Howard Hodgkin's Indian Art Collection

choi

Karen Wilkin, An Artist's Trove; Howard Hodgkin's collection of Indian art is now on view at the Met. Wall Street Journal, Feb 20, 2024, at page A13.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... tists-eyes-1b793440

‘Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting’ Review: Through an Artist’s Eyes
The British painter’s impressive holdings of paintings and drawings made for the Mughal, Deccani, Rajput and Pahari courts go on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
By Karen Wilkin

Akbar Hamzanama
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akbar_Hamzanama

Note:
(a) This is an exhibition review, on Indian Skies; The Howard Hodgkin collection of Indian court painting. Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met), Feb 6 - June 9, 2024.
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibi ... dian-court-painting

Under the title in this Web page, you see two tabs: "Overview" (which is this Web page) and “Exhibition Objects." Click the latter. In the new Web page, concentrate on the two paintings whose images the WSJ review carried )one can click either painting to enlarge for details):
(i) "Maharaja Bhupat Pal of Basohli smoking.   India, Mankot, Himachal Pradesh   ca 1685"
(A) This painting corresponds to the description in the WSJ review: "portraits of maharajas—in close-up profile * * * seated cross-legged and smoking a hookah"
(B) maharaja
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maharaja
(section 1 Etymology; section 2 Indian subcontinent, section 2.1 Raja as a ruler's title)
(C) I am clueless about the meaning of "India, Mankot, Himachal Pradesh."
(D) Basohli (town)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basohli_(town)
(in Jammu and Kashmir, India;"was founded by Raja Bhupat Pal sometime in 1635. It was known for the palaces which are now in ruins and miniatures paintings (Basohli school of Pahari painting)")
(ii) "Mihrdukht Aims her Arrow at the Ring, Folio from the Hamzanama (The Adventures of Hamza)   Basawan (Indian, active ca. 1556–1600)   ca 1570"
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/825583
("She created this test for her many suitors, declaring that only the man who could match her prowess would gain her affection. Hamid, the son of Hamza, meets this challenge and wins her hand in marriage")

Basawan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basawan
(flourished 1580–1600; painter)

(b)
(i) Mihrdukht Aims Her Arrow at the Ring. Howard Hodgkin Indian collection, undated.
https://howard-hodgkin.com/india ... r-arrow-at-the-ring
(complete description: "The story-tellers' epic of the hero Amir Hamza was a favourite of the young emperor Akbar. Early in his reign he commissioned a series of 1400 large scale illustrations, which took his painting studio 15 years to complete. In this tale the beautiful Mihrdukht, a brilliant archer, repels her unwanted suitors by challenging them to shoot an arrow through a ring held in the beak of a golden bird at the top of a tall tower. Here she effortlessly demonstrates this feat")
(ii) Akbar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akbar
(1542-1605; "was the third Mughal emperor, who reigned from 1556 to 1605")
(iii) Mughal Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_Empire
(1526–1857; founder and the first emperor was Babur (grandfather of Akbar), " a chieftain from what is today Uzbekistan"/ section 1 Name/ "the last Mughal * * * was deposed by the British East India Company and exiled in 1858")

Mughal
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Mughal
(pronunciation)
is a variant of Mogol, which is in turn a variant of Mongol.
(iv) list of emperors of the Mughal Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li ... f_the_Mughal_Empire
(section 2 List of Mughal Emperors: titular name + birth name)
(v) Akbar surname in modern times: "Muslim (mainly Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh; also Iran): from a personal name based on Arabic akbar 'greater,' 'greatest,' an elative adjective from kabir 'great.' Allahu Akbar (‘Allah is the Greatest’) is a slogan of Muslims throughout the world. The Mughal emperor known in English as Akbar the Great ([birth name] Jalal ud-Din Akbar; 1542–1605) extended his rule from a base in Panjab to cover most of the Indian subcontinent by the time of his death. His rule was notable for the integration of Hindus and Muslims in positions of power." Dictionary of American Family Name. 1sr ed. Oxford Univ Press, 2013.

(c)
(i) Hamzanama
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamzanama
("(lit[erally] 'Adventures of Amir Hamza') narrates the legendary exploits of an Arab warrior named Hamza * * * oral tradition, were written down in Persian * * * presumably in the era of Mahmud of Ghazni (r[eign] 998–1030) [Ghazni is a city in present-day Afghanistan]. In the West, the work is best known for the enormous illustrated manuscript, the Akbar Hamzanama, commissioned by the Mughal emperor Akbar about 1562")

A reminder: The characters in Akbar Hamzanama all look Indian, because the illustrators were Indian. In a similar fashion, Jesus Christ is depicted in the West as a male Westerner, and Buddha in China does not look like an Indian. All characters in Hamzanama were in fact Arabs of Arabian Peninsula.
(ii) English dictionary:
* amir (n, etymology: and mir came from the same Arabic word, so is another English noun admiral)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/amir

