Art: SCULPTURE ON THE BARGAIN COUNTER

“DESPITE today’s boom prices in the market for popular paintings (TIME, Dec. 5), art collecting need not be any more expensive a hobby than photography or sailing. To make that point, the City Art Museum of St. Louis last week was staging a show of 367 art works priced at $4 to $1,200 apiece. Art objects of various neglected periods proved to be even better bargains than contemporary pictures by little-known artists. Sample rates: a bronze reindeer from ancient Persia for $632.50, a 5,000-year-old “female divinity” from Sumer for $103.50, an ancient Egyptian bronze statuette of Anubis for $172.50, a Tarascan warrior for $200, a Coptic bone statuette for $28.75, Etruscan earrings for $189.75, and two highly stylized Spanish and Greek bronzes for $200 (left} and $402.50 (right}.

Among the show’s most surprisingly low-priced hits were the Greek terra cottas (opposite}. Starting with the Tanagra woman and reading clockwise, their price tags read: $517.50, $115, $345 and $230. The makers of the terra cottas were low-caste artisans, often slaves, who turned out art by the ovenful, like cookies, mostly for the grave trade. Whether out of superstition or sentiment, their wares were heaped in tombs, and so sometimes survived the centuries. Many of the figures are thought to be free little interpretations of lost great sculptures. They narrowly reflect, as in a rear-view mirror, the lucid, passionate, sun-swept world of the ancient Mediterranean.