ABSTRACT
The study of the reception of antiquity in 20th-century art is a risky task, since our main methodological tool is to establish and interpret similarities, and this is often a highly subjective exercise, which can mislead us because it is aff ected by false expectations and prejudices. Questions of artistic reception require a highly critical approach, especially when one is confronted with a multitude of possible cross-fertilisations between artists, restorers, architects, and archaeologists, such as in studies of Aegean prehistory of the early 20th century. While the relation between Art Nouveau/Jugendstil and the discoveries of the Cretan Bronze Age at the beginning of the 20th century constitutes an often-discussed (albeit controversial) topic, it appears that similar questions concerning the period between the First and Second World Wars have, so far, received much less scholarly att ention. Thus, in the fi rst part of this contribution, I will shed light on the artistic reception of Minoan art in this later period and on the interrelations between Art Deco, Cubism, and their related artistic trends on the one hand, and the archaeological activities, especially in Minoan Crete, on the other. The second part will be devoted to examining to what extent the reconstruction of Evans’s ‘Palace of Minos’ in the 1920s was shaped by contemporary architectural concepts. I have to stress that I am neither a modern art historian nor an architect: my focus is merely the history of research and artistic reception.