(d) Read only paragraph 1 of the WSJ review, which is superficial, sounding as the reviewer knows little about Indian art.
—-------------------------------
New York

In 1964, the British painter Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017) traveled to India, accompanied by a curator of Indian art from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Hodgkin had been interested in Indian court painting since he was a schoolboy, but this was his first trip to the subcontinent. He met collectors and contemporary artists, initiating lasting friendships and an intense lifelong relationship with Indian culture, sustained by annual return trips that nourished his painting, but not in literal ways. Hodgkin famously described himself as a “representational painter, but not a painter of appearances.” Rather, he said, he made “pictures of emotional situations”—including his responses to India.

Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting
The Met Fifth Avenue
Through June 9

Those responses are also manifest in Hodgkin’s ambitious collection of Indian works: 122 paintings and drawings made for the Mughal, Deccani, Rajput and Pahari courts before the dominance of British colonialism. In 2022, the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased 84 of them. Now they are reunited with the remaining examples acquired by the artist, on loan from the Howard Hodgkin Indian Collection Trust, in the celebratory exhibition “Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting.” Organized by the Met curators John Guy and Navina Najat Haidar, the show also includes two of Hodgkin’s own oil paintings made in the 1990s, one in the Met’s collection, one a loan. The intense color in the two oils helps us to understand his enthusiasm for the Indian works he acquired and to speculate briefly on what he distilled from them.

“Indian Skies” is both informative and idiosyncratic. The differences between regional styles are made clear by the installation, which divides the works according to their origin, while the names of the artists, when known, are included. But the selections are more personal than comprehensive. One gallery is devoted to Mughal and Deccani court painting, with its fusion of Persian, Indian and European influences, mostly from the 16th and 17th centuries. In the most spectacular works, a riot of pattern and fragile detail, with architecture turned into geometry, frames elegant, subtly naturalistic, agile figures. Carefully observed “portraits” of birds seem the equivalents of the meticulously rendered profiles of courtiers and nobles.

We recognize the names of notable protagonists. There’s a refined, somewhat idealized profile of Prince Aurangzeb (c. 1653-55). The last great Mughal emperor, he was the son of Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal to commemorate Mumtaz Mahal, Aurangzeb’s mother. One of Hodgkin’s first purchases, we learn, was a gorgeously constructed page with a lush garden, a tipped pavilion, and a tall tower topped by a gilded bird at which a woman shoots an arrow; made about 1570, it’s a rare example of paintings on cloth illustrating the adventures of the Prophet Muhammad’s uncle Hamza, made for the Emperor Akbar.

Another section provides an overview of paintings made in the courts of Rajasthan and the Punjab between the 16th and 19th centuries—suave, stylized images, less naturalistic than Mughal works. There are scenes from Hindu epics, depictions of voluptuous women with heavy-lidded eyes, and portraits of maharajas—in close-up profile, enjoying the company of the women of the court, seated cross-legged and smoking a hookah, or leaning athletically from a galloping horse to spear a wild boar.

“Marriage Procession in a Bazaar” presents rows of men riding wonderfully varied horses—brown, white, roan, spotted—following the groom, perched on a lively elephant, with clusters of attendants, all silhouetted against a spring-green ground. The procession unfolds between a row of booths with a stunning array of merchandise and stylized buildings with spectators. (In a Mughal drawing of a similar crowd scene, made circa 1701, the massed figures watching a prince enter the city are even more sharply characterized, each with distinct features and gestures.)

That boar hunt (c. 1720), with its rolling landscape and fabulous vegetation, is impossible to ignore, as is a gang of agitated pachyderms in “The Elephant Hunt” (c.1730-40). The two works come from Kota—the source, often, of paintings of hunting so powerfully composed and detailed that we can almost ignore the bad things happening to animals.

And elephants! One gallery is devoted to them, often shown in impressive profile, with gorgeous saddlecloths and caparisons, some with their names recorded. They pose quietly, fight, resist training, roll in the dust, gallop, carry a sultan, and in one enchanting album leaf of a family group, the baby, caressed by an affectionate mother’s trunk, reaches up with his own trunk to touch his father.

As we enter “Indian Skies,” we encounter a pair of 6-foot-tall panels of dancing Gopis—milkmaids associated with Krishna—balanced by equally large images of cannons, probably studies for murals. In the galleries, the scale shifts to intimate, inventively orchestrated, detailed and patterned compositions, with anecdotal information often turned into near-abstract structure. “Indian Skies” demands close attention. And rewards it.

Ms. Wilkin is an independent curator and critic.