Concentrated exhibits that focus on areas of art with which we may think we are already familiar can force us to see that art afresh. Those shows can also encourage us to re-examine that art’s connection to the art of other cultures and to rethink its influence on later artists. The Katonah Museum’s exhilarating exhibition “Ancient Art of the Cyclades,” guest-curated by Pat Getz-Gentle, is just such a show. The exhibit comprises approximately 100 exquisite objects, mostly female figures, or idols, and vessels, but also tools and blades, from a dozen American museums and 16 private collections. It is only the fourth of its kind to be mounted in America, and it is a knockout. Not only does the exhibition illuminate the gorgeous forms and variousness of Cycladic sculpture (a pre-Greek art made during the third millennium B.C.E.), it also helps to bridge that art with the art of our own era — the Modernist forms in the sculpture of Arp, Brancusi, Henry Moore, Elie Nadelman, Picasso, Matisse, and Surrealist-period Giacometti.

The human form, one of the most easily reducible to a recognizable symbol, is also one of the most difficult to distill in art. It is one thing to make a simple recognizable human image (most 3-year-olds are capable of this) and quite another to convey a human presence in the purist, most essential, and elemental of forms — to make that leap to significant form from merely symbolic image. The ancient figurative art of the Cyclades, an archipelago of some 30 islands off the mainland of Greece in the Aegean Sea, comes as close to distilling the human presence as any representational art has before or since.

The Katonah exhibit is arranged chronologically into sections that stress differences between the Late Neolithic Period (c. 5000–3000 B.C.E.), the Early Cycladic I Phase (c. 3000–2800 B.C.E.), the transition between EC I and EC II (c. 2800–2700 B.C.E.), the Early EC II Phase (c. 2700–2500 B.C.E.), and the Late EC II Phase (c. 2400–2200 B.C.E.). A number of very interesting points are made: For instance, the show tracks how the figures went from full-formed to thin, almost abstract “Violin Types” to hybrids to the canonical idols, and how the figures’ arms were placed — from opposed to more naturalistic to the classic, or canonical, folded-arm style. But what is striking about the figures and vessels from this roughly 1,000-year period of art is their similarities, especially in terms of quality.

The American sculptor Nadelman, whose own work undoubtedly influenced Picasso’s first Cubist sculpture, coined the term “significant form,” but Cycladic sculpture got there first. Modernist artists pared down their forms to irreducible essences. For inspiration, at least some of them looked directly at Cycladic sculpture, elevating it, as with African art, to primary from primitive.

According to Ms. Getz-Gentle’s informative catalog essay, most of the Cycladic sculptors were not artists by trade. Rather, they were primarily fishermen or farmers who made art only occasionally. Cycladic vessels and figures — pared-down and smooth to the touch, as if their features had been worn down through centuries of use — resemble pebbles washed up on the beach. And their subjects and motifs (primarily the female form and the sea) and their colors (red, the color of blood and fire, and blue, of the sky and the sea) all come directly from their lives and surroundings.

Most of the art from this period is made of white marble and was found buried with the deceased, so clearly it served some kind of ritualistic function. There are traces of pigment on the vessels, as well as on the figures — decorative tattoos, facial features, hair, jewelry — that indicate the sculptures may have been adorned like the people themselves. But what we are mostly left with are pure white forms, both vessels and figures that, without eyes or mouths (and often without limbs or heads) comprise a strange, harmonious amalgam. It conveys both a utilitarian quality that suggests trinkets, tools, weapons, or talismans, and a meditative inwardness.

The heads, pan-, hammerhead-, or axe-blade-shaped, also each suggests a female torso. They are rounded, and they swell at their cheeks and chins, as if with child. Their triangular noses read also as vulvae. As the heads rise, they flare outward into wedge shapes that curve at their crowns like the horizon. Viewed from the sides the heads appear to lean backward in sexy, recumbent poses that suggest they are simultaneously looking upward in prayer and freely offering themselves. Some, when viewed in profile, actually resemble standing figures in reverse. The face reads as the figure’s back; the forehead, as a bowed head; the neck, as legs, and the sides of the cheeks, as arms clasped behind the figure’s back. In the rare totem-like “Mother-and-Child” (c. 2800–2700 B.C.E.), one of only three complete compositions of its type, the mother’s arching forehead acts as a perch for the standing child, whose pose, in miniature, mimics that of the mother.

Most of the figures, presented standing in the exhibit, were originally meant to recline. A few are positioned prone in the show. One “Reclining Female Folded-Arm Figure” (c. 2600–2500 B.C.) touches the base at only its buttock and crown. The body, with its legs and feet in tension with the ground, appears to be levitating. The figure, both fully at rest and fully erect, is in a state of suspension. Like Egyptian or Buddha figures, it conveys states of eternal readiness and relaxation.

Yet these qualities are apparent in all of the art in the show, in which growth and suspension are explored as forces in harmonious tension. In most of the female figures, all of which seem to stress the pubic triangle, the idol’s elements — lines, divisions, forms — appear to have emerged, or to have grown, from out of the womb-like branches and fruit on a tree. Even the vessels — most of which have suspension lugs (four ear- or nose-like appendages with holes that allow for hanging) — almost all convey the essence of female torsos and heads. Occupying a space that is somewhere between man and vessel, between object and user, they merge human forms with forms made by humans, as if the creator and the created were inseparable.

Until December 31 (Route 22 at Jay Street, Katonah, N.Y., 914-232-9555).