Passions Run High Over This Collection

“Power and Desire,” an entrancing exhibition of South Asian paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art’s Edwin Binney 3rd Collection, tells many a juicy story--of Rajput leaders and Hindu gods, emperors and consorts, kidnappings and illicit rendezvous, hunts and celebrations, passions and infidelities, pleasures and obligations.

Power and desire are not just the motivating impulses that course through the narratives in these 70 exquisitely detailed paintings. They are also the forces that must join to make such an exhibition happen, and the very same forces, in this case, that conspired against such a show happening for nearly 10 years.

No more than 25 or 30 paintings from the 1,453-piece Binney Collection have been displayed at a time since 1991, when the museum staged a show to introduce the stunning, newly acquired material. The coming-out party was appropriately celebratory. Reputed to be one of the best collections of Indian painting outside India, the Binney acquisition promised to raise the profile of the San Diego museum, whose spotty permanent collection includes several notable Spanish and Italian paintings and a hefty selection of work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

But after that first hurrah of a show, the Binney treasures were kept under wraps, except for a small, rotating selection of images hung in an inconspicuous corridor behind the museum’s Asian galleries. For nearly a decade, the desire to highlight the collection clashed with the power of the former museum director to control exhibition programming. Now, with a new director in place, a permanent gallery for the Binney Collection about to be constructed, and the up-and-running show, which will travel internationally, power and desire have finally united to back the same cause.

“The collection has been frustratingly absent from the public view,” says San Diego Museum of Art director Don Bacigalupi, who applied himself to remedying the situation as soon as he arrived on the job nine months ago. “It’s one of the stellar aspects of the [museum’s permanent] collection. It seems obvious that it should be a priority.”

Edwin Binney 3rd, heir to the Crayola fortune, amassed his collection from 1958 until his death in 1986 (in addition to South Asian art, he also collected Turkish painting, American quilts and French drawings). Said to be a savvy but prickly character whose contempt for snobs and solicitors was matched by his own elitist Bostonian airs, Binney, who had a home in San Diego, bequeathed the bulk of his holdings in Indian art to the San Diego Museum of Art, where he had served on the board of trustees. The collection spans the 12th to 20th centuries and includes paintings representing nearly every important court on the Indian subcontinent.

Shortly after the museum accessioned the gift in 1990, Ellen Smart, a PhD in South Asian art and archeology, was hired as its first curator. She organized the show “Myths, Monsters, Maharajas: Introducing the Binney Collection” in late 1991 amid high hopes for regular display and publication of the collection.

After that first exposure, however, the Binney Collection was forced into hiding. Smart cataloged the collection, which had arrived “in a jumble,” she recalls, much of it unmatted and unboxed, and brought it to museum standards of storage and preservation. But, she says, her requests for slots on the exhibition schedule and support for publications were consistently denied.

Steven Brezzo was the museum’s director at the time. When asked in 1996 why the Binney Collection had such a low profile, he said, “I don’t know why that is.”

To be an active part of people’s lives, he said, the museum has to compete with other “recreational enticements” that the city offers. “To do that we have to err on the side of being popular, exciting. That takes energy, money and programming.”

Brezzo steered the museum more and more toward blockbuster shows, spectacles featuring Faberge eggs or Romanov jewels, or exhibitions with both feet firmly in popular culture, surveying the art of the Muppets, Dr. Seuss and “Star Wars.” “We don’t have the resources to spend on scholarship and connoisseurship,” he said.

Dominating the schedule were packaged shows organized elsewhere. One by one, starting in the mid-’90s, the museum’s core curatorial staff moved on, dispirited by the lack of institutional support for their in-house efforts, or, in Smart’s case, “downsized” when her position was merged with another. (Several of the curators have since been replaced.) Plagued by scandals involving high expense-account totals and nepotism, Brezzo left the museum last year.

Bacigalupi’s arrival last summer was greeted by many in San Diego’s art community like fresh rain after a drought. Good-humored and diplomatic about how enthusiastically he’s been received, Bacigalupi characterizes the museum’s box-office-driven programming of the past 15 years as symptomatic of broader imbalances in the museum arena.

