JOHN ZEAMAN

Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands

Sultans of Deccan India

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You can practically  smell the incense and mango blossoms at the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibit of art from India’s Deccan peninsula. It’s a fairytale world, one in which the protagonists wear golden boots, ride on elephants, wander through enchanted gardens and recline on canopied thrones. It’s also a topsy-turvy one in which diamonds are as big as peach pits, falcons wear pendants and parrots are bigger than rams.

Along with the pleasant disorientation that comes with such a show, are the historical challenges. Even after reading the introductory wall-text, you keep asking yourself: Who were these people? When did they live? How did they get to the middle of India?

As its title suggests, “Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700: Opulence and Fantasy,” is about an Islamic civilization that took root on the Deccan Plateau, India’s broad midsection. It was an offshoot of another Islamic civilization, the Mughal Empire, to the north, which conquered the plateau, but couldn’t hold onto it. The Deccani settlers rebelled against the imperious Mughals and established the independent kingdoms that are the focus of this show: Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Bidar and Golconda. What evolved was an unusually cosmopolitan society and – thanks to diamonds and other lucrative trade ­– a very prosperous one.

The huge diamonds, which open the show, are suitably stunning, although the Deccan taste was originally for flattish, rectangular diamonds as clear as glass. Later, European taste resulted in the multifaceted, glittering stones familiar to us today, such as the 70-carat “Idol’s Eye” diamond that, centuries later, was set into a necklace by jeweler Harry Winston.

Paintings are the true jewels here, however. They are small, like Persian miniatures, painted on paper. Many are no bigger than a sheet of typing paper, with details that they can only be fully appreciated with the aid of a magnifying glass (helpfully provided in the galleries).

For an idea of just how multicultural this society was, consider Malik ʿAmbar, an Ethiopian slave who rose to be a general and prime minister of Ahmadnagar. In one painting, he stands in profile, a formidable, large-bellied figure wearing gauzy white robes and holding a long Decanni sword. A master of guerilla style warfare, he so infuriated the aggressive Mughal sultans to the north, that one of them, Jahangir, dreamed that he was shooting an arrow through Malik’s decapitated head. The dream remained an impotent wish, though immortalized in a surreal picture by Jahangir’s own court painter.   The pink-robed sultan lets his arrow fly while standing atop a globe of the earth, which rests on the back of a bull, which itself stands on a giant fish.

That’s about as weird and as violent as the imagery gets in this show.  Whatever wars were waged by the sultans of Deccan India, they wanted to be remembered for their elegance, refinement and spirituality. Sultan Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II of Bijapur was an accomplished musician, composer and visionary. We see him riding an elephant, playing a string instrument called a tambur, and strolling trancelike through a breezy night garden holding castanets that look like colorful birds.

Sufis, mystics of the Islamic faith, had a status in Decanni society that transcended royal and political power. In another painting of Sultan Ibrahim, he is shown bringing gifts, including a spittoon, to a rather elegant sufi who wears a turban, holds pince-nez and sits on a canopied throne.

In contrast, a sufi leading a more ascetic life (usually called a dervish), is portrayed on a hillside sitting on a tiger skin.  His power is such that two lionesses lie tamely at his side. A yogini approaches in a prayerful attitude. There are several paintings like this in which holy men and women from different disciplines interact, another reflection of Deccan society’s liberal nature.

There are some amazing objects in this show: a falcon constructed entirely of metal calligraphy, a tall, delicate brass ewer  with an elongated dragon-head spout, a sculpture of a mythical winged lion slaying six elephants, a peacock-shaped incense burner and immense tapestries chock full of passages reflecting the rich life of the Deccan peninsula.

But the soul of this show is in its poetic paintings.   One of the most evocative is just a fragment.  Titled “Peacock in a Rainstorm at Night,” it shows the turquoise bird diving for the treetops where smaller birds are already sheltered. It’s monsoon season. The bird’s multi-eyed ornate tail stands stark against landscape shrouded in utter darkness.  The horizon’s sharp curve makes the earth seem small as it meets the menacing, cloud-filled sky.

Japanese Narrative Art

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Things are never what they seem in Japanese narrative art.  Shipwrecked men are attacked by demons disguised as beautiful women. A fisherman’s wife is revealed to be a turtle. The dead return or have interesting adventures in the netherworld.

