ART OF IRAN

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 154, 27 December 1935, Page 2

ART OF IRAN

WONDERFUL EXHIBITION

HELD IN LENINGRAD

The International Exhibition. of Iranian.art in Leningrad is so vast, so complex, and so. lull of unfamiliar, unpublished material, raising so many intellectual problems, that an adequate interpretation of it would require many months and. many articles, writes Arthur Upham Pope in the "Manchester Guardian." There are 25,000 objects, filling eighty-four galleries, and although there are things in some of the later galleries which would riot be included in an exhibition of severest artistic standards in Western Europe, none of these is without historic interest, and there is something to-be said for the presentation of material showing the decline as well as the rise and culmination of various styles. But this artistically less interesting material represents only a negligible proportion of the whole collection, and before the seventeenth-century galleries there is not an object that is ordinary and gallery after gallery presents a concentration of masterpieces that has left the foreign visitors breathless with excitement and admiration: : The London exhibition constituted for all the most instructive comparison. Leningrad has' no single gallery to compete with the memorable splendour of the main hall in Burlington House in 1931 and perhaps no gallery that quite competes with the exotic charm of Gallery IV: there, with its silk carpets and its famous lustre ceramic wares. But as for the rest, honours in display lie with the Russians, not merely because of the amount of material but even more because of the rational system with which the collection is presented. PREHISTORIC AKT. Some, eight galleries' of prehistoric art include a quantity of the early painted pottery that has been recovered by the various archaeological expeditions that have been at work in Persia. . Many bronzes from the Caucasus and Siberia show interesting parallels with the bronzes' from Luristan, but it. was the consensus of opinion of the prehistorians at the third international congress - that has just met concurrently with the exhibition that these similarities represent merely a-common culture and very little if any, interchange, thus definitely leaving priority and supremacy in the early animal art with Iran. The Pazirik material from the Altai ■ dating from about 500 8.C., far surpasses even the high anticipations of the Western scholars. Here is animal conventionalism, both plastic and silhouette, of a force and vividness that have never been surpassed, and most of the motives are definitely Iranian in character, a proof of the dominance of Iranian culture well into Central Asia From; the prehistoric galleries -one passes into a series of halls which for m°s* :must mark the climax of the exhibition. Here are Achaemenid vessels in gold and silver; jewellery,'seals, coins, and sculpture of the! most impressive beauty, and'if no one'piece equals in immediate appeal the'hilarious ibex that was such a striking feature of the London exhibition, there are an ibex rhyton head and another rhyton terminating in the forequarters of a galloping horse that are vigorous and individual, and a leaping antelope, once the handle -of a vessel, that seems in the moment of seeing it an achievement beyond which nothing more can be imagined. ' NOT THRILLING. art is not particularly thrilling, but for the specialist ■ there are new facts about this mysterious hybrid period to be gleaned, especially in the finds from Ncsa, and the Sasanian gallery offers the compensating aesthetic stimulation,-for here are more than- a hundred' pieces, fourfifths of all that exist, including a number of splendid examples quite unknown outside Russia. The exhibition is concerned largely with showing the relation of Iranian art with all those cultures with which it came into contact, and placed next to the Sasanian gallery are several rooms of Byzantine art, so' rich' that they would be the chief pride of many a Western museum. Here ,are forty ivories, manuscripts, mosaics, textiles, stone sculpture, and a wonderful collection of silver and gilt paterae. The result of this juxtaposition is striking and unanticipated. There are few indeed who would have, known in advance how the sumptuous arts of Byzantium weaken under the impact of the virile Sasanian art, heroic, intense, de'coratively sound, instinct with a powerful will. A notable feature is the presentation of the results of numerous archaeological expeditions, that have been carried out by' the Russians, each in a separate hall, each admirably displayed, each a mine of precious. historical information, each throwing some light on the development of- art in Iran and its throughout nearly the whole of Asia. TO THE ORDER OF TIMUR. The gorgeousness of Timur has been a tradition amply witnessed by the «>mazed accounts of the Europeans who reached his court. But few have seen the impressive architectural' remains" in Turkistan, and nothing substantial has ever reached Western collections that has personal relations with Timur. A.t the Leningrad exhibition, however, one can for the first time. obtain a solid.idea of how imposing were the accoutrements of the world conqueror. A vast bronze cauldron with splendid relief ornament which was made expressly for him weighs two tons and is as handsome as it is impressive. The vessel is so vast it had to be cast in eight segments and is so much valued in Turkistan that it had to be brought on its own special flat car accompanied by a guard who is responsible to the community that owns it for its return. Even more impressive to the eye of the connoisseur is a great bronze candlestick likewise made to his order, inlaid with gold and silver, also of heroic size but with beautifully studied proportions that give it rationality and elegance as well as monumentally; making it certainly one of the noblest pieces of metal known. There are scores of galleries filled with manuscripts, textiles, carved wood, armour enough to equip a-tour-ney, and, more important still, but quite defying brief comment, are the numerous galleries filled with the finds of the Oldenburg and Kozloy expeditions, a new revelation of the variety, originality, and power of the art of Central Asia for the first ten centuries of our era, with its many indications of contacts between Iran and the Far East and with masses of " unstudied material that have given some of the Western scholars opportunities for imporfant discoveries yet to be announced. The Leningrad exhibition will bo heard of for years to come.