Museum of Cycladic Art

Museum of Cycladic Art

Museum featuring ancient Cycladic sculptures & artifacts, with kid-friendly activities & exhibits. The Museum of Cycladic Art is a living cultural institution in the centre of Athens that focuses on the promotion of the ancient civilizations of the Aegean and Cyprus, with special emphasis on Cycladic art of the 3rd millennium BC. It is a Legal Entity under Private Law supervised by the Ministry of Culture withοut state funding.

The Museum has operated since 1986 to house and display the private collection of antiquities of Dolly and Nikolaos Goulandris. Since then, it has expanded significantly and today holds one of the most complete private collections of Cycladic art in the world, with representative specimens of the world-famous Cycladic marble figurines.

The nucleus of the Museum’s Cycladic Art Collection is the marble figurines depicting naked human figures that fascinate the visitor with their simplicity and abstractness, elements that have inspired some of the 20th-century’s greatest artists, such as Konstantin Brancusi, Amedeo Modigliani, Alberto Giacometti, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore.

The Main Building, at 4 Neophytou Douka str., was built in 1985 by the architect Ioannis Vikelas to house the permanent collections of the MCA. The builidng has 4 floors with galleries, occupying in total of approximately 2,300 sq. m., storerooms, workshops, and offices.

The Stathatos Mansion, the work of the Bavarian architect Ernst Ziller, is one of the most important extant examples of Neoclassical architecture in nineteenth-century Athens. Since 1993 it houses temporary exhibitions and the offices of the museum. The building is accessible both from the corner of Vasilissis Sophias Avenue and Irodotou Street and from the Main Building, via a closed passageway leading from the atrium.