Welcome to the fantastic world of emaki, illustrated handscrolls that date back to Japan’s middle ages. Some 20 such scrolls are the focus of “Storytelling in Japanese Art” at the Metropolitan Museum. Together with decorative screens, fans and books, they provide insight into the origins of those popular Japanese comic books called manga and, in turn, the graphic novels of western culture.

Shibata Zeshin, “The Ibakari Demon.”

Although most emaki have a god or two, or at least a bodhisattva, few are solemn or meditative in character. They are much more like Grimm’s fairy tales than religious stories.  And the artists have pulled all the stops in renderings of monsters, hellfire and gory details.

Consider, for example, “The Drunken Demon,” in which five warriors are sent to the castle of a monster who has captured all the region’s beautiful young women.  Upon arriving, the giant monster serves them a feast of sashimi of human flesh to be washed down with goblets of blood. Later, with help from the gods, the heroes break into the demon’s bedroom and chop off his head.  The huge head flies through the air and plops atop a hero’s head, which, we are told, would have killed him had he not been wearing a god’s golden helmet.

Sheerly in terms of artistic value,  the heroes are no match for the slavering, bug-eyed, snaggle-tooth monsters. Upon these, the artists have lavished all their skills.  The humans – small, berobed, dignified – are as static as chess pieces by comparison.

In “Legends of the Kitano Shrine,” a story of vengeance, the visual stars of the story are the gigantic Thunder God who scatters the wrongdoers like so many leaves in a hurricane and an eight-headed beast who guards the fiery gates of a blast-furnace Hell.

Anonymous, “Illustrated Legends of the Kitano Tenjin Shrine.”

Next to the monsters, the landscapes are the most visually fascinating.  This form evolved out of landscape scrolls that were made to be experienced as a journey through poetic scenery.  As the viewer rolled out a foot at a time – from right to left — he would follow a path through forests and mountains while passing lakes, wildlife and picturesque shrines. The convention continued into the narrative versions, requiring artists to connect disparate landscapes to tell the story (unlike contemporary graphic stories, there are no frames to separate the scenes). Hence, for example, a line that represents the bottom of a cloud might gradually become the horizon for a sea voyage as the action unfolds.

The scrolls are typically 30 to 40 feet in length – much too long for museum cases to display. This is the exhibit’s only shortcoming – that you can see only a segment of each scroll. Most stories consisted of three rolls, so what you see is like the coming attractions in a movie, a synopsis and three scenes.  A few of the stories can be seen in their entirety on touch-screen computers in the final gallery.

In addition to themes of war and horrible monsters, there are religious stories about miraculous events, love stories involving courtiers and court ladies, and comical tales in which animals, like mice and foxes, stand in for humans. It is worth revisiting, not only because there is so much currently on view to absorb, but because in February, some 20 new works of art will be rotated into the exhibition.

 

Indian Miniatures

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Indian painting is pure pleasure.  You don’t need to know any theories, art history or even the subject of the picture. You look at these paintings like a child peering into an illustrated book of fairy tales.

It’s an art of heroic feats, courtly love, eroticism, the thrill of battle, palace intrigue, fantastic gods, beautiful animals and haunting landscapes.

Abd-al-Samad’s “Two Fighting Camels”

I don’t know why there aren’t more exhibits devoted to this magical tradition.  Perhaps because the works are small and on paper.  In our culture, images that aren’t big and on canvas are taken less seriously.  But now the Metropolitan Museum of Art has stepped up with a beautiful show covering eight centuries of Indian miniatures. It takes you from works done on palm leaves in the 12th Century through the great golden age of the enlightened Mughal emperors, and ends with the introduction of photography and the tradition’s decline in the late 19th Century.

“Wonder Of The Age: Master Painters Of India, 1100-1900,” also has a different spin than other such shows.  Instead of organizing the works by style or dynastic periods, the focus is on 40 artists and their lineages.  Some are still nameless, known only as “master of” this or that style or tradition, but others emerge as individuals, such as Basawan, favorite of the Mughal emperor Akbar, whose style was influenced by European realism. Or the Iranian-born, Farrukh Beg, whose style reflected the Persian penchant for poetic and complex landscapes of stylized mountains, trees and flowers.

