Qajar Art at Brooklyn Museum
iran_c...@my-dejanews.com
Leisure/Weekend Desk; Section E; Part 2
ART REVIEW
Dazzling Images Delineate a World That Never Was
By HOLLAND COTTER
10/23/98
The New York Times
Page 33, Column 4
c. 1998 New York Times Company
In every culture, objects of beauty bring delight. They also push ideologies,
advertise interests, secure alliances and pump up reputations. So it has
always been; so it is likely always to be.
It was certainly true two centuries ago in Iran . There, a passel of ambitious
new rulers came out of the blue and created an assertive, self-promotional
dynastic art of almost hallucinatory strangeness and brilliance, briefly
revivifying an ancient culture in its twilight years.
Nothing quite like this late Persian art had ever appeared in Asia. And it has
never been seen in bulk in the West before the opening today of an
extraordinary exhibition, ''Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch, 1785-
1925,'' at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Many shows flatter audiences by telling them what they already know; this one
does the opposite. In a gathering of 100 objects from starry international
collections, including the Hermitage and the Louvre, it fleshes out an almost
unheard of chapter of art history as it upsets the popular image of classic
art tradition.
Think '' Persian painting,'' and what comes to mind? Small illuminated
miniatures with diminutive landscapes and teensy figures. But the Qajar
emperors thought big, sometimes very big. They liked their portraits life
size, their battle scenes Cinemascopic. Even their collectibles -- lacquered
boxes, gilded enamels -- have a trumpeting, clear-the-way flair, like props
in a Handel opera, glinting under the stage lights.
And by the time the Qajars, who were Turkish-speaking tribal warlords, came
to power in Persia at the end of the 18th century, the empire was badly in
need of star wattage. The last Safavid ruler had been defeated in 1722. Two
stopgap dynasties had come and gone. The Ottoman Turks posed a serious
threat, and European superpowers -- England, France, Russia -- had designs on
Central Asia.
The Brooklyn show, organized by Layla S. Diba, the museum's curator of Islamic
art, and Maryam Ekhtiar, senior research associate, begins with a selection of
late Safavid art, the most familiar of Persian styles. Here one finds an
illuminated Koran, all lapis lazuli and gold, a scrap of official calligraphy
and a miniature portrait depicting the court artist Riza Abbasi.
He is shown as an elderly man, stooped, gentle, spectacled, though the image
is somewhat deceptive: he was notorious for his lifelong love of wrestling
and louche company. What's most interesting about the portrait, though, is
that it shows him at work on a painting, and that painting is the figure of a
man in European attire.
Europe, one quickly discovers, is everywhere in the art on view. Louis XIV, or
someone who looks a lot like him, shows up in a miniature painting from
Isfahan. A neo-classical Flora decorously hikes up her skirt in front of a
stylized Safavid landscape in an album painting. A lacquered book cover is
decorated with a pasted-on French engraving.
Perhaps most striking is a European-inspired expansion in scale, dramatically
demonstrated in four full-length portraits hung near each other in the show.
Two of them are spectacular images of Charles I of England and his Queen,
Henrietta, by Anthony van Dyck, on loan from Russia. The other two, of a boy
carrying a bow and arrow and a young girl in a snoodlike cap, are products of
the Safavid court.
Stylistically, the Western and Asian works couldn't be more different.
Charles looks suave and relaxed, like a dancer at rest, in licorice-black
armor set off by a cascade of royal red silk. The Persian youth stands as
stiff as a doll in a spatial setting of Escher-like illogic, in which
one-point perspective and the depthless flatness of Persian manuscript
tradition clash. But side by side, the paintings tell a story of how a new
Persian art developed, inspired by Western models but still Persian to the
core.
This hybrid art flourished during the short-lived Zand dynasty (1750-79). And
although little from the period survives, the items in Brooklyn are
wonderful. They range from vivid narratives, to naturalistic portraits, to
full-length oil- on-canvas figures meant to occupy niches in palace walls.
The standout is a large picture, once owned by Andy Warhol, of a couple
locked in a steamy (for Persian art at least) embrace. Their clothing has
been loosened, their limbs are intertwined. The woman salutes her importunate
lover with a wine glass as he fondles her breast. But her attention is
elsewhere. She stares confidingly out at the viewer as if extending an
invitation to join the fun.
After the Zand period, the Qajar dynasty (1785-1925) took charge and settled
in for the long haul. Its founder, Aqa Muhammad Khan, was an odd character.
As a young man, he had suffered castration at the hands of tribal enemies;
and while his contemporaries extolled his martial prowess, they alluded to
his unphotogenic looks with a shudder.
His nephew and appointed heir, Fath Ali Shah, was his opposite in every way.
He had a populous harem and fathered more than 100 children, basically
producing an entire ruling class of siblings. He was an indifferent
administrator and was inclined to let his sons do the dirty work on the
battlefield. But his gift for self-advertising was second to none, and in art
he created one of the great, head-turning personal styles of the dawning
modern era.
Six of his life-size portraits are at the center of the Brooklyn show, and
they are riveting. In one, from around 1809, he is shown standing, one hand
at his waist, the other holding a staff topped by a little gold bird. His
face, with its pale skin, looks youthful, but it is nearly lost between his
beetling handlebar eyebrows and his long black beard.
