[CPProt.net] UK: At auction, strands of Islamic tradition

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

At auction, strands of Islamic tradition  
By Souren Melikian International Herald Tribune

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2005
 
 
LONDON Politicians wondering why the West so often goes amiss in its
dealings with Islamic countries might like to glance at the art world. From
museums to auction houses, misnomers, misinterpretations and, all too
frequently, severe mishandling of works of art reflect a lack of information
at an elementary level. Here too, alas, misinformation can lead to
destruction.
 
"Islamic art sales" this week were not an encouraging sight. To outsiders
stepping in to view the objects, their disparate character must have been
bewildering. You cannot accumulate works of art created by profoundly
different cultures over 12 centuries and expect visual coherence. 
 
The notion of "Islamic art" is a 19th-century Western invention. There is no
more "Islamic art" than there is "Christian art" from Carolingian Germany to
Victorian Britain.
 
There is actually less of it. Islam, which says that God has "no analogy,"
bans the worship of images, in contrast to Christianity with its countless
paintings and carvings of Virgin and Child or scenes from the Old and New
Testament. The few works that could be called "Islamic" are manuscripts of
the Koran or architectural inscriptions reproducing Koranic excerpts. Yet
even these do not belong to one "Islamic art" because the aesthetic
traditions that produced them were different.
 
To this day, the notion of "Islamic art" is perpetuated by universities and
museums that lack the financial and human resources to distribute the art of
the Arab east, the Iranian world, Turkey and Islamic India into separate
departments. 
 
At the collecting level, ignorance destroys. Thousands of manuscripts have
been ripped apart to satisfy Western buyers eager to frame them and hang
them on the wall like European drawings. 
 
At Christie's, "Four folios from a Kufic Quran, Near East or North Africa,"
taken from two different sections of a Koran, were offered as one lot. They
did not sell. A host of pages likewise separated from their manuscripts
appeared elsewhere in the sale, as they did in the auctions held on
Wednesday at Sotheby's and Bonhams.
 
Several important texts have been lost in the last 100 years through this
ripping process. Volumes preserving major variants in famous literary works
have been dismembered. These are essential when establishing the critical
edition of any text or studying its history through time. At Christie's,
four pages removed from a 16th-century manuscript of the 10th-century
Iranian Shah-Nameh (Book of Kings) offered variants about which the
catalogue says nothing. These substantially depart from the printed
editions. Their quality shows that the manuscript must have been executed in
the royal studio. None of the pages sold. Shorn of the end page, which
almost certainly named the scribe and gave a date, perhaps even a location,
they are now no more than waifs from an artistic and literary shipwreck. 
 
Monuments are treated just as badly. We will never know from which
17th-century Syrian mosque or mausoleum a ceramic revetment tile with the
Muslim profession of faith was removed. If we did, there would be no need to
speculate about its precise date. In Iran, not one of the palatial friezes
of revetment tiles of the 13th and 14th centuries have survived. Dispersed
across the world, the tiles that carry verses from the Book of Kings are not
even recognized for what they are. In Sotheby's sale, one of them, sold for
£10,200, or about $17,950, retained two Persian words from a variant on a
Shah-Nameh verse that escaped the cataloguer's attention.
 
Commercial digging represents another ongoing catastrophe. Banned by law in
the concerned countries, too poor, too corrupt and too hard pressed to
enforce it, they have devastated one major archaeological site after
another. Nishapur (Neyshabur in Persian), the great East Iranian metropolis
where amateurish excavations were conducted in the 1930s by a Metropolitan
Museum team, was quarried by looters for the next four decades.
 
Thousands of vessels reached the Western markets. At Sotheby's a piece of
that type labeled "Central Asia" was painted with superb sepia-brown
calligraphy reproducing an Arabic maxim found on several Nishapur bowls:
al-jud min akhlaqi ahl-il Janna. Salama. (Generosity is part of the ethics
of Paradise people. Peace!) Perhaps - who knows? - this promise prompted
bidders to run it up to £78,000, an astronomical figure, paid, Sotheby's
said, by an "institution."
 
But whether museums will want in the future to retain wares without a
documented provenance over which the shadow of unauthorized digging will
hang forever is a moot question.
 
Clandestine digging eliminates historical evidence by destroying the context
in which an object lay underground. This erases from memory its original
location, the other objects with which it was associated and any dating
clues from coins or vegetal remains that allow carbon-14 analysis. It raises
unnecessary questions about geographical origin - Sotheby's thus noted
apropos of the calligraphic vessel that "Samarqand, Nishapur and Utrar are
all known to have been established centres of pottery production" under the
Samanids, the dynasty that ruled most of eastern Iran from the late 9th to
the early 11th century.
 
Today, fewer and fewer scholars are willing to tolerate further destruction.
Already, major institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum ban the
acquisition of undocumented objects that have been dug up. Occasionally this
may spare museums a faux pas. Illicit excavations provide the most splendid
smoke screen for objects recently fabricated or embellished.
 