“Krishna with Radha in a Forest Glade”

There are just enough pieces from the early centuries to give a sense of what Indian painting was like in the pre-Mughal era, when Buddhist and Hindu themes were treated with intense color and emotion to match.  In  “Green Tara Dispensing Boons to Ecstatic Devotees” by the artist known as the Mahavihara Master, the goddess is a voluptuous giantess surrounded by fervent followers.

Indian art excelled at animal paintings.  In ‘Abd-al-Samad’s “Two Fighting Camels,” each animal has the other’s leg in its mouth. Elephants are depicted both naturalistically and in ornate costumes riding into battle.  The Indian Audubon was an artist named Mansur, whose precise renderings included two peafowl, a yellow-beaked great hornbill and a green chameleon.

For a sense of the refinement of art under the Mughal conquerors, consider the elegant profile portrait, “Shah Jahan Riding a Stallion,” by the artist Payag. Imperial power (and exquisite taste) are expressed in jewel encrusted scabbard, the saddle like a small pile of Persian rugs, and, a gold halo like those worn by saints in Western art.

Popping up all over the show is the blue-skinned Krishna, both Hindu god and an historic figure. He is already a hero in infancy, as in “Nanda Touches Krishna’s Head after the Slaying of Putana,” an illustration of an episode in which the babe kills a demoness by draining life from her breasts. This picture, from the Delhi-Agra area of North India, gives everyone the same black-lined almond-shaped eyes typical of Indian art.

Krishna, not to be confused with Rama, who is also blue, was something of a prankster in his adolescence, as can be seen several versions of the story in which he perches in a tree with the clothes of the gopi, or cow-herd girls, who are bathing in the river. Later, you can see him as the sensuous lover of the lovely Radha in “Krishna with Radha in a Forest Glade,” in which the flowers and blossoming trees around the two lovers seem expressions of their awakening passions.

The show draws to a close in the late 1800s, with what came to be called “the company school,” a reference to the East India Company, which virtually ran India when it came under British rule. Some of the works commissioned by the British look like European ethnographic studies, although the Indian artist who painted “Four Tribesmen,” portrays the men with great empathy.  The camera came into play with hand-colored photographic portraits that are beautifully done but can’t help but be jarring after the dreamlike world of the paintings.

Perhaps panoramic photography inspired the 1893 painting, “Maharana Fateh Singh’s Hunting Party Crossing a River in a Flood,” a watercolor that is more than 5 feet wide.  If so, no magic was lost, for this is a hauntingly beautiful picture with its long procession of riders and the sky lit by a lightning bolt that looks like a golden serpent.

 

 

Forbidden City

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“Portrait of the Imperial Bodyguard Zhanyinbao”

In the year 1744, the emperor of China began work on a beautiful garden in the Forbidden City. There, he imagined, he would retire to a life of contemplation and literary pursuits.

“In my eighties, exhausted from diligent service,” wrote the Qianlong emperor in one of his many poems, “I will cultivate myself, rejecting worldly noise.”

Unfortunately, the Emperor never got to live out this ideal retirement. He remained saddled with the burdens of imperial rule until his death in 1799. His masterpiece, the Qianlong Garden, fell into two centuries of disrepair and overgrowth.

Yet there was a silver lining to this. Unlike the creations of so many other Chinese rulers, which were updated or demolished by their successors, this one remained a time capsule, reflecting 18th century taste at its most extravagant.

Now, an ambitious restoration in Beijing has freed up some of the garden’s interior artworks for loans.  The result is “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City” at the Metropolitan Museum.  On view are paintings, calligraphy, ceramics, clocks, rootwood furniture and decorated panels, screens and partitions.

The exhibit is as much about the place as its 90 precious objects. This was no mere garden in our narrow sense of the word, but an elaborate, though compact compound of buildings, pavilions, and landscaping.  It wasn’t a place for appreciating pure nature so much as a refined fantasy of it.

Even the the names of the buildings are dreamy: Building of Luminous Clouds, Pavilion of Soaring Beauty, Lodge of Bamboo Fragrance, Belvedere of Viewing Achievements, and (on the theme of the well-deserved retirement) the Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service. It was a place where the emperor could be entertained in his private theater, but it was also a place where he could play the rustic and – like Marie Antoinette in her peasant cottage at Versailles – pretend to be a simple hermit contemplating the moon.

