India’s Eye-Opening Legacy of Painting

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is presenting three exhibitions collectively titled “A Passage to India.” Two offer an uncommon look at the popular art made on the vast subcontinent. The third reflects the British view during the colonial period.

A small group of photographs act as prologue to the main show. “Painted Prayers: The Ritual Art of Indian Women” consist of about 20 contemporary Cibachrome images by ethnologist and writer Stephen Huyler. It claims to be the first exhibition about a peculiarly Indian phenomenon. Every day millions of Hindu Indian women paint their houses. This doesn’t mean that every day some Indian women paint their houses so that at the end of the year a lot of houses have been spruced up. It means that seasonally, weekly and sometimes daily these women paint and decorate their dwellings.

The act of painting is regarded as a spiritual exercise, a form of prayer. It intends to celebrate special days, curry the favor of the gods or placate them. The results echo travelers’ impressions that India is a land soaked in astonishing colors from delicate lime greens to sonorous purples. The images are startling and piquant. The facade of one adobe-like house looks like an Abstract Expressionist composition.

In Jodhpur recently a woman somehow got her laundry bluing mixed up with the paint and covered her house with it. The resulting hue makes solid walls look as disembodied as the sky. The effect so pleased the local women that a whole quarter is now filled with blue houses.

If Huyler’s pictures tend to create the impression that people in India paint all the time, the concurrent main exhibition and its title seem to confirm it. “From the Ocean of Painting: India’s Popular Painting Traditions, 1589 to the Present” is a crowded assembly of 101 teeming pictures from a horde of about 20 different traditions. It not only arches from Delhi to Madras, it shows that popular artists in India paint on everything from life-size shadow puppets to portable altars to tiny devotional books to huge banners. When they run out of those, they paint in reverse on glass producing a kind of calendar art.

These artists not only paint on everything, they cover every inch with image and text. One example is “The Great Goddess.” About 5 feet tall and 5 feet wide, it depicts the multi-armed female deity Shiva brandishing daggers and mounted on a tiger. As if the elaborated image were not complex enough, every cranny that isn’t taken up by it--including the goddess’s arms--is filled with calligraphic text in Sanskrit.

Larger works are often used as backdrops for recitations from such traditional texts as the Mahabharata. One such banner about 15 feet long shows several hundred figures.

The exhibition was conceived and organized by Barbara Rossi for the University of Iowa Art Museum, where it was previously shown, and a catalogue is still forthcoming. That is a pity since this is billed as the first U.S. showing of India’s folk, tribal and popular urban painting. The normal expectation from such an exercise is a certain clarification. Here confusion is more likely.

That is the fault of neither the art nor its presentation. This work is entirely consistent with India’s ancient courtly arts, its temples so teeming with sculpture they look--from a distance--like eroded rocks, its miniatures so exquisite they hold up under microscopic examination.

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If we deadline-driven Westerners find this art befuddling and somehow akin to the art of the Middle Ages, or contemporary Outsider art, it’s because all come from realms where time is differently conceived. There is no reason not to endlessly elaborate an image since the act gives pleasure, the gods are pleased and time doesn’t matter.

Speaking of time, the final exhibition, “Victorian Visions,” consists of about 40 albumen photographs from the period of British colonial fascination with the great land.

Taken as early as 1860, what some may lack in aesthetic polish all compensate for in the way they bend the clock. There are exquisite things, such as an image of a dancer’s foot encrusted with baubles, a Ceylonese nude of surpassing innocent seductiveness, pompous Maharajahs and ferocious holy men. The Himalayas are awesome, and a dead tiger pathetic. But nothing gets to us as much as the idea that such old photographs can exist.

Then we realize that Indian culture goes back to 2500 BC. Seen today it doesn’t look all that different. Same Ganges with bathing men, same sacred bullocks and patient elephants. Such a realization clears up most questions about this culture and its art.

* Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara, “From the Ocean of Painting” and “Painted Prayers,” through Aug. 13; “Victorian Visions,” through Aug. 27; closed Mondays, (805) 936-4364.