Probably the least interesting thing about the quietly beautiful collection of Indian art now on view in three galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are the “skies” promised by the exhibition’s title. Among the more than 120 individual artworks on display, dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and created across the subcontinent for the diverse Mughal, Deccan, Rajput, and Pahari courts, are examples of stunning royal portraiture, scenes of courtly life, illustrations of literary and historical narratives, and engrossing studies of elephants, tigers, birds, and various flora. Yet it turns out these works rarely gaze upwards and look upon the heavens with more than a passing interest.
Indeed, the inspiration for that title, “Indian Skies,” comes from the British painter Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017), who amassed this singular collection over the course of six decades. Of the works on view, about eighty were recently acquired by the Met, and this jewel-box of an exhibition, curated by the Met’s John Guy and Navina Najat Haidar, is an auspicious celebration of the purchases. Two abstractions in oil on wood by Hodgkin, In Mirza’s Room (1995–98)and Small Indian Sky (1990), have been included, implicitly asking us to consider how the Indian masterworks he collected informed his own modernist oeuvre.
Hodgkin’s oils are painterly constructions of warm, intense colors that cohere into glowing atmospheres, incorporating patterns and painted frames to telescope a sensitive layering of pictorial (as opposed to perspectival) space. These are all formal characteristics that play important roles in the Indian artworks he owned. Hodgkin’s Small Indian Sky, with its horizontal bands of greens and red, inevitably reads as a landscape in sunset light, and in the accompanying wall text we find that the Brit was referring as much to his memory of the Indian landscape as to any artwork that region might have produced.
Yet walking through the show, having been welcomed in by an inviting Court Beauty (Chokha, 1805–10), we find that Hodgkin quickly recedes from view. These captivating objects, which outpunch their typically diminutive size, create worlds of their own, but it turns out that landscape spaces tend not to be the main point: they are more often stage settings for the stories these remarkable artists hoped to tell. Skies, when seen at all, tend to play a minor role, usually peeking out at the very top as slivers of flat, monochromatic color, focusing our attention instead on characters and things, simultaneously reinforcing our sense of these pages as immutably decorative surfaces.
The show is broken up into two main sections. In the first we find paintings made for the northern Indian Mughal Empire and the south-central Deccan sultanates, dating mostly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These Muslim-ruled kingdoms were pluralistic, largely tolerant imperial societies, and their court workshops amalgamated the influence of miniature painting from Persia (whence the Mughal invaders came), native Indian aesthetics, