Alexander Iolas’s Temple of Art. Town and Country 138, May, pp. 231-237.
Dorsey H (1981) Where all that glitters is gold – Alexander Iolas’ house. Vogue 171, pp.292–296.
Eco U (2009) The Infinity of Lists. An Illustrated Essay. Rizzoli.
Filopappou Group www.omadafilopappou.net. (accessed 25 August 2015)
Filopappou Group (2011) Over the Corner we met Iolas. Press release. Available at: http://beton7.com/index.php/en/program/exhibitions/item/61-filopappou-group.html (accessed 25
August 2015)
Fremont V (ed) (2014) Alexander the Great. New York: Paul Kasmin Gallery.
Hamilakis Y (2007) The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hamilakis Υ and Yalouri Ε (1996) Antiquities as symbolic capital in modern Greek society, Antiquity 70: 117-129.
Helfenstein J and Schipsi L (eds) (2010) Art and Activism. Projects of John and Dominique de Menil, Houston and Yale: The Menil Collection.
Home Subjects. Available at: http://homesubjects.blogspot.de/ (accessed 25 August 2015)
Jones S (June 2010) Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves Beyond the Deconstruction of Authenticity. Journal of Material Culture 15(2): 181–203.
Karavia Μ, Alexandros Iolas. In: Ikastika, broadcasted on ERT1 on 12 August 1982, available at: http://www.ert-archives.gr/V3/public/main/page-assetview.aspx?tid=35348&tsz=0 (accessed 25 August 2015)
Kokkou A (1977) I Merimna gia tis Archaiotites stin Ellada kai ta prota Mouseia [The Care for Antiquities in Greece and the First Museums]. Athens: Ermis.
Kolokytha C (2014) Destroy…Alexander Iolas: The Villa-Museum and the Relics of a Lost Collection. Arts 3: 105-115.
Lasic B (2009) Splendid patriotism. Richard Wallace and the construction of the Wallace Collection. Journal of the History of Collections, 21(2): 173-182.
Meyer R (2001) Mapplethorpe’s living room: photography and the furnishing of desire. In: Art History, special issue: Other Objects of Desire, Collectors and Collecting Queerly, 24(2): 292-311.
Pearce SM (1994) Objects as meanings; or narrating the past». In: Pearce SM (ed) Interpreting Objects and Collections, London and New York: Routledge, pp 19-29.
Pearce SM (1995) On Collecting. London and New York. Routledge.
Pearce SM (1998) Collecting in Contemporary Practice. London: Sage.
Robson DR (1995) Prestige, Profit and Pleasure. The Market of Modern Art in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. New York and London: Garland Publishing.
Smith JW (ed) (2002) Possession and Obsession: Andy Warhol and Collecting. Pittsburg: The Andy Warhol Museum.
Stathoulis Ν (1994) Alexandros Iolas. Athens: Nea Synora Livanis.
Stathoulis Ν (2012) Alexandrou Iola. I Zoi mou. Athens: Odos Panos.
Stewart S (1993) On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir and the Collection. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Ανακτήθηκε στις 09-06-2020 από: https://www.academia.edu/19580767/Art_works_objects_stories_and_relations_of_Alexander_Iolas_The_legendary_collector_and_the_recollection_of_his_legend_English_translation_of_published_Greek_original_?ri_id=1875353
Ι-όλα ή τίποτα 