Capturing the Romance of the Taj : County Museum exhibit of one of the world’s most celebrated buildings is a gift for the holiday season

“Romance of the Taj Mahal,” opening today at the County Museum of Art, is a wondrous exhibition that is at once scholarly, affectionate and generous--like the Magi bearing exotic gifts for the holidays. It spills forth about 250 exquisite miniature paintings, architectural models, details and drawings, precious jewels, sinister daggers, waxen jades and lush textiles.

It is, irresistibly, about love. As the world knows, the Taj Mahal was built as a tomb by the Mogul emperor Shah Jahan in Agra on the banks of the Jamuna River after the demise of his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. She died during a military campaign in 1631 while giving birth to her 14th child.

The Taj became one of the world’s most celebrated buildings, not because it is a great historical monument like the pyramids of Giza or the Greek Acropolis, but because of the refinement of its design, the richness of marble and inlay and--most of all--the romance that fueled it.

In an old Noel Coward play estranged lovers meet. He has taken a trip around the world to ease his broken heart and she asks him if he saw a sacred elephant in India. “They’re lint white, I believe, and very, very sweet,” she says. “Of course you saw it in the moonlight.”

“Yes,” he replies, “moonlight can be cruelly deceptive.”

That elephant was surely the Taj.

The exhibition (through March 11) is the brainchild of LACMA’s super-smart senior curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art, Pratapaditya Pal. Specialized sections were supervised by Janice Leoshko, Joseph M. Dye III and Stephen Markel. All contributed to a catalogue that virtually must be read to get the most from the show. Scholarly enthusiasm occasionally overloads prose (and readers’ fuses), but tenacious attention is rewarded.

The show is deeply engaging even without the catalogue in mind, but it is also a curious business. For one thing, it is a Godot-like play in which the main character, of necessity, never appears. The closest we get to the Taj is through a large model that acts as the exhibition frontispiece. This replica was made by an Agra jeweler. In 1939, it came to the New York World’s Fair and was later picked up by an Indian expatriate who used it as the centerpiece for his restaurant in Florida. When it came to LACMA, it was encrusted in curry grease.

In short, this serious exhibition launches itself with a substantial piece of kitsch.

Pal’s catalogue introduction concentrates amusingly on modern commercial exploitation such as an advertisement that shows a splendid view of the Taj mirrored in its famous reflecting pool. The caption reads, “When Shah Jahan saw the contractor’s bid did he say, ‘Make the pool a little smaller?”--a question aimed at persuading consumers that it’s worth it to pay more for Johnny Walker Red Label Scotch.

The curator has donnish fun pointing out other examples, such as the rock-blues musician who took “Taj Mahal” as his nom de microphone. Now his friends say, “Hi, Taj” and headwaiters greet him solemnly as “Mr. Mahal.”

This is all a giggle, but emphasis puts a different spin on the show, giving it the aura of a contemporary media-art exhibition out for social criticism and demythification. The catalogue’s final section is devoted to representations of the Taj mainly by later Europeans. Part of Pal’s thesis is that nobody thought the building was such a big deal until the British moved into India. He wonders out loud whether the romance of the Taj is not largely a Western rather than an Indian phenomenon. The section proves the point, but in a funny way, because no really substantial Western artist ever messed into the place except Rembrandt, who collected Indian miniatures at a distance. One is inclined to see the mystification of the Taj as part of the 19th-Century Romantics’ passion for the exotic. But no big-name European artist was ever magnetized to India in the way Morocco attracted Delacroix or the South Seas seduced Gauguin. Just too far, I guess.

The big cheeses here are no more renowned than England’s Albert Goodwin, Japan’s Hiroshi Yoshida and the American photographer Mitch Epstein. The section fizzles slightly on account of this but underlines the Taj’s charm as being probably as much a popular as an aesthetic phenomenon. When we set the comparatively clunky Euro-American art next to the ethereal delicacy of original Mogul, one thing is certain: We may love the Taj, but we got her wrong.

Instructive as this section is, there is a tendency for the concept to swamp the art and hint of sourness in the subtext.

It is dispelled by Shah Jahan’s art as by a spoon of raspberry ice.

He descended on one side from the Mongol emperor Genghis Khan ( Mogul comes from Mongol ) and on the other side from Timur--called Tamerlane --making this exhibition a direct continuation of LACMA’s recent estimable, “Timur, the Princely Vision.” While Shah Jahan’s ancestors are towering historical figures, he is best remembered as a patron and aesthete. There is something rococo about his aesthetic. Floral motifs appear everywhere, heavy with religious symbolism but rendered with tremulous sensitivity.

Not that Shah Jahan didn’t live in the real world. His story suggests a kind of miniature epic. Born in 1592 under the most favorable astrological configuration, he nonetheless had a father (the emperor Jahangir) who was a drunk and a druggie. The boy was promptly taken away from his mother and spoiled rotten by a surrogate and his grandfather, Akbar. When it came time to ascend the throne he had to battle his stepmother for his rightful place. Years later, when he was old and ill, his sons schemed, poisoned and fought over the succession. Not a very nice bunch in the crunch, but you would never know it from the art.

Idealization is the hallmark of Shah Jahan’s art. We see the real world through it but with the sting removed. When a respected old man is caught en flagrante in bed with a young boy, the shock and humiliation of it are muffled into a rather kindly prank. There is a kind of moral tolerance running through the art that recalls Lady Murasaki’s classic “Tales of Genji.”

In the paintings, much of this effect comes from our natural response to things in miniature, but there is more to it. Shah Jahan employed some of the most gifted artists of his day. They lose nothing of inventiveness and skill in drawing a head the size of your fingernail. Balchand’s illuminations, like “A Warrior Frightened by Tribesmen,” cast an aura of legend over a plausible event. A preference for night settings lends mystery. Govardhan’s “Four Mullas” is a dream seen through the veil of dusk. Anonymous images of birds and animals have a Rousseau-like presence that reminds us that poetry was virtually the native language of the culture. Mogul realism has the rich greens of Oz, and its kaleidoscopic abstract designs tinkle with the trees of the seven dancing princesses.

In reality Shah Jahan was a busy ruler who rose at dawn and worked until evening. The art shows only moments of pomp and relaxation: an equestrian night wedding feast that seems illuminated by a million fireflies, harem girls bathing at night, the prince watching an elephant fight, the prince communing with ascetics.

If life is poeticized, its reality of a bedizined existence is proved by the decorative arts section with its gourd-shaped jade bowls, sumptuous jewels and fabrics as light as butterfly wings or as textured as fur. Occasionally another reality intrudes, in push daggers designed to maximize the fatal thrust.

It is a pity to have so little architecture in a show about the Taj Mahal. But photos, drawings and fragments can only do so much. At least what they do underlines the essence of Shah Jahan’s aesthetic. There is a fragment of a beautifully carved screening door on view that looks from a few paces off like wood. It turns out to be stone and that sense of lightness turns out to be a central clue.

It’s easy enough for a Western cynic to suspect that both the fact and symbolism of the Taj are not really about romance but about luxury--an easy mistake to make at the end of the voracious ‘80s.

But anybody who takes a really good look must see that in the end it is about luxury transcending itself. Indian visitors from philosophers to plebes have remarked on how the Taj seems weightless and otherworldly. This art begins with luxury but comes out the other end as a dream of perfumed peace, sensual ease and grace.