[Assam] DC museum: W S J Review of "Facing East: Portraits from Asia"

[umesh sharma]

Some might like to visit this museum in Washington,  DC .
   
  Umesh

Office of Public Affairs and Marketing <publicaffairs at asia.si.edu> wrote:
  Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2006 14:01:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: Office of Public Affairs and Marketing <publicaffairs @ asia.si.edu>
To: jaipurschool at yahoo.com
Subject: Resend of The Wall Street Journal Review of "Facing East: Portraits
from Asia"

                                        (We apologize for any missing information. This copy is a resend.)     FSG in the News 

                           This 1814 full-length painting of Fath-Ali Shah by Mihr-'Ali portrays the leader as an unconquerable hero, despite the fact that he had just lost a major battle with the Russians.*      "Washington's Sackler Offers a Portrait of a Continent"   By Lee Lawrence
The Wall Street Journal
Posted Tuesday, August 1. 2006; Page D6

  Featuring some 60 works spanning more than half the globe and 2,000-plus years, "Facing East: Portraits From Asia," on view at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Art through Sept. 4, is -- to put it mildly -- a whirlwind. The show lumps together works as disparate as a Roman-inspired Syrian sculpture, Chinese scroll paintings and Mughal Indian miniatures under the banner of "Asia," as if to suggest they all share some Asian quality that sets them apart from Western portraiture. 
  Neither comprehensive enough to be a survey nor sufficiently focused for an in-depth study, the show at first seems rather unsatisfactory -- until, that is, you begin to compare the works. It isn't long before you discover that portraiture is not quite the straightforward genre it has often been made out to be. 
  Portraits, it turns out, serve much the same purposes in Asia as in the West: Among other things, they commemorate loved ones, showcase a person's status or immortalize cherished heroes. But the manner in which portraits accomplish this changes from culture to culture. 
  The most intriguing theme is the role "likeness" plays - - or does not. An 1814 full-length portrait of Fath-Ali Shah, for example, is striking for its saturated reds, deep blacks and dense patterning. You need to stand back to take it all in -- the piercing eyes, the long beard, the gem-studded coat-of-mail, the recurved bow and the dagger stuck through the glimmering belt. Fath-Ali Shah, the portrait declaims, is a powerful man in the mold of Rustam, the legendary Persian warrior. 
  To the work's right hangs a Chinese scroll painting from about the same period, depicting a noblewoman from the Manchu court. Here, too, the figure stares out at us, her gown teeming with swirling clouds and long-tailed dragons, symbols of imperial status. Her features are idealized, as are Fath-Ali Shah's, yet the overall impact is quite different. Her face becomes generic, and her portrait exalts role and status over the individual. Fath-Ali Shah, on the other hand, remains recognizable, and his portrait glorifies him as a man capable of filling the boots of a hero. 
  Even within a culture, the use of idealization varies. In a 1598 ink drawing, Persian painter Riza Abbasi depicts a fellow pilgrim in the holy city of Mashhad reaching around the back of his head with his left hand to scratch a spot behind his right ear. The distinctive aquiline nose, squinting eyes and bulging belly are realistic, and the very awkwardness of the gesture creates a bond with the viewer, for who has not been irritated by a hard-to-reach itch? 
  In sharp contrast is a 1630s painting by one of Abbasi's successors in which an Uzbek nobleman is seated, a falcon perched on his gloved hand, his face stylized beyond recognition. While this precludes us from picking the nobleman out in a lineup, it nevertheless is quite telling: Unlike the pilgrim, this is a creature set apart by birth and station. 
  It soon becomes clear that physical resemblance is not always the best way to measure a portrait's accuracy. A painting commissioned by 19th-century Indian Maharana Bhim Singh of Mewar certainly looks like the man, even if the portrait's eyes are probably a bit more almond shaped and larger than life. Pictured in profile, a halo encircles his head, he holds a sword and above him, a crescent moon splits the sky. He thus bears the symbols and posture of a ruler in charge, yet we know that at the time the maharana's rule was shaky -- much like Fath-Ali Shah's portrait à la Rustam was done not long after he lost a major battle with the Russians. 
  The penchant for adopting exalted identities is in itself quite intriguing. Seventeenth-century bronzes portray South Indian nobles as temple devotees, a 14th-century statuette shows a Nepalese queen as a Buddhist deity, and a 1917 self-portrait in oil by Japanese artist Kohno Michisei imitates a self-portrait by German artist Albrecht Durer -- in which Durer, in turn, had given himself a Christ-like countenance. The most unusual -- and funniest -- such (mis) representation, however, is the 1903 photograph of the notoriously ruthless Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi, shown wearing a gilded crown and glum expression as she impersonates Guanyin, the enlightened being who embodies compassion. 
  By the end of the show, one cannot help but wonder whether all portraiture does not offer up personas rather than persons. Whether it is the portrayal of a long-dead sage or poet, an 18th-century print of a Japanese courtesan or the group portrait Korean artist Do-ho Suh created by merging the features of all his classmates into a single face, portraits show us only those identities the artist or patron wishes us to see. As Japanese scholar Sato Issai wrote on a portrait his friend Watanabe Kazan did of him in 1824, capturing a likeness is a slippery thing. "Likeness and unlikeness is in the facial expression; what is beyond likeness and unlikeness is the spirit. Now the spirit has neither beginning nor end...it scatters like mists and clouds....So what does not resemble me is very much like me. As to which is like me, who can say that it is not really me?"

Ms. Lawrence is a writer based in Washington, D.C.

  *Portrait of Fath-Ali Shah by artist Mihr- 'Ali; Tehran, Iran, 1814; Oil on canvas; Lent by The Art and History Collection. 
              
  
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Smithsonian Institution
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Umesh Sharma
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 1-202-215-4328 [Cell Phone]

Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005

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