A curious "late Sasanian or early Islamic silver bowl" turned up at
Sotheby's, which placed it in "Persia" (i.e., Iran) or "Mesopotamia" (i.e.,
Iraq) in the "late 6th/7th century." Sotheby's, eager to do the right thing,
had two samples from the bowl analyzed at Oxford University. The conclusion
was that the metallurgical composition is "consistent with data from other
analysed silver vessels from the late Sasanian/post-Sasanian period."
 
This, alas, says little about the stiffly engraved design and its oddities.
Scrolls in Iranian art do not end with rosettes - as several do on the bowl.
Bird heads do not spring out of the bases of blossoms, nor do split
palmettes carry acanthus leaves on the side. I would not bet on the £54,000
silver bowl staying on view forever in the "institution" that reportedly
acquired it.
 
In this atmosphere of aesthetic confusion and shaky knowledge made worse by
the occasional fear of tripping up, it is no surprise that private
collectors have all but vanished in Europe.
 
This is to some extent compensated for by the ascent of collecting in the
Middle East, where new money rather than connoisseurship triggered it, with
some rare exceptions. Sheik Nasser al Sabah in Kuwait has been building up
for more than three decades a stunning private museum. Discreet, the sheik
stands apart. So does another collector, descended from an Ottoman family of
Syrian civil servants based in Riyadh.
 
Turkish buyers interested in Turkish art became active in the 1980s, forming
impressive collections of Iznik ceramics. Yet this week they were absent. At
Sotheby's the rarest Iznik piece, a large basin, or tabaq, from the second
quarter of the 16th century was bought for £90,000 by a dealer established
in Kuwait. Surprisingly, some fine 16th-century revetment tiles remained
stranded.
 
The Iranian expatriates in the West who used to compete furiously for some
Iranian works of art likewise displayed far less enthusiasm. They sat on
their hands as Christie's star lot, the 1844 portrait of Mohammad Shah
Qajar, came up. The portrait was unsold.
 
It takes a valiant expert to make predictions in a market where buyers are
so few and so fickle. Nearly half the lots went nowhere at Christie's and
37.5 percent failed to sell at Sotheby's.
 
Sotheby's departmental head may have derived some comfort from the triumph
of his star lot, a Mogul painting of the 1630s depicting a prince seated on
a palace platform amidst turbaned literati. Bequeathed in 1844 to a
Norwegian painter by his Javanese pupil, it is unlikely ever to raise
questions about the legitimacy of its source. And that, in the eyes of the
unnamed institution that bought it, is surely priceless. It might account
for the staggering £192,800 it cost. Once again, forecasts about an "Islamic
work of art" were confounded.
 
 LONDON Politicians wondering why the West so often goes amiss in its
dealings with Islamic countries might like to glance at the art world. From
museums to auction houses, misnomers, misinterpretations and, all too
frequently, severe mishandling of works of art reflect a lack of information
at an elementary level. Here too, alas, misinformation can lead to
destruction.
 
"Islamic art sales" this week were not an encouraging sight. To outsiders
stepping in to view the objects, their disparate character must have been
bewildering. You cannot accumulate works of art created by profoundly
different cultures over 12 centuries and expect visual coherence. 
 
The notion of "Islamic art" is a 19th-century Western invention. There is no
more "Islamic art" than there is "Christian art" from Carolingian Germany to
Victorian Britain.
 
There is actually less of it. Islam, which says that God has "no analogy,"
bans the worship of images, in contrast to Christianity with its countless
paintings and carvings of Virgin and Child or scenes from the Old and New
Testament. The few works that could be called "Islamic" are manuscripts of
the Koran or architectural inscriptions reproducing Koranic excerpts. Yet
even these do not belong to one "Islamic art" because the aesthetic
traditions that produced them were different.
 
To this day, the notion of "Islamic art" is perpetuated by universities and
museums that lack the financial and human resources to distribute the art of
the Arab east, the Iranian world, Turkey and Islamic India into separate
departments. 
 
At the collecting level, ignorance destroys. Thousands of manuscripts have
been ripped apart to satisfy Western buyers eager to frame them and hang
them on the wall like European drawings. 
 
At Christie's, "Four folios from a Kufic Quran, Near East or North Africa,"
taken from two different sections of a Koran, were offered as one lot. They
did not sell. A host of pages likewise separated from their manuscripts
appeared elsewhere in the sale, as they did in the auctions held on
Wednesday at Sotheby's and Bonhams.
 
Several important texts have been lost in the last 100 years through this
ripping process. Volumes preserving major variants in famous literary works
have been dismembered. These are essential when establishing the critical
edition of any text or studying its history through time. At Christie's,
four pages removed from a 16th-century manuscript of the 10th-century
Iranian Shah-Nameh (Book of Kings) offered variants about which the
catalogue says nothing. These substantially depart from the printed
editions. Their quality shows that the manuscript must have been executed in
the royal studio. None of the pages sold. Shorn of the end page, which
almost certainly named the scribe and gave a date, perhaps even a location,
they are now no more than waifs from an artistic and literary shipwreck. 
 
