B E L G R AV I A R E S I D E N T S ’ J O U R N A L 015

The Belgravia Residents’ Journal reviews the latest art offerings in the area

The besT and The resT

GuideThe art

Henry Hopwood-Phillips strays to Mayfair to see if Kallos Gallery lives up to its name

A s I stroll up to the burnished copper front of Kallos Gallery on Davies Street, I curse myself for letting my classics knowledge slip. In the

office I’d been mocked by colleagues for claiming kallos was a catch-all Greek term for goodness. ‘Oh there was nothing really to laugh at,’ Dr Liz Sawyer, the gallery’s director of events, assures me. ‘The Greek phrase hoi kaloi te k’agathoi combines beauty and moral goodness in a similar way to how we say “the great and good” today.’

As my pride slowly re-inflates, I realise we are standing by a Parthian stag rhyton (a stag-shaped drinking horn) of the 1st century. With gold leaf details and garnets for eyes, its beauty hits me about the same time as the air conditioning does. Made by itinerant Greek craftsmen in the local style of Hellenised Parthia, its musculature at the front, frozen taut in the hunt, is in such perfect proportion to the drinking horn that the outrageous rear development almost looks natural.

A young team leads the new gallery. As well as Liz, there is Dr Glenn Lacki, the gallery director. Both have marinated in classics for most of their lives. I ask the latter why he thought about going into business in the first place. ‘A very long DPhil!’ he admits. ‘I met the Baron at Oxford and taught him Latin for several years. Over dinner one night he told me about his gallery plans. How could I refuse?’ The Baron of course refers to Lorne Thyssen-Bornemisza, third in a prominent line of Swiss-German-Hungarian collectors, and the founder of Kallos.

The Baron got into collecting antiquities about 15 years ago. ‘He probably has the world’s greatest collection of Roman coins,’ Lacki tells us. I marvel at the lack of specie. ‘Although there are strong players in Roman, Byzantine, Persian and other fields because there are so many that, to use the Baron’s words, “fish from the same pond” when it comes to Greek works, there are actually very few trying to specialise in its extraordinary pieces,’ Lacki explains, hence the gallery’s concentration on this area.

‘One is as 10,000 to me if that one is the best,’ Heraklitus wrote, and it forms the keystone of Kallos’ philosophy. Lacki tells me how the Baron refuses to let the bar drop, not once, not for anything; although his approach can be a little too perfectionist. ‘Sometimes he complains

about missing pieces. Now, if we want to wait around for an intact bronze of Aphrodite at her bath, we may be waiting a long time!’ Lacki exclaims.

‘This is a field which only appreciates. Each passing year there are fewer top-end and well-provenanced pieces on the market. It’s like a list of endangered animals. Once they’re gone, they are gone forever,’ Lacki reminds me soberly. ‘This plays out in the markets. Antiquities were, for instance, one of the best performing assets sold out of the British Rail Pension Fund’s art investments.’

‘This is because there is something special about the timelessness of an antiquity,’ Sawyer remarks. ‘You are a custodian of a piece of history, pieces that have been chosen as the best by past generations in an unbroken chain. Yet the heaviness, the gravitas of that art is tempered by the fact that anybody can appreciate it. You don’t need a doctorate to love that dinos over there – it was a mixing bowl for wine at parties. The classics are about reconnecting with an eternal nature, about being part of stories that are bigger than us.’

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

14-16 Davies Street, W1K 3DR, 020 7493 0806 (kallosgallery.com)

From top: Black-figure Dinos, circa 540-20 BCE; Bronze Geometric Horse Votive, circa 750-30 BCE