The Powers That Were in Persia

Among the stranger and more surprising exhibitions of recent months, “Royal Persian Painting: The Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925” chronicles a type of art with which few in the West have any familiarity, despite its mostly 19th century vintage. That’s the surprising part. The strange part is the painting itself--sophisticated, conservative and authoritarian in style.

The exhibition, organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and newly opened at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, is a thorough, somewhat historically complicated and often visually fascinating overview of the art of the Qajar dynasty in what is now Iran, a dynasty whose final collapse led to the accession of Riza Shah Pahlavi in 1925. Its focus is on the emergence of monumental paintings of life-size figures--especially princes and nobles, meant for display in architectural settings in palatial public rooms, but also more domestic subjects. Imagine a Persian miniature crossed with a full-length court portrait by Van Dyke, and you’ll be somewhere in the ballpark of what the large and sumptuous public pictures look like.

These are power portraits, meant to impress, intimidate and propagandize. Take the three portraits of Fath ‘Ali Shah (two lent by the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and not seen outside Russia before). All are signed by the ruler’s court painter, Mihr ‘Ali, and all are characterized by an almost aggressive grandeur.

They show the bearded potentate in a dazzling variety of full regalia. Whether standing erect and bedecked with scepter, crown and ceremonial sword, or seated on an elaborate carpet before a rudimentary landscape, or encased in ornamental armor, the shah is portrayed as an artifact for public display. His face carries no expression, its matched, almond-shaped eyes anchored beneath precise arcs of brown-black brows. The pose is always frontal, arms held away from the body, emphasizing silhouette. Feet, when seen, are in profile.

Rudimentary attempts to portray volume, occasional suggestions of cast shadow and the transparency of the lower reaches of the shah’s beard all infer an internationalist awareness of three-dimensional illusionism familiar from European art. Mostly, though, these life-size figures are portrayed as flat shapes against flat walls in shallow spaces.

That emphatic two-dimensionality is decorated to a fare-thee-well, with ornate interlaces of gold, encrustations of pearls and borders of glittering jewels. Sometimes, as in the seated portrait, it’s hard to know where the rigorously patterned embellishment of the shah’s clothing ends and that of the surrounding tapestry begins.

Pattern is repetition, repetition is ritual. The visual result is an ecstatic, iconic timelessness embodied in the ritualized image of a ruler. These portraits of what is finally a mere mortal convey a triumphalist sense of “always was, and always will be.” Imagine the pop-eyed impact of one sent as a diplomatic calling card to some French-ified European aristocrat.

A fourth portrait of Fath ‘Ali Shah, which may or may not be by the same artist (it’s unsigned), shows a less formal, more casual scene, in which he sits to the side smoking a hookah while a young man stands at the left. The generational pairing may imply a line of royal succession. (It’s estimated he fathered more than 200 children, in an extreme family-values effort to consolidate his authority throughout the realm.) Whatever the case, the painting is one of several in the show depicting domestic rather than state pleasures, including large scenes of life in the harem.

As Persian women did not appear in public, neither did Persian paintings of women appear in public rooms. The most remarkable in the show are a pair of almost mirror images of elaborately robed female acrobats. One stands serenely on her hands, the other seems suspended for eternity in mid-flip, hovering above a pyramid of rosy apples. Both conform to the same pictorial conventions as the ruler portraits--flat, shallow, patterned, frontal--although their blandly pretty, nearly identical faces have the feeling of generic types, rather than individualized portraits.

One weakness of “power paintings” like these is a certain sameness from one picture to the next. It’s probably inevitable, though, when the pragmatic purpose is to assert eternal continuity of totalitarian rule.

Indeed, the Qajar revival of monumental, life-size painting itself seems linked to that dynastic aim. Sacred calligraphy and miniatures found in manuscripts are the most common and widely known Persian paintings today, but monumental figural painting had flourished in antiquity (the rise of Islam in the 7th century put a stop to it). The extensive wall-labels in the Hammer exhibition and the show’s excellent catalog both accurately describe this mostly 19th century work with the term life-size figural painting. But try thinking of it another way: This is Grand Manner portraiture, Persian-style.

Persian rulers began to revive the genre of life-size painting late in the 18th century, by which time Grand Manner portraiture had been well established in Europe for more than 100 years. It’s as if successive generations, culminating in the Qajar dynasty, progressively began to realize that big, impressive, life-size paintings of aristocrats could usefully serve a dual purpose.

One was internal, the other external. First, the idea of a revival linked the current generation with the grandeur of its own cultural antiquity (much as Neo-Classical style was just beginning to do in Europe and the emergent United States), thus lending an aura of stability and appropriateness to the ruling class. Second, life-size figural painting offered a competitive artistic vehicle for Persians beset by intrusive threats from Britain and Russia, where Grand Manner portraiture was the artistic lingua franca of the court.

Royal Persian painting of the Qajar dynasty therefore seems to be a rather precarious combination, meant to appeal to two distinct (and distinctly different) audiences: the folks at home, who had one set of imperatives, and the infidels abroad, who had another. Late in the exhibition, a small but arresting bust-length portrait of an imam or Muslim cleric, attributed to Abu ‘l Hasan Ghaffari and made around 1860, shows an elegant, strikingly individualized, grim-faced sitter frozen in the conventionalized style of academic European painting. The stress and strain of being caught between two worlds is written all over his sullen and unhappy face.

* UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443-7000, through May 9. Closed Mondays.