India Unveiled : Art: San Diego Museum of Art’s encyclopedic Binney collection among the best for South Asian paintings.

Ellen Smart had to pause long and hard to think of other American collections of Indian paintings that match the quality and breadth of the San Diego Museum of Art’s Binney collection.

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the private collection of Stuart Cary Welch . . . and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,” she finally replied.

Not bad company for the local museum, whose holdings generally have not merited much acclaim.

Smart was appointed the SDMA’s first curator of Indian paintings last December, charged with the research and care of the museum’s newly acquired Edwin Binney, 3rd Collection. The collection numbers about 1,400 works, created throughout India over 800 years, from the 12th to the 20th centuries.

Few American museums have sizable collections of South Asian art, Smart said in a recent interview in her book-enshrouded office. Most South Asian art still remains in its country of origin or in the colonizing mother country, England, where Smart received her doctorate in the art and archeology of South Asia in 1977.

Since Smart, an articulate and serious woman, began full-time at the Museum of Art last May, scholars from all over the world have flocked to the Binney collection.

“I started on a Wednesday,” shesaid, “and the first batch of scholars arrived on Friday.”

Starting Saturday, part of the distinguished collection will be available to the public, and not just to serious scholars. The exhibition,

“Myths, Monsters, Maharajas: Introducing the Binney Collection,” will include 108 highlights of the collection chosen by Smart.

The late Binney, a longtime museum trustee who also collected Turkish and Persian art, and American quilts, set as his major goal to create an encyclopedic collection of Indian painting, Smart said.

“He wanted to have great things from every school, but also a sampling of lesser works to show how great the great things are. Ed bought pictures that make no sense on their own, art-historically. But, with the others, they form a continuum and shed light on the different schools of Indian painting.”

Binney began collecting Indian paintings in 1958 and continued until his death in 1986. It was “a great time to collect,” Smart said.

“You couldn’t do what he did now. Prices have gone up tremendously. While he was collecting, several 19th-Century collections were broken up and sold.” That created opportunities for buyers that are unparalleled today.

Scholars of Indian art were scarce during those years, and their number remains small today, Smart said.

“The study of Indian painting is still in its infancy because it’s foreign. You have to learn Indian languages to work with Indian paintings.”

Sixteen major languages are spoken in India, using 12 alphabets, noted Smart, and Indian religions, myths and cultures are equally unfamiliar in this country.

Yet Smart doesn’t worry that the upcoming show will seem inaccessible to viewers. Even people who have no exposure to Indian art are likely to be impressed by the delicate realism of much of the work or intrigued by its fantastic mythical imagery. For this introduction to the collection (smaller portions were shown at the museum in the 1960s and ‘70s), Smart based her choices strictly on “great quality.”

“I haven’t attempted to make a didactic run through Indian art. I hope people can see the paintings as works of art and not try to form a whole history of Indian painting. I hope they will come and like them. I don’t know how they could not.”

Smart’s approach to this show, based on connoisseurship and the beauty of individual works rather than on the context of their creation, differs substantially from her usual practice of braiding together art, social and political histories. Her research as a recent Fulbright scholar, for instance, concerned how textiles were used in the courtly life of one Mughal noble clan.

Another continuing subject of her research, and the topic she will discuss in a lecture Sunday in conjunction with the SDMA show, involves the use of Mughal paintings to identify plant materials in 16th- and 17th-Century Mughal gardens. In 1985, she published a children’s book about Akbar, the Mughal emperor and patron of the arts whom Smart determined to have had dyslexia.

“That’s what makes the most sense--to learn about the 16th Century through 16th-Century paintings,” she said.

Wall labels for the show will describe the poems and other texts that inspired the paintings on view, but there was neither time nor money to produce an exhibition brochure, Smart said. The museum plans eventually to publish a full catalogue of the Binney collection and, perhaps within the next few years, to produce a book of 100 masterpieces from the collection.

Smart hopes as well to obtain a permanent gallery for the Indian works, and to mount a continuous series of small, thematic shows.

Museum director Steven Brezzo said there are no plans to dedicate such a gallery at this point, but he expects that some of the works will be kept on display in either the museum’s Asian galleries or prints and drawings galleries, if their delicate condition allows.

Although not able to deliver a publication or space for permanent display in the near future, the museum already has demonstrated ample commitment to the collection through an unusual turn of events. In 1988, two years after Binney left the collection to the museum, the museum was required to $500,000 for it in order to take legal possession.

Binney had also bequeathed portions of his collection to Harvard University’s Fogg Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but Binney’s widow sued the estate for support and prevented distribution of the work. The courts determined that beneficiaries of Binney’s will should settle his widow’s claim based on the value of the collections they received. The San Diego Museum of Art was held responsible for $500,000.

Brezzo recalls that the museum’s board of trustees considered selling a portion of the collection to settle the estate, but they eventually voted unanimously to keep the collection intact and pay the sum by other means. Never was there hesitation in accepting the terms or the gift, however.

“Binney had been a longtime trustee of the museum, and we anticipated that the collection would come to the museum. The board was always committed to maintaining it,” Brezzo said.

Now that it has found a home in San Diego, the collection has been receiving frequent visitors, but it will probably do its share of traveling as well, according to Smart.

“The Binney collection is such that anyone who does an exhibition about Indian painting will borrow from it. The collection has something for any exhibition of Indian painting.”