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Rare heirlooms of Iranian history http://www.ir-tmca.com/about/building.htm
In this land of paradoxes, it is perhaps no surprise that an exhibition dealing with the past should be held in a museum built to house the work of the present. Monumental sculptures by Henry Moore, Max Ernst and others greet visitors who venture into the landscaped garden. True, there was no convenient alternative to the museum, completed only months before the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah. It was the one venue large enough to accommodate some 300 painted manuscript leaves and more than 50 manuscripts. Displayed with elegant simplicity, the paintings are widely spaced, an indispensable requirement to enable viewers to concentrate on works too rich in detail to be taken in at a glance. That the most brilliant art show of any kind in Iran should be put together under the new regime in a building designed by the monarchy must tickle the vivid sense of irony shared by most Iranians. So will the ubiquitous presence of royal themes. The "Shah-Nameh" or "Book of Kings," a stylized history of the world with Iran at the heart of it and written in the 10th century, looms very large. Indeed, a compelling reason for holding the show in the Museum of Contemporary Art is that its most dazzling section consists of "Shah-Nameh" pages owned by the museum. The story of their acquisition in 1994 begins with a tale of destruction. No one knows for sure how the "Shah-Nameh," which was produced "by order of the Book House [Ketab-Khaneh] of Shah Tahmasp [1524-1576]," as the opening page says, and is arguably the greatest surviving Iranian manuscript, came to Istanbul. It arrived in Paris at the turn of the 20th century under equally obscure circumstances and was acquired by Baron Edmond de Rothschild. Preserved in mint condition, the precious manuscript was entrusted for sale in 1954 to Rosenberg & Stiebel, a New York company specializing in French painting and decorative art. In 1959, a buyer willing to pay $360,000 was found at last. This was Arthur Houghton Jr., a collector of rare English books who later became chairman and then president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Within three years, pages were pulled out of the manuscript to be exhibited at the Grolier Club. In 1970, Houghton began dismembering the book and donated 78 paintings to the Metropolitan Museum. Seven more pages were sent to be auctioned at Christie's, London, on Nov. 17, 1976. The International Herald Tribune was the first to report the outrage in this column. Further sales followed at auction and through the trade. After Houghton died in 1991, an English dealer, Oliver Hoare, approached the Iranian cultural authorities. In the 1970s, protracted negotiations between the secretariat of Queen Farah Pahlavi and Houghton's agents had made no progress. At the time, persistent rumors blamed the excessive greed of a highly placed Iranian official.
Hoare put a price of $20 million on the portion of the manuscript still held by Houghton's estate. The financial difficulties caused by the massive destruction and loss of life that resulted from the Iran-Iraq war made it impossible for the government to commit such an amount to the purchase of art. Hoare suggested that the museum might sell off some of the contemporary works, ranging from Andr? Derain to the New York School paintings, which had been acquired by the queen's secretariat. Iranian law, however, rules out the sale of any part of the nation's art holdings. The idea of a barter slowly emerged. In 1994, after months of arduous discussions and near failures, a swap of the museum's "Woman III" by Willem de Kooning for the Houghton portion of the "Shah-Nameh" was concluded in Vienna. Sami Azar, the museum director appointed long after the event, still mourns the loss of the de Kooning. When pressed, he concedes that the arguments that finally convinced the strongest Iranian opponents against the transaction of its necessity carry considerable weight. If Iran had not acquired the remaining portion of the manuscript, it would have been broken up. The text, which is important to the literary history of the "Book of Kings," and the sequential integrity of nearly half the pages, which is equally important to art history, would have been lost. Final irreparable damage would have been caused to one of the most important heirlooms of Iranian culture. By contrast, the de Kooning would still be intact after moving from location A to location B.
Azar, to whom credit goes for holding an exhibition in a museum fundamentally intended for a different purpose, may find some comfort as he watches the flow of young Iranians peering at the pages. While the pages of Shah Tahmasp's "Shah-Nameh" stand out in the show, others rival with them in splendor. Some were also ripped off from "Shah-Nameh" manuscripts. The most splendid one originally belonged to a volume copied in 1493-1494 for Sultan Ali Mirza, who ruled Lahejan in northern Iran. Stolen from a Sufi hermitage in Istanbul prior to 1929, the book was returned, bereft of a number of paintings. These later surfaced in Paris. Some are now scattered across Europe and America. The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington owns seven of them. The Reza Abbasi Museum acquired the page in the show courtesy of Farah Pahlavi. But the most striking works come from the Golestan Library, the former Royal Library of Iran. Pages from a famous moraqqa or "patchwork [album]" in which rare paintings and specimens of calligraphy were originally collected by Jahangir, the Mogul emperor of India (1605-1627), are on view for the first time since the 1936 London "Exhibition of Persian Art." A double page with a royal banquet in a garden painted in the 1470s or 1480s and a sheet with a camel fight are both signed by Behzad, an artist whose name has the same resonance in Iran as Leonardo's in the West. One of the most important manuscripts from late 16th-century Mogul India is there. It contains the Persian text of a "world history" written in the early 14th century by Rashid ad-Din, a minister turned historian. Illuminated by Indian artists trained in the Iranian technique, it reflects the radically new aesthetic approach that evolved in the most international court in the East, where Persian art and culture shared by Iranians and Indians alike underwent the influence of Western art via the engravings brought by missionaries and travelers from Europe. Several revelations pepper the show. A sensational manuscript of the "Bustan" (Garden of Scented Flowers) by Sa'adi, was copied in Bokhara in 1553-1554 for the Royal Librarian of the Uzbek dynasty. The label regrettably omits these details, found in the last page and in the inscription at the top of a palace in one of the paintings. Viewers might be forgiven for not realizing that this is a major addition to the rare Bokhara school. Half the labels are likewise vague, when not downright mistaken. The opening page of a Koran from Islamic India illuminated under Jahangir, around 1605-1610, is described as "Timurid" - implying that it is Iranian and earlier by 100 years. Several signed paintings are called "anonymous." The conversions of the Muslim era to the Christian era are all wrong by 100 years. The English translations, invariably atrocious, are occasionally incomprehensible. Such are the peccadilloes in this otherwise admirable show that has no catalogue. Given the labels, this is just as well. As I walked out into the garden, Max Ernst's gigantic bronze character struck me as sneering with unusual intensity. The heat, no doubt. |