He wears a creamy ankle-length robe with a snug top, a nipped-in waist and a
flared skirt bordered with pearls. His color-coordinated accessories --
wristlets, armlets, epaulets -- culminate in a peaked and feathered crown that
is almost the size of his torso. His feet are shod in flowered hose and dainty
high-heeled slippers.
To the modern eye, he looks effete, faintly absurd, like a bantamweight dandy
with attitude. But the portrait was meant to represent an ideal, an icon. The
rigid stance and the kohl-lined eyes were modeled on those of the fabled
Sasanian rulers of Persia's pre-Islamic Golden Age. The hand gripping the
staff has suggestive connections with Napoleonic portraiture being created in
France.
The conspicuous beard may be read, at least in part, as a self-conscious
emblem of virility, understandable in a dynasty whose patriarch was a
gelding. The clothes and trappings, however, seem designed entirely for
dramatic effect. They exude a distinctive but familiar chic defined by
costliness, impracticality and an immunity to embarrassment.
That immunity served Fath Ali Shah well when he packed paintings like this
one off as a kind of diplomatic calling card to the courts of Europe. And he
was no doubt gratified to learn than when his Persian Ambassador in London
bowed to one of the portraits as if it were a religious image, the English
followed suit.
Did he even suspect that they were just being shrewdly, amusedly polite?
Probably not, given the atmosphere of willed fantasy that seemed to pervade
the Qajar court. It was such fantasy that prompted Fath Ali Shah to have
himself depicted receiving obeisance from English, French and Turkish envoys
at a time when exactly the opposite balance of power was in effect, and Iran
was on its way to becoming a pawn in a colonial game.
In short, Qajar art is a work of fiction. In some cases it rewrites history;
in others it creates an image of the court as an extravagant, sensual,
no-expense- spared Eden. This is evident in a 22-foot-long painted ceiling
covered with angels and floral arabesques, and in niche-shaped still life
paintings of tempting meals. And it is nowhere clearer than in the pictures,
of unflappably charming women, meant to decorate palace rooms.
Several are included in the show. One is a dancer with castanets and a wealth
of sausage curls. Another is a bare-breasted mother with her all-but-nude
young daughter, an erotic Madonna and Child. Most remarkable are the
upside-down female acrobats. Their faces peer impassively out from the bottom
of the paintings while their bodies topple above, fragmented cubistic puzzles
from which sets of toes emerge.
These contortionist paintings are formally exhilarating, and they leave an
indelible afterimage, always a good sign. But there's also something
disturbing about them, slightly cracked. They give the human figure no place
to go except toward further disintegration.
With the death of Fath Ali Shah, however, Qajar art pulled back and took a
more conventional route. An 1830's portrait of his successor, Muhammad Shah,
shows the change. The picture's somber palette and realistic modeling adhere
to European standards. Only a twist of patterned fabric tied around the
sitter's waist is a reminder of lost dazzlement.
There was, to be sure, fine Qajar work still to come. A battle scene painted
on the lid of a lacquered box, dated 1865, is a miracle of close-worked
detail. And the official portraits of the next ruler, Nasir al-Din Shah,
constitute an exquisite return to near-miniature scale. In a sparkling
painting on loan from the Louvre, he assumes the time-honored power pose, but
he looks small and shy in his chunky Victorian chair, and his soft, wide-set
eyes seem distracted and a little sad.
Late Qajar painting is Victorian art, with the mix of photographic realism
and escapist fantasy that this implies. A portrait of the dynasty's last,
aged leader, Muzaffar al-Din Shah, records his enfeeblement with merciless
accuracy. Yet a genre scene from the same time, depicting an exorcism in
progress, includes a clutch of scampering imps that might have come straight
from English fairy painting.
Ms. Diba, who worked for five years on this show, brings it to a provocative
conclusion with a single 1907 political cartoon from an Iranian newspaper. In
it, Asian rulers are caricatured as dogs -- an animal despised in the Muslim
world -- vying for scraps dispensed by two giant hands, one labeled Russia,
the other Britain.
This little marriage of art and politics is a quiet shocker. Far from being a
self-advertisement for glory, it is an irate, self-critical call to action by
underdogs, a militant demand for a new, modern national self-identity and for
revenge. In the light of this image, the bright pageant of Persian art
through which one has just passed feels like the illusion it was: vain,
preposterous, evanescent. But there's no question that it was a mirage of
inimitable glamour, which this once-in-a-lifetime show captures
unforgettably.
''Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925'' remains at the
Brooklyn Museum of Art, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, through Jan.
24. The exhibition travels to the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural
Center, University of California at Los Angeles (Feb. 24 to May 9), and the
Brunei Gallery of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London (July 5 to Sept. 26).
stic art from two centuries ago in Iran : ''Female Dancer With Castanets,''
left, by an unknown artist, and ''The Shah and His Courtiers,'' by Ali Quli
Jabbadar. Both are on view in the exhibition ''Royal Persian Painting: The
Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925,'' which opens today at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
(Photographs from the Brooklyn Museum of Art)(pg. E33); A portrait of the
Persian ruler Fath Ali Shah, from around 1809. (Brooklyn Museum of Art)(pg.
E38)
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Provided Courtesy of
The Iran Courier News
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MrMojoMan
Museum, I used to pay it regular visits. And I was always impressed by their
own collection of Iranian art. It is worth a visit, even after this
exhibition is gone.
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--- MrMojoMan
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iran_c...@my-dejanews.com wrote in message
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