Monuments are treated just as badly. We will never know from which
17th-century Syrian mosque or mausoleum a ceramic revetment tile with the
Muslim profession of faith was removed. If we did, there would be no need to
speculate about its precise date. In Iran, not one of the palatial friezes
of revetment tiles of the 13th and 14th centuries have survived. Dispersed
across the world, the tiles that carry verses from the Book of Kings are not
even recognized for what they are. In Sotheby's sale, one of them, sold for
£10,200, or about $17,950, retained two Persian words from a variant on a
Shah-Nameh verse that escaped the cataloguer's attention.
 
Commercial digging represents another ongoing catastrophe. Banned by law in
the concerned countries, too poor, too corrupt and too hard pressed to
enforce it, they have devastated one major archaeological site after
another. Nishapur (Neyshabur in Persian), the great East Iranian metropolis
where amateurish excavations were conducted in the 1930s by a Metropolitan
Museum team, was quarried by looters for the next four decades.
 
Thousands of vessels reached the Western markets. At Sotheby's a piece of
that type labeled "Central Asia" was painted with superb sepia-brown
calligraphy reproducing an Arabic maxim found on several Nishapur bowls:
al-jud min akhlaqi ahl-il Janna. Salama. (Generosity is part of the ethics
of Paradise people. Peace!) Perhaps - who knows? - this promise prompted
bidders to run it up to £78,000, an astronomical figure, paid, Sotheby's
said, by an "institution."
 
But whether museums will want in the future to retain wares without a
documented provenance over which the shadow of unauthorized digging will
hang forever is a moot question.
 
Clandestine digging eliminates historical evidence by destroying the context
in which an object lay underground. This erases from memory its original
location, the other objects with which it was associated and any dating
clues from coins or vegetal remains that allow carbon-14 analysis. It raises
unnecessary questions about geographical origin - Sotheby's thus noted
apropos of the calligraphic vessel that "Samarqand, Nishapur and Utrar are
all known to have been established centres of pottery production" under the
Samanids, the dynasty that ruled most of eastern Iran from the late 9th to
the early 11th century.
 
Today, fewer and fewer scholars are willing to tolerate further destruction.
Already, major institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum ban the
acquisition of undocumented objects that have been dug up. Occasionally this
may spare museums a faux pas. Illicit excavations provide the most splendid
smoke screen for objects recently fabricated or embellished.
 
A curious "late Sasanian or early Islamic silver bowl" turned up at
Sotheby's, which placed it in "Persia" (i.e., Iran) or "Mesopotamia" (i.e.,
Iraq) in the "late 6th/7th century." Sotheby's, eager to do the right thing,
had two samples from the bowl analyzed at Oxford University. The conclusion
was that the metallurgical composition is "consistent with data from other
analysed silver vessels from the late Sasanian/post-Sasanian period."
 
This, alas, says little about the stiffly engraved design and its oddities.
Scrolls in Iranian art do not end with rosettes - as several do on the bowl.
Bird heads do not spring out of the bases of blossoms, nor do split
palmettes carry acanthus leaves on the side. I would not bet on the £54,000
silver bowl staying on view forever in the "institution" that reportedly
acquired it.
 
In this atmosphere of aesthetic confusion and shaky knowledge made worse by
the occasional fear of tripping up, it is no surprise that private
collectors have all but vanished in Europe.
 
This is to some extent compensated for by the ascent of collecting in the
Middle East, where new money rather than connoisseurship triggered it, with
some rare exceptions. Sheik Nasser al Sabah in Kuwait has been building up
for more than three decades a stunning private museum. Discreet, the sheik
stands apart. So does another collector, descended from an Ottoman family of
Syrian civil servants based in Riyadh.
 
Turkish buyers interested in Turkish art became active in the 1980s, forming
impressive collections of Iznik ceramics. Yet this week they were absent. At
Sotheby's the rarest Iznik piece, a large basin, or tabaq, from the second
quarter of the 16th century was bought for £90,000 by a dealer established
in Kuwait. Surprisingly, some fine 16th-century revetment tiles remained
stranded.
 
The Iranian expatriates in the West who used to compete furiously for some
Iranian works of art likewise displayed far less enthusiasm. They sat on
their hands as Christie's star lot, the 1844 portrait of Mohammad Shah
Qajar, came up. The portrait was unsold.
 
It takes a valiant expert to make predictions in a market where buyers are
so few and so fickle. Nearly half the lots went nowhere at Christie's and
37.5 percent failed to sell at Sotheby's.
 
Sotheby's departmental head may have derived some comfort from the triumph
of his star lot, a Mogul painting of the 1630s depicting a prince seated on
a palace platform amidst turbaned literati. Bequeathed in 1844 to a
Norwegian painter by his Javanese pupil, it is unlikely ever to raise
questions about the legitimacy of its source. And that, in the eyes of the
unnamed institution that bought it, is surely priceless. It might account
for the staggering £192,800 it cost. Once again, forecasts about an "Islamic
work of art" were confounded.
 
http://www.iht.com/