Although permanent retirement to the gardens was never in the cards for the emperor, he was able to enjoy it over the last 20 years of his life for brief visits or weekend-like retreats. Such occasions may have been an opportunity to get away from the imperial throne, but apparently an emperor couldn’t sit on anything else, since thrones occupied every important space.

Because he had a summer palace, and was expected to use the garden during the cold months,  winter themes predominate in decoration, particularly what Confucious called “The Three Friends of Winter.” These were bamboo and pine, which stay green in winter, and the plum tree, which blooms in late winter.

“Winter Landscapes and Flowers”

A portrait of the Qianlong emperor shows a long-faced man with jowls and a direct, penetrating gaze. A contemporary of George Washington, King George III of England, Catherine the Great, and Louis XV, he ruled an empire that was the richest and biggest in the world.  And yet, he found time to be a literary scholar and the author of an incredible 40,000 poems.

For all his devotion to Chinese aesthetics and philosophy, the Qianlong emperor was also intrigued with innovations from Western art.  European artists were brought over to teach and execute perspective and other realist techniques. Most often the Chinese artists blended the two methods, as in the emperor’s portrait, in which the voluminous robe is rendered flat, while the face is modeled three-dimensionally. Trompe l’oeil wall paintings were used to create the illusion of space in the rooms of the small garden buildings.

The Chinese lacked the technology to produce glass, hence imported glass was highly valued and used in art alongside gems and other precious natural materials, as in a panel depicting a plum tree, in which the petal-blossoms were fashioned from milky glass.

Among the religious works are a series of 16 panels depicting enlightened Buddhist disciples.  These “ luohan” are rendered in white jade set into a black lacquer background. The starkness only emphasizes how outlandishly ugly they are, a reminder, perhaps that wisdom has nothing to do with external appearance or conventionality.

Until they were taken out of their settings during restoration, no one knew that the backs of these panels were decorated with 16 different, elegantly rendered plants – perhaps representations of the inner perfection of those on the reverse side.

Korean Art

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In a glass case against the wall stands the elegant “Moon Jar,” an 18th-century Korean porcelain that is about the size of basketball and nearly as round.

Directly across from it is an installation by the contemporary Korean artist Kang Ik-joong that duplicates the Moon Jar’s form on 25 panels.  The tight five-by-five arrangement is reminiscent of those silkscreen multiples of Mao or Marilyn by Andy Warhol, the ones that look like big sheets of stamps.

Kang, however, isn’t affecting the cool detachment of Warhol.  For him, “Moon Jar” is an improbably occasion for reveries and dreamy associations.

Of course, like so much postmodern art that relies on borrowed strategies and recycled images, you need to read the wall text to know what’s going on.

Oh, to be as simple and direct as “Moon Jar.”

Kang says moon jars like this one remind him of the floating clouds that he watched as a child from the valley of his Korean home, and the “orange-hued moonrises seen from the plane window as I come into JFK after a long trip,” or the sun slipping into his Manhattan studio while he’s eating Chinese takeout.

Tilework utilizing children’s art

That’s a pretty good capsule description of Kang’s career. Born in 1960, in Cheong Ju, Korea, he came to New York to get an advanced degree from Pratt Institute in 1984 and has been here ever since. Inspired by the tilework in the New York subways, he makes tile-based murals and installations, sometimes soliciting children’s work to make the individual tiles.

On learning that over 50 languages were spoken in the Princeton schools, for example, he had students paint the word “library” in their native language. Some were incorporated into a 30-foot mural, “Happy World,” that used some 5,000 3-inch-square paintings by the artist. “Amazed World 2001,” used 34,000 children’s drawings from all over the globe for a maze-like installation at the United Nations.

In size then, “25 Wishes,” is a modest work for Kang. The panels are just big enough to accommodate a full-sized image of the Moon Jar.  Unlike Warhol’s multiples, these are not identical. Some have an asymmetrical bulge on one side, and others have darker shading than their neighbors, as if, like Monet’s haystacks, they were done at different hours of the day. The profile reveals unexpected affinities – the flat shape resembles a Christmas bulb or a Chinese lantern.

The setting for this work, the Art of Korea Gallery, is a modest outpost amid the Met’s often spectacular multi-gallery displays of Chinese and Japanese art, but it provides an elegant capsule history – told mostly through ceramics.

