Cultura: Putting Names to the Greats of Indian Art
'Wonder of the Age': Master Painters of India, 1100-1900 “The Lover Prepares to Depart,” from around 1710 and attributed to Golu of Nurpur, at the Metropolitan Museum. More Photos »
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: September 29, 2011
Their immediate aim has been to name the names of Indian artists and identify their creations, pinning down as never before who did what, where and when. Their motive has been to dispel the long-held view, especially in the West, that these often small, transcendent works were made by unlauded artisans toiling away in monasteries and imperial workshops.
“ ‘Wonder of the Age’: Master Painters of India, 1100-1900” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is in effect an epic and immersive progress report on this research. Simultaneously a scholarly turning point, stylistic chronology and pictorial feast, it has been organized by John Guy, a curator of Asian art at the Met, and Jorrit Britschgi, curator of Indian painting at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, where it was seen last summer. In the catalog introduction the curators cite more than 30 art historians from Europe, the United States and India on whose scholarship their own work builds.
The exhibition outlines the rich history of painting culture in India, beginning with an illuminated manuscript executed on palm leaves in a Buddhist monastery in the 12th century and concluding with two startlingly large paintings inspired by European models and influenced by photography, which were made for the Maharana of Udaipur around 1890 and have never before been allowed out of his palace (now a municipal museum).
Nearly 200 works in six galleries explore the elaborate style wars between the raw vigor and flat color blocks of the indigenous Rajput (Hindu) court manner and the finely calibrated naturalism and delicate patterns imported by the conquering Mughals of Central Asia. Repeatedly fusing, breaking apart and fusing again, these styles percolated throughout northern and central India as the Mughals expanded their dominance over Rajput courts, especially in the late 16th and 17th centuries.
While most exhibitions of Indian paintings include only a few examples whose creators are known by name, this one concentrates almost exclusively on works that are known or thought to be by some 40 individuals. In some cases the actual names are lost to history, but even then the artists are more individuated than before, awarded the nom d’art of “Master” of a specific illuminated manuscript, technique or court.
We encounter families of artists, some of whom worked for successive generations of emperors, most notably the brilliantly cosmopolitan Akbar the Great, who took over the first Mughal court at Delhi in 1556, and his son Jahangir and grandson Shah Jahan, all passionate patrons of painting. Toward the end of the show, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the Mughal courts were in disarray, we see the emergence of Rajput family workshops that catered to multiple patrons, both Indian and European.
The show is a somewhat wild ride down one of the three longest and greatest rivers of world painting (the other two being Chinese and European). Sometimes, as in the opening gallery, you might almost be shooting rapids, so quickly do the elements of the Rajput vocabulary accrue from one Buddhist, Hindu or Jainist manuscript to the next.
And then, in the same gallery, we suddenly reach Akbar’s court, with a delicately realistic image of the young soon-to-be emperor out hawking with noblemen, crossing a vertiginous slope face of dust-colored rock; bright color is allotted only to the hunters’ clothing and steeds. It is attributed to Abd al-Samad, a Persian artist who oversaw Akbar’s extensive workshop, which attracted artists from across the subcontinent. On the opposite wall is refinement of a more familiar sort, in a set of images by Basawan, a Hindu recruit who took full advantage of the European engravings and paintings Akbar collected, but who had also learned a thing or two about fantastical Persian rock formations.
In other words, this show is not a coherent succession of gemlike Indian-painting bonbons. Things may cohere wall by wall, but turn almost any corner, or enter a new gallery, and you’re waylaid by a new personality or style or treatment of space — especially space. One of the basic lessons of this extraordinary journey is how much of the power of Indian painting on both sides of the stylistic divide resides in carefully structured tensions between surface and depth, compressed onto relatively small rectangles where no area is left unattended.
The artists of the court of Akbar and his successors dominate the second gallery, mixing Persian and Mughal strains with European notions of perspective — both linear and atmospheric — and portraiture. An image of a Sufi sage, a late work by the great Farrukh Beg, another Persian-trained artist, is based on a Netherlandish engraving of Melancholia. Beg transforms the image with colors ranging from natural to artificial; they coalesce in a tree whose profuse leaves speak more of life’s exuberance than its trials.
