ART REVIEW : A Passage to India’s Spirituality and Passion

Imagine a realm where fantasy, mythology, literature, religion and experience shed their distinct boundaries to form a single rich, multifaceted reality.

Imagine the visual documentation of such a world, its faithful and precise renderings of intangible truths, and you will have conjured up the extraordinary images in the show “Myths, Monsters, Maharajas: Introducing the Binney Collection,” through Jan. 26 at the San Diego Museum of Art.

To appreciate Indian art from every point of view, reasoned the famed Indian scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy half a century ago, “we ought to be equipped with learning, piety, sensibility, knowledge of technique, and simplicity.” The 108 Indian paintings on view beg such depth of understanding, yet they do not require it. They are profoundly literary, based on texts both sacred and secular, but they are also profoundly visual, spectacular in color, texture, detail and subject.

Curator of South Asian Art Ellen S. Smart, with the assistance of Navina N. Haidar, selected these works from the 1,400-piece Edwin Binney Third Collection, which recently entered the museum’s permanent collection. While the show echoes the breadth of Binney’s collection, with paintings from numerous regions throughout India, dating from the 12th to the 19th centuries, it was not intended to present a fluid, narrative history of Indian art. Instead, Smart singled out dazzling examples from the collection to proffer “a glimpse of the museum’s holdings and a taste of more to come.”

Paintings from the Mughal empire (1556-1748) provide the literal and figurative core of the show. They hang in a gallery-within-the-gallery, surrounded primarily by 17th- and 18th-Century works that bear the influence of Mughal court painting, especially its synthesis of flat, near-Eastern pattern painting and European-influenced realism.

During the reigns of the Mughal emperors, portrait and genre painting came into their own and painting itself assumed new status as a means of recognizing God. Traditionally, followers of Islam rejected such image-making as idolatry, but under Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb and the other Mughal emperors, portraits of rulers, members of the court, generals and scholars came to be valued as important documents that, not inconsequentially, also conferred a measure of immortality upon their subjects.

One work alone in this show, the portrait of Ikhlas Khan, a 17th-Century African slave who rose to become prime minister at the court of Bijapur, would suffice to persuade any viewer of the ennobling potential of portraiture.

Hunting scenes, court celebrations, a boy maharaja’s English tutorial and a familial hug all received the exquisite attention of Mughal court painters and other artists throughout India. However mundane the subject, its rendering usually boasted fine, sometimes microscopic detail, opulent patterning and color, as well as gold, applied in shallow relief with a jeweler’s precision.

Such genre scenes present no particular difficulty to the contemporary Western viewer, but images that illustrate texts are another matter. These works, too, are visually spectacular, but far more challenging to interpret. The thorough wall labels provided here are indispensable guides to the complex tales behind these images.

Many images also belong to Ragamala series, described by Smart as “illustrations of poems that evoke the particular musical modes or scales of the raga system of North Indian music.” The concepts behind such illustrations can be daunting to grasp, studded as they are with unfamiliar terms and beliefs. Images of deities assuming the forms of men and fantastic beasts rest upon a complex scaffolding of ideas that cannot be explained in a paragraph or two.

Fortunately, the juicy visual splendor of Indian paintings speaks a far more universal language than the texts underlying them. The paintings vibrate with an intensity that draws one in to scrutinize the wonders within. The small size of the paintings (most are smaller than 10 inches) also enhances their magnetic pull.

In their smallness and dense detail, these paintings have much in common with European Christian miniature manuscript paintings, especially during the Renaissance. The Indian works, like the European, circumnavigate the spiritual world, rendering visual a host of miraculous events. Unlike the Christian works, however, the Indian paintings possess a luxuriant sensuality that often presents itself as the pathway to the divine.

There is no fear of flesh in this spiritual/sensual world, and no shying away from sex or seduction. Among the most memorable of images in the show is the “Lalita Ragini” of circa 1660, a timeless scene of a man gazing over his shoulder at his sleeping lover as he leaves her at sunrise.

Nearly all of the works in “Myths, Monsters, Maharajas” visualize the union of solidly rendered forms and ethereal notions. Elephants inspired by a book on the interpretation of dreams bear convincing pairs of wings. The gray, swirling fluids of the cosmic ocean hold a multiheaded snake that could have slithered straight off a treatise on scientific illustration.

These documents of the fantastic extend enticing invitations to a rich, remote world. Edwin Binney, Ellen Smart, and the San Diego Museum of Art have conspired brilliantly to make those invitations impossible to resist.

At the San Diego Museum of Art through Jan. 26. Open daily except Monday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. (619) 232-7931.