Roberta Smith
Art historians rarely rest, and the world is generally a better place for their exertions. Scholars of the great painting traditions of India, for example, have taken knowledge of their subject to new levels in the past few decades, with their assiduous combing of documents, deciphering of inscriptions and scrutinising of artworks.
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 organised 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 catalogue 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.
Nearly 200 works in six galleries explore the elaborate style wars between the raw vigor and flat color blocks of the indigenous Rajput 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-coloured rock; bright colour 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.