In this section there are almost as many text panels introducing different artists as there are paintings, which looks somewhat daunting but also indicates the Mughals’ sense of their own historical importance: imperial biographies frequently mentioned favored artists. One was Abul Hassan, anointed by Emperor Jahangir as a “Wonder of the Age,” the designation that gave this show its title. He is represented here by an exquisite drawing of St. John the Evangelist based directly on a Dürer engraving, an example of which hangs next to it. Made when Abul Hassan was but 13, it counters the assumption that Indian art is often psychologically thin by being more emotionally demonstrative than its inspiration.
The breadth of skill is often impressive. Another of Jahangir’s “Wonders” was Mansur, equally at ease with exacting depictions of birds and reptiles and jewel-like manuscript illuminations in the Persian style. His contemporary Payag is represented by a portrait of Shah Jahan, a man of military bearing shown in profile on a stallion bejeweled to the nines, that is among the world’s most exquisite exercises in propaganda. Payag is also thought to have produced the wonderfully misty depiction of one of Jahan’s sons hunting nilgais, a kind of antelope, at twilight. Take out the hunters and their prey and you have a landscape such as Corot might have painted. The work also signals something of an Indian specialty: the luminous nocturnal scenes that dot the show’s second half.
As the second gallery gives way to the third the show suddenly shifts gears, turning to the diffusion of Mughal naturalism throughout provincial courts, both Hindu and Muslim. Various adaptations, integrations and rejections that the catalog accurately describes as “convoluted” unfold. A final flowering of Mughal-court art includes four works from around 1700 attributed to the idiosyncratic “Stipple Master,” who all but eliminated color to concentrate on silhouetted figures enhanced by a finely dotted chiaroscuro that sometimes seems to presage Léger. His rococo lightness contrasts with the more emphatic bravura drawing of his near contemporaries the Hada Master and the Kota Master, who press Mughal naturalism into violent action in a series of stupendously detailed renderings of sometimes airborne battles between elephants.
Thereafter, the Rajput vocabulary formulated in the show’s opening gallery prevails for a stretch. Color flattens and heats up across one long wall dominated by the works of masters, named and unnamed, of the courts of Nurpur, Bahu and Mankot in the Punjab Hills in the north. They achieve a balance of abstraction and representation — and a fusion of figure, architecture and landscape — equaled in European painting only by Sienese masters like Sassetta.
One folio, attributed to Golu of Nurpur, shows a handsome prince taking leave of his mistress in an image starkly divided between a brilliant white marble interior and an all-black nighttime landscape punctuated by six moonlit trees. These contrasting spaces are framed by bands of a deep orange whose intensity is echoed primarily by the lovers’ garments, which are nonetheless detailed, and bejeweled, with Mughal finesse.
The stylistic convolutions really never cease in this show, which will reward several visits and is further enriched by Mr. Guy’s and Ms. Britschgi’s detailed yet accessible catalog. The last three galleries are almost as strong as anything that has come before, even though the Mughals are nearly gone and the smaller courts are fading in the face of squandered wealth and foreign powers.
New and dazzling accommodations continue to be reached between India’s two great traditions, only now they seem, in a way, to inhabit one another from within. At the court of Guler in the Punjab, an artist named Manaku lends a kind of Rajput fleshiness and abstraction to the Mughal detailing of nature in a folio based on the Gita Govinda, a 12th-century love poem illustrating Krishna’s dalliances. This image of topographical sublimation offers a pastel, nearly labial ravine — full of snakes on one side and blossoming trees on the other — that illustrates the cooling of the south winds by the Himalayas. Manaku’s brother Nainsukh revives a late Mughal tradition of refined figuration in tensile architectural interiors that are fine-boned versions of Rajput rooms.
These elements — Rajput flesh and Mughal bones — entwine and retwine to the end. In the final gallery Tara, the master of Udaipur court in the mid-19th-century, portrays theHindu festival of Holi erupting in an immense square framed by delicate white facades that we see from multiple perspectives. Maharana Sarup Singh and his courtiers, mounted on elephants, fling colored powder and colored water into the air; the enveloping plumes of red, which might almost be spray-painted, liberate Rajput color from its flat blocks with startling force.
In this gallery, too, we see the real end of Indian painting in tinted photographs that indicate the embrace of photography by artists and patrons alike. And no wonder, since such verisimilitude was already in force, in Mughal realism, nearly 300 years earlier.
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