It begins in the late Bronze Age with an iron red jar dated to the fourth century BC. A wonderful bird-shaped vessel from the three Kingdom period (57 BC to 668 A.D.) has a head like a sea horse and a tail that serves as a spout. One big round jar has such tiny decorative handles that even a child couldn’t hook a finger through one.

Dazzling gold earrings from royal tombs dating to this same period are a reminder that Korean gold work was then the most accomplished in all of Asia.

When it came to porcelain, Koreans of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries favored understated pieces, often in celadon, rather than the colorful work that was popular in China and Japan. The elegance and simplicity of these pieces can be seen in a tall light-bulb shaped vase decorated with inlaid cranes and clouds.

A complete trip around the gallery takes you through 2,500 years of art and brings you back to the white “Moon Jar” with its subtle peach blushes and “25 Wishes,” with its self-conscious appropriation and autobiographical reveries.

 

 

Art of the Samurai

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I never realized a sword could be so interesting. Correction: I never realized a sword blade could be so interesting. As a Westerner, it’s hard not to be initially nonplussed by the first few galleries of the Metropolitan Museum’s “Art of the Samurai” show in which glass cases display one seemingly identical curved steel blade after another.

You approach without expecting much. But close up, these objects — a seductive blend of art and deadly weapon — draw you in.  Even if you’re not a fan of films like Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” you can’t look at one of these gleaming blades without imagining how swiftly it might cleave a head from its shoulders, then wondering if it ever had.  Soon you’re noticing its gentle curve, its clean bevels, the subtle etched designs and the calligraphy on the unpolished end where the handle will go. .

For me, the most intriguing feature was the tempering pattern, that soft, shimmering line, like a light frost, that is a byproduct of the sharpening and polishing process. Over centuries, this art also became a decorative art. Sometimes these lines, called hamon in Japanese, look like mountain ranges, or cloudbanks, or curling waves.

And, as I said, these are only the blades.  Just to get this far, however, requires two teams of craftsmen, the swordsmiths and the polishers (a short film in the exhibition shows the process of a blade’s creation). The mountings and fittings are the job of yet another specialist group.

You’ll probably have these galleries to yourself. Visitors to this show tend to concentrate in the galleries beyond, where the colorful helmets and suits of armor are displayed.  If swords were Zen-like objects, the “spirit of the Samurai,” as the exhibit tells you, then the armor and the helmets are more like the ego, serving as both self-protection and proud plumage.

This show has 214 works and is said to be the most comprehensive exhibit of Japanese arms and armor ever to take place in the world. Extremely valuable pieces – “National Treasures” — will only be exhibited for a few weeks at a time, and will rotate with others during the show’s 12-week run.

It’s interesting to see the parallels and differences between Japanese armor and its European counterpart. Instead of the steel exoskeletons worn by King Arthur’s knights, samurai wore coats, arm shields and hip skirts made of small enamel-coated metal plates, strung together and overlapped like fish scales. These suits were more flexible, and, because of the enamel coloring, much more decorative.

Later, when matchlock rifles were introduced into Japanese warfare, the samurai began wearing the heavier European-style breastplates.  One has an impressive 10 bullet dents in it, though scholars believe these were made under test conditions as proof marks, to impress the buyer.

The primitive guns made battlefields very smoky, requiring commanders to have even taller crests on their helmets so that soldiers could see that their leader was still there. Some of these grew outlandishly high. One, a helmet with tall three-branch “deerhorn” crests belonged to the famous samurai, Honda Tadakatsu (1548-1610). A scroll from the Edo period shows him wearing it. He sits on a folding campstool, hands on spread knees, bright eyes looking eager for battle.

Helmets typically had protective mask-like faceplates, as well. These were cast in angry expressions designed to frighten opponents. Some had bristly moustaches and one has a furry head of hair, as if to better meld the wearer and the helmet into one visage. A 17th-Century helmet with a flaring back will tell you where the design for Darth Vader’s helmet came from.

With new pieces circulating into view every few weeks, this is a show where you can literally see new things on return visits.  I want to get back to those sword blades. I had learned after looking at them that one called Okanehira is considered the greatest of all Japanese swords. I could have gone back for another look to see if I could discern its greatness, but as a novice, I didn’t yet feel worthy.