Asia Dominates New Season of Art Shows - NYTimes.com
Mosaics of the East From the Met to San Francisco
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: September 15, 2011
THE big institutional news in New York City this fall is the reopening, after eight years of renovation and rethinking, of the Metropolitan Museum’s Islamic collection, in what are now being called the Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia. The wrap-around suite of 15 spaces, which opens on Nov. 1, will hold some 1,200 works (out of a collection of 12,000) from dozens of cultures that have, during 13 centuries, shared Islam as a religious faith.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
A room from a private home in Damascus, 18th century.
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Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
An enameled bottle, from late-13th-century Egypt.
Wondrous things will be back on view, from chastely ornamented Koran leafs handwritten in 9th century Egypt and Iraq to a grand, intact, wood-paneled and marble-floored room from a private home in 18th-century Damascus. Along with ivory carvings, painted manuscripts and glass mosque lamps of unspeakable beauty we can also hope to see some of the museum’s magnificent carpets displayed to full, expansive advantage.
Most important, the new galleries will restore to prime visibility the art of age-old cultures whose histories have become since these galleries closed, ever more intimately entwined with our own, and about which we have everything to learn.
By way of quiet innovation the galleries will include a substantial helping of imperial Mughal art from India. Under territorial imperatives long operative at the Met, Mughal material falls within the purview of the Asian — as opposed to Islamic — department. But in these globalist days there’s a whole lot of sharing going on, which is why you’ll find Indian art in the Islamic wing, and Islamic art, and quite a lot of it, in a special exhibition called “ ‘Wonder of the Age’: Master Painters of India, 1100-1900,” which arrives at the Met from the Rietberg Museum in Zurich on Sept. 28.
With loans from the National Museum of India in New Delhi, the Udaipur City Palace Museum in Rajasthan and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, there should be some sights glorious to behold. But the show is also shaped by scholarly purpose. In an effort to dispel the out-of-date idea that anonymity of authorship is an invariable characteristic of Indian art, the curators have identified by name all of the 40 painters whose work is gathered here.
Coincidentally a related concern underlies a third Met highlight, “Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures,” on view as of Sept. 21. In this case the figures acknowledged, however tentatively, by name are the subjects depicted in nearly a hundred Central and West African sculptures, among them a group of Hemba figures from Congo, each a portrait of a specific elder in an ancestral lineage. Hemba work was virtually unknown in the West until the 1960s and is still little studied. But it’s time has come: this is fabulous stuff.
Elsewhere, in shows of modern and contemporary art, names are right out front. Asia Society Museum has paintings and drawings by the famed Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore through Dec. 31. Several young Indian artists will be appearing in a California show called “The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India,” opening Oct. 15 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
From the sound of it the show should give a fair sense of what’s cooking in the extremely lively and diffuse South Asian and South-Asian-abroad scene. Although several established artists are included, others — Nikhil Chopra, Siddhartha Kararwal, Dhruv Malhotra, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Tejal Shah, the duo Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, and the Otolith Group — are on their way to being international names.
Relatively few new artists from China have been singled out for solo attention by museums this fall, though a few old ones have. In “Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965)” at the Cleveland Museum of Art beginning Oct. 16, one of that country’s pioneer modernists takes a turn in the spotlight, followed by another, Xu Beihong (1895-1953), at the Denver Art Museum starting Oct. 15. Both artists lived and worked through daunting political times, as did those, two centuries earlier, in “The Art of Dissent in 17th-Century China: Masterpieces of Ming Loyalist Art from the Chih Lo Lou Collection,” at the Met through Jan. 2.
