ATTRIBUTED TO THE NAXOS MUSEUM SCULPTOR, LATE SPEDOS VARIETY, CIRCA 2500-2400 B.C.

The present figure can be attributed to the Naxos Museum Sculptor, an artist who takes his name from an excavated example now in the local museum. Getz-Gentle considers him one of the most independent-minded and prolific sculptors of the Late Spedos variety and lists more than twenty sculptures attributed to his hand, to which the present figure can be added (see pp. 81, 161 and pls. 69-70 in Personal Styles in Early Cycladic Art). As Getz-Gentle observes (op. cit., p. 82), “the most strikingly unusual aspect of the sculptor’s style, not seen again until the Chalandriani variety, is the absence or near-absence of a visible mid-section,” a trait observed here with the comparatively short abdomen. The sculptor either uses the right forearm to construct the top of the pubic triangle, as here, or places the abdominal line directly beneath the right arm.

Joseph Ternbach (1898-1982) trained in Vienna as a metal craftsman and developed a teaching collection of arms and armor at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. In 1939, after spending a year in a concentration camp, he emigrated to Forest Hills, Queens, and worked as a conservator for leading U.S. museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art. In addition to publishing scholarly articles on metal restoration, Ternbach also amassed an important personal collection of ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian and Classical Antiquities.