“I feel that we, as a field, have just emerged from a first-generation experiment with blockbuster shows,” he says. “We suffered an addiction to them, and we have some realigning to do, some assessments concerning where we’ve come on this diet of blockbusters.

“The general principle I hope to achieve is one of balance, so that we’re not missing audience members at any level. I’m not at all interested in random flashes of spectacular shows that don’t build on our audience’s understanding of the world of art. Nor am I interested in creating an academic jewel box that features shows that appeal to only 16 scholars in the world. I think there’s a way to learn from both those types of exhibitions and to create a program that balances both and everything in between.”

Hybrid shows that draw from museum collections and sometimes expand upon them can be terrifically successful, he says. “They have huge appeal in the way of large blockbusters, but they engender devotion to a collection. The museum gains, not just in the bottom line, but in terms of devotion to the collection, the soul of the institution.”

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When Bacigalupi started at the museum in August, he found a “canned” show on the books for this time slot, but he and Caron Smith, curator of Asian art at the museum, decided to put Binney back on the agenda, and they moved ahead quickly with the organization of “Power and Desire.” Smith, a scholar of Chinese art who came to the museum in 1998 from a position at the Asia Society in New York, formed a curatorial team with Vishakha Desai, senior vice president and director of the galleries at the Asia Society, and independent scholar Kavita Singh.

“With this show we chose some stars that would show off the breadth, others that would show off the wit that Binney had in collecting,” Smith says. “He enjoyed humor as well as the classic definitions of quality in these paintings.”

Smith and her colleagues organized the exhibition into three thematic categories: “Rule and Domain,” encompassing images of leaders and the activities of their rule; “Love and Longing,” showing romance in all its facets; and “Divine Realms,” detailing episodes in the lives of the Hindu gods. Peppered throughout the show are interactive displays of Indian clothing, jewelry and a shrine upon which visitors can place artificial flowers or pieces of plastic fruit. All are designed to give visitors a physical link to the work, to provide them greater access to its often complex, unfamiliar subjects.

“To get people to see and appreciate is the job of a museum,” Smith says. “It’s the museum’s job to create the environment where the synapse can be closed between whatever the work is and whoever the person is, to create an arc between the two.”

Another strategy the curators adopted was to equip viewers with a tool-like vocabulary to use in navigating their way through the paintings. At the beginning of the exhibition--and in a handsome, take-away brochure--they present “Seven Keys to the Visual Language of South Asian Paintings,” essentially a primer on how to decipher the narratives and spatial relationships within. Magnifying glasses are also provided so that viewers can study the meticulous detail in these watercolor paintings, some of which are accented in gold, silver, tiny gems and beetle carapaces.

“There’s so much emotional nuance in the detail,” Smith says. “If

you can get people to look, they can really see so much without knowing very much. That’s really what happened to me.” The seven keys were modeled after discussions she had with the other curators of the show. “It was using those steps that got us to what’s going on in the traffic of the pictures, the delicacy of the interchange and the subtleties of the way the relationships are expressed.”

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This slice of the Binney Collection will travel to the Asia Society in October, and next spring to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It’s the first time any of these works has traveled since the late ‘60s, when the collection was still in private hands. Upon the show’s return to San Diego, the works will be reintroduced into the permanent collection in their own gallery, scheduled to be completed by the spring of 2001. The gallery, which was approved under Brezzo’s tenure but never scheduled or funded, will hold about 30 paintings, not many more than the corridor did, but in a more unified and prominent space.

Bacigalupi and Smith both hope to attract scholars to the collection, to guest-curate shows and to write about the paintings, perhaps in the form of booklets that can be collected to form one evolving, multifaceted catalog. Smith envisions storytellers in the gallery, a family-friendly place “where generations can grow up knowing of this treasure here, with all the intricacies and interests it offers.” People who come again and again, seeing shows that approach the material from varying perspectives, will, Smith says, “be able to string these together into some kind of garland of awareness. We were doing a real disservice to hold this material out of circulation.”