NEW art seldom startles. It would like to, but it doesn’t. Once you’ve seen a bit of it, you’ll have a pretty good idea what you will see next — digital photographs, big assemblages on the floor, plotless videos, the usual. More startling by far are the antique Indian paintings at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.
The maharajahs’ exhibition “Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur” is the opposite of usual, its pictures wholly unexpected. For a century or two, they’ve been stashed in saving darkness in a fort in northern India. Who knew they existed?
Their manner, too, surprises. It’s as if you had taken the familiar sheen of Mogul court art (its polished Persian suavity, its allegiance to the scale of page and book) and the similarly familiar flash of Indian folk art (the hot ebullient colors, the rhythmic repetitions) and melded them for a style unlike either. These pictures carry you — in leaps — to places you’ve never been.
For instance: The exhibition starts before the world begins. Here’s the cosmic ocean: Sometimes it’s all yellow, sometimes it’s all orange, all is dissolution. The images fill your field of vision. The ocean feels unbounded. It rolls off to infinity in neat concentric waves.
The steep mountains, when they come, are made of petals, not of stone.
The landscape is inhabited by colored birds and tigers but not by common people.
The exhibition’s tone is set by “Sage Markendeya’s Ashram and the Milky Ocean,” painted, in opaque watercolor and gold, in the 1780s. Vishnu, a Hindu deity, is sleeping on a silver sea. His bed looks like one of those inflatable plastic mattresses that float in suburban swimming pools, except it’s made of snakes. Welcome to Rajput painting. You’re not in Kansas anymore.
You’re in Rajasthan, in Jodhpur, in the Kingdom of Marwar, high on a rocky hilltop in a castle called the Mehrangarh, “the fort of the sun,” where these pictures were commissioned and very likely painted, then put away.
A mighty fortress is the Mehrangarh. Its walls are 1,500 feet long, 120 feet high and 70 feet thick. Here maharajahs have lived for 700 years. One resides there still, His Royal Highness Gaj Singh II, the 36th of the Rathore line. His Kingdom of Marwar lost its independence in 1947, and without his royal favor, its art would not be here in Washington.
Oz was mostly emerald and tasteful. Here, no single hue dominates, and strangenesses erupt. Colors zing and clang.
What would it be like to live as a maharajah? Viewing these paintings, you, too, become an Indian king, ruling your domain from that lofty dwelling. Your every wish is granted. Jewels are in your turban, ropes of pearls around your neck. Blossoms scent your gardens. Your swimming pools are large enough to float a fleet of pleasure craft. Feasts of 50 dishes will be served to you alone by long lines of lithe women.
Like a king, you get to see whatever you imagine. The painters in your palace are there for just that purpose. It’s a little bit like having a Steven Spielberg studio in your basement busily producing pictures of your dreams.
“Garden and Cosmos” could have been called “The Three Maharajahs.”
The first maharajah is a voluptuary. The second is conventionally pious. The third, an ash-smeared yogi, lives alone in the corner of the garden in a wretched little hut.
All wear swooping black mustaches, and, being maharajahs, all are shown as larger than lesser human beings. Otherwise, each is different.
Maharajah Bakhat Singh (1706-1752) reminds me of Hugh Hefner. He was mighty as a warrior and ruthless as a son, becoming king after murdering his father, but you wouldn’t know this from the art he commissioned. He doesn’t ride or hunt. What Bakhat does is party, party all the time.
In “Amusements on a Moonlit Water Terrace” (circa 1720), dozens of young women serve him dinner while others pluck sitars. Another of his paintings is called “Revels in a Pleasure Boat.” Elsewhere he is shown playing in a swimming pool with 20 of his women; he’s squirting them with water jets from a big long brass syringe. (Then his elegant young niece brought him a new coat, one she’d dipped in poison. That’s how Bakhat died.)
When Maharajah Vijay Singh (in Marwar, all the males bore the surname Singh) ascends to the throne in 1752, the paintings lose their spice. Vijay was no sybarite. We still see the same fountains, terraces and gardens, but the playgirls have been banished, as have the all-girl orchestras. We’re now surrounded by deities. The pleasure craft in the palace pool are now there for the deity Rama.
When Maharajah Man Singh takes the throne in 1803, the pictures change again.
Man Singh credits his ascension to the grace of Jallandharnath, that most ascetic of ascetics. Man Singh now turns his back on the hereditary nobility and dedicates his kingdom to the yogis known as Naths.
They took their name from Jallandharnath and practiced his harsh disciplines. The maharajah did the same. He “cared nothing for himself nor for worldly affairs,” he wrote, “as the greatness of Nathji enveloped his heart.” You see this in his art.
In the paintings he commissioned, Naths aren’t hard to spot. Their skin is gray. They all wear heavy earrings and pointy hats.
To make yourself a yogi, you first had to devote yourself to 12 years of study. The dogmas of their practice, and of their metaphysics, had been written down for centuries but seldom before painted. Now hundreds of Nath pictures were painted for the king.
These 60 paintings (which, after leaving Washington, will travel to Seattle, the British Museum in London and the National Museum of India) to evoke yogis’ progress. The maharajahs’ exhibition takes you all the way from photographs of Jodhpur and frolicking in gardens to the realms of pure abstraction.
What does that state look like? Well, it’s pure and oceanic, glittering and golden. Also it presages by more than a century the all-gold field paintings made by Robert Rauschenberg, the all-blue ones of Yves Klein and Mark Rothko’s glowing atmospheres. It’s like a prediction. You can see it in this show.
For more info visit: www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions