This volume accompanies an exhibition at the Getty Villa in Malibu and Musée Picasso in Antibes and combines ancient art objects with works by four prominent artists completed in the first three decades of the twentieth century. This beautifully presented catalogue includes eight short essays examining the ways that the classical legacy informs the modernist aesthetic. In visual art, at least, the twentieth century marks the final break with the many versions of institutional classicism current across the Western world. Anti-academic sentiment disdained the high-art traditions inherited from the Renaissance, and new art movements now challenged familiar modes of expression, not least those associated with the idealised human body and its classical-sculptural archetypes. Even so, leading artists still continued to find in Greece and Rome the stimulus for a new and challenging creativity.

As the preface states, the aim of the essays is not merely to identify antique sources, but to explore each artist's ‘individual vision of antiquity’. A few words on the four artists may be helpful. Pablo Picasso, son of an academic artist and instructor, had been drawing from antique models since childhood. Having established himself at the forefront of the Cubist movement, he had rejected the extremes of avant-garde art by the post-war period, and, like other European artists now subscribed to ‘le rappel à l'ordre’ (a phrase coined in a 1926 book of essays by Jean Cocteau) with a return to figurative painting. Born in Athens, Giorgio de Chirico studied art in Munich and as a young man lived in Italy before arriving in Paris in 1911. From this point his Metaphysical style involved the juxtaposition of unexpected combinations of objects (including ancient statues set in deserted Italian piazzas), while the 1920s saw him develop a new signature style with human figures represented as anonymous mannequins. Fernand Léger began his career as an architect; he developed his own brand of Cubism and later in life looked to classical influences, fusing the female with industrial machinery and commercial advertising. A Cubist, Dadaist and Surrealist in turn, Francis Picabia only favoured figurative art in the mid-1920s. In his 1930's Transparencies, classical statues emerge from beneath layers of Renaissance imagery. These works were conceived as a reaction to the conservative classicism Picabia saw around him and are often read as playful and parodic.

The artists are well chosen. They intersect on a prosaic level: all four were sponsored at different times by the Parisian art dealer, Léonce Rosenberg; and Picasso, Léger and Picabia lived on the French Riviera. These seemingly trivial connections impact on their work. In 1929 an exhibition in a grand apartment rented by Rosenberg showcased de Chirico and Picabia among others. Each was allocated their own room with Picabia's Transparencies in Madame Rosenberg's bedroom and de Chirico's gladiator series in the main hallway. Set amongst lavish Louis-Philippe furniture and decoration, the new works imposed on an old interior to maximum effect. In the 1920s the Riviera was abandoned during the summer because of its heat and Picasso, in particular, made ample use of its deserted beaches as the backdrop of his classicising paintings of bathers and nudes. Cochran (p. 34) quotes the artist as seeing his family holiday in Antibes bringing him closer to an idyllic vision of mythological Greece: ‘In Paris I never draw fauns, centaurs or mythological heroes. One would say they only live here’.

Cochran's essay ponders the problems of how the four artists came to terms with antiquity in an age that privileged the present and cites Picabia's Transparencies as illustrating ‘the impossibility of representing the past in anything other than a distortion’ (p. 34). But Picabia also famously stated that ‘there is no antiquity’ (the title of Green's first essay), affirming that the past continues to live most fully and vividly in (or as) the present.

Mythological themes emerge in a number of these canvases, but in a Freudian world where classical myth is frequently used to illustrate psychoanalytical thought, traditional narrative becomes less important than symbol and metaphor. Picabia's Transparencies conflate classical and other sources. In his essay on the artist, D. informs us that their mythological titles are actually butterfly species deriving from Paul Girod's 1912 Atlas de poche des papillons de France, Suisse et Belgique. The connection is made explicit in Briseis (1929), which features the Dying Niobid from the National Museum in Rome with an image of a butterfly transposed over her face. But does the title recall Achilles' captive in Homer's Iliad or a species of moth, or both, or neither?

In order to illuminate the impact of antiquity on modernist creativity, the exhibition brings together thirty-seven modern works and thirteen Greek and Roman objects. The only antique that does not belong to the Getty collection is a Greco-Roman Sleeping Ariadne from the San Antonio Museum of Art. De Chirico's own version of the well-known Vatican Ariadne appears in Melanconia (1912), Melancholy of a Beautiful Day (1913), The Soothsayer's Reward (1913) and Square with Ariadne (1913). The landscape features of the San Antonio sculpture – her rocky bed crawling with lizards, birds and snails – emphasise de Chirico's transposition of his statue to the urban setting of an Italian piazza. The same Ariadne is referenced in the middle figure of the three women in Picasso's The Bathers (1918) and Man Watching his Sleeping Female Companion (1922).

Another well-known statue from the classical canon, the Crouching Aphrodite (known through versions in the Louvre and British Museum and represented here in a Getty version), is used by Picasso, Léger and Picabia. In Léger's Kneeling Woman (1921) all her soft curves are hardened, while Picabia's Crouching Woman (1942) references a photograph from a soft-porn magazine rather than the original sculpture. More generally, the subtle line drawings of Picasso's Vollard Suite etchings (1930–7) and illustrations to Ovid's Metamorphoses (1931) recall incised Etruscan bronze mirrors and Greek vase painting. Greek vases are recalled again in Léger's Woman Holding a Vase (1921), where the woman's columnar body echoes that of the red vase that she holds. The vase and the woman are interchangeable, each an extension of the other.

One characteristic of modernist employment of antiquities is an eclectic borrowing from different periods and places. Picasso's bronze head of his young lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, suggests Cycladic sculpture in the simplistic stylisation of her features, while G. (p. 130) compares it to a fourth-century funerary stele in the Getty collection where a fragment of a woman's head has the same pupil-less eyes, melon hairstyle and calm expression. The pose of Picabia's The Fig Leaf (1922) evokes the Louvre's Hermes tying his sandal, while the monochrome black silhouette of a male body recalls black-figure vase painting. The same artist's Craccae (1928) includes a male dying Niobid from Florence's Uffizi Gallery (seen here in the form of an unrestored version) and a female figure from the Macellum at Pompeii.

Overall the illustrations (and the exhibition they reflect) offer more than the text. Of the four experts who have contributed to the volume, three are modernist art historians; D., Associate Curator of Antiquities at the Getty Museum, is the one specialist in ancient art. Accordingly his is the only essay to discuss the Greek and Roman objects on display. Here the catalogue misses a key opportunity to explore the visitor experience of viewing ancient and modern objects side by side. In the sequence from source to reception the relationship is not merely comparative but dialectical. These modernist art works can tell us much about the period in which they were created, but they can also inform our understanding of the way that ancient art is received, re-imagined and revived and indeed even point us to new or renewed readings of ancient art itself.