Garden & Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur

From SAAM's literature:

"This groundbreaking exhibition of 58 artworks will present new facets of Indian painting that flourished in the royal courts of Rajasthan from the 17th to the 19th century. In addition to the exquisite narrative "miniatures" with which we are familiar, the exhibition will include breathtaking monumental images that convey an unsurpassed intensity of artistic vision and religious fervor. Produced for the Rajasthan nobles, these paintings have never been published; most have been seen by just a few scholars since their creation. This is the first time these paintings will be exhibited in the United States."

–Josh Yiu, Foster Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art

I have been looking forward to seeing this exhibit ever since it was first announced in the SAM calendar, and on the whole I was not disappointed. The exhibit had two main types of paintings, secular paintings of court life and politics, and religious paintings expressing mostly the Nath flavor of Yogic theology. While the secular paintings were a bit interesting from a historical perspective, allowing the viewer to see what court life looked like in that place and time, and were painted with the same artistic style as the devotional paintings, they didn't offer much after the first painting or two for anyone who is not a student of this particular historical period.

The devotional paintings, however, were an entirely different experience altogether. I am glad that by chance I happened to enter the exhibit the wrong way round, viewing all of the devotional paintings first before getting to the court paintings, which were placed at the front of the exhibit.

While all of these paintings were the work of dedicated artists in the court atelier, most of the paintings did hold a purpose other than simple expression, and that is to be shown at court along with stories and discussion as visual illustrations to assist the education of those present. Due to that, many of them are part of a series of paintings in a storytelling series, or are within the painting themselves presenting an elaborate story, much like a good graphic novel without words.

Even if I didn't already have spiritual leanings towards India, I would have found most of these paintings to be very interesting. Anyone who knows anything about Indian theologies knows there's some pretty good stories there, especially from a graphic perspective. Take this image on the right for example, from the Tulsidas Ramayana. I mean, anyone who isn't interested in a picture showing the adventures of a royal, a guard, a blue guy and a couple of monkey men crossing the land in search of a kidnapped lady in distress just plain doesn't know anything about good stories! And this is of course to say nothing for the actual art itself, which is so rich, colorful, inspired and wildly creative I'm not sure how you couldn't fall in love with it at first sight.

There were many such large story paintings telling various stories and explaining various geographies and characters of well-known devotional stories. Among the most breathtaking of these was a huge 3-panel set of paintings telling the story of Krishna Lila, which tells of young Krishna unwittingly luring a bunch of female cowherds into the woods, causing them all to become inspired with a longing for divine love. After luring them from their home lives, a multiplicity of Krishnas peek out and play with the gopis among a huge and amazingly lush forest, until he leaves them searching among the trees for his hopeful return. The delicate beauty of the detail of the painted forest with all of its tiny flowers and creatures is one I could probably sit and look at all day without tiring of.

Apart from the lush and comic-book like paintings of all the various stories and characters, there were two full rooms depicting stories of the most cosmic order. According to the exhibit text, many of these depicted concepts and images are not known to have been painted anywhere else (as opposed to the devotional paintings of the stories, which like our Western tradition of depicting biblical scenes, is a widespread and often-repeated topic for devotional artists). These paintings made the brave attempt to depict the nothingness and allness that is god/the universe itself.

One such painting, depicting the universe before any corporeal forms were taken, is simply a canvas of varying shades of shimmering gold paint with various textures. These paintings too were intended to be shown in sequential order, depicting first the absolute nothingness/allness and gradually the progression of lesser godly forms that were assumed out of this none-ness to create the corporeal world we exist in today. The image from the beginning of this post shows the middle part of the progression, when Spirit (left) and Matter (right) emerged from the nothingness (the gold background). I found this room of paintings in particular to be very riveting, even though the actual paintings themselves were much simpler in graphic detail than all of the other paintings in the exhibit. I almost wished I could just stay in that room all day.

You can read more about the show, and see a slide show of images from the exhibit here.
You can see the book that goes along with the exhibit here.