National Gallery - Alexandros Soutzos Museum

For building studies and the presentation and preservation of sculptures for the new National Sculpture Gallery, which displays permanent collections of contemporary Greek sculpture. With support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the stables of Goudi Army Park, two historic nineteenth-century buildings, have been renovated and modernized, in order to serve as the National Sculpture Museum. The park overlooking the two buildings has become the site of an outdoor sculpture museum. The creation of a National Sculpture Gallery and its catalogue was an imperative for Greece as a country. Greek artisans had a profound influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century sculpture, and the nation lacked a home for their masterpieces. One of the renovated Gallery buildings houses the permanent collection of Greek sculpture with works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The other building hosts periodical exhibitions, with an emphasis on sculpture and other forms of art. The brilliant sculptors of the nineteenth century created the face and features for modern Greece and endowed the neoclassical architecture of the Greek towns with superb works of art. Artists of note include Leonidas Drossis, whose work adorns the Academy building; the Fytalis brothers, Vroutos and Filippotis; and Yannoulis Chalepas and his classical and, later on, more liberal works. In the twentieth century, the great sculptors Rodin, Bourdell, Maillol, and their students and followers and, later on, the Cubists, followed in the traditions of their precursors.