Islamic art: window on a wider world
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By Robert Irwin The times 24 March 2004. Islamic art is difficult. The pictorial conventions we’re familiar with are absent.
There are no nude women (except for the occasional appearance of Shirin bathing in Persian miniatures illustrating the love story of Khusraw and Shirin). Much of the decoration consists of calligraphy in languages that are hard to master.
It is the product of empires and cultures whose history is scarcely ever taught in British schools. Much of what Muslims and historians of Islamic art regard as high art consists of textiles, metalwork and ceramics — stuff that a European art historian would classify as applied art or craftwork.
Yet, in the last century or so, successive exhibitions of Islamic art have inspired Western artists from Kandinsky to Matisse. Heaven on Earth: Art from Islamic Lands, the new exhibition at Somerset House, offers something that is both difficult and ravishing.
Drawing on the collections of the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the Khalili family in London, it is billed as the most important exhibition of Islamic art to go on show in London since one put on by the Hayward Gallery in 1976.
When Kenneth Clark produced his television series and accompanying book, Civilisation, he did not include Arabs, Persians and Turks. He seems to have felt, as many British people still do, that art is a monopoly of the West.
The 19th-century art critic John Ruskin argued that elaborate ornamentation was the typical product of savage cultures. He thought that Islamic art was detestable and compared it to the stripes on the back of a tiger. He hated abstract art in general and the Arab penchant for decorative abstraction in particular.
The earliest collections of Islamic art in Europe were haphazard and often dependent on the enthusiasms of private individuals. Many examples of Islamic ceramics, textiles and calligraphy were acquired by the owners of cabinets of curiosity. Islamic artefacts, such as Persian lustreware and Fatimid ivory work, were displayed cheek by jowl with such objects as narwhal horns, stuffed freaks and Maori carvings.
In Russia, Peter the Great, inspired by accounts of Dutch and British cabinets of curiosity, began his own in the 1690s. He wanted to use his rare and marvellous things to educate his benighted subjects and even offered vodka and snacks as an inducement to visit his collection in St Petersburg.
In the decades that followed, his collection of exotica evolved into the Institute of Oriental Studies. The Islamic art eventually joined the collection of Western paintings in the museum of the Hermitage.
After the Khurasani warlord Nadir Shah sacked Mogal Delhi in 1739, he sent Tsar Ivan VI some of the spoils as a gift. The Somerset House show includes some of the masterpieces he presented: a table, bracelets, flasks, a dish and a tray, all of gold, enamelled and studded with jewels.
In the 19th century, collecting Islamic art became a more scholarly pursuit. One of the stalwarts of this movement, a Count Alexei Bobrinsky, who headed the State Academy for the History of Material Culture but also had his own private Islamic art collection, acquired the Bobrinsky Bucket, here the star of the show.
This brass piece, inlaid with silver and copper, was made in Herat in 1163 and is unusual in that the merchant who owned it, the agent who commissioned it, the man who cast it and the calligrapher who worked on its inlay are all named in the bucket’s inscriptions. The calligraphy, some of which is ornately plaited and some of which is human-headed, is particularly striking.
Bobrinsky’s collection, like those of so many Russian aristocrats, was absorbed into the state’s collection in the Bolshevik years. As a result, the Hermitage owns some 30,000 pieces of Islamic art. Naturally, the collection is strongest in objects produced in the Persian cities of the eastern Islamic lands. It is relatively weak in manuscripts and other artefacts produced by Arabs in the West in earlier centuries.
In Britain, quite a few of the Islamic art works that today are in the collections of the British Museum, the V&A and the Ashmolean also first appeared in the cabinets of curiosity of private collectors. Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), for example, bought all over the world (including Islamic manuscripts and talismans). His collection was to form the core of the British Museum.
The British were beginning to study Islamic art from a practical point of view by the 19th century. The artist Owen Jones urged industrial designers to learn from the principles of Islamic ornament. William Morris made a study of Islamic textiles and helped to persuade the V&A to buy the famous Ardabil carpet. William de Morgan produced beautiful ceramics inspired by Persian lustreware.
The largest collection of Islamic art in private hands in Britain today — about 25,000 pieces — is owned by the Khalili Family Trust. Unlike the 18th-century collectors, who sought out the unique and bizarre, David Khalili has concentrated on collecting representative pieces, including a large number of Korans, which make an excellent basis for comparative study of calligraphy and arts of the book.
The Koran which was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad was not at first written down as an integral text but was mostly transmitted orally. When, around 650, the Caliph Uthman decided that a text should be compiled, the verses had to be copied “from scraps of parchment and leather, tablets of stone, ribs of palm branches, camels’ shoulder blades and ribs, pieces of board and the breasts of men”.
One remarkable exhibit is a folio page from a large Koran that seems to have been produced in North Africa in the early 8th century, but which was later discovered in Tashkent in Uzbekistan. It is thought to have been carried by an Arab warrior who fought in the jihad to bring Central Asia under Muslim rule.
Books have their destinies.
• Heaven on Earth: Art from Islamic Lands is at Somerset House (020-7845 46000) from March 25 to August 22. Robert Irwin is Near Eastern editor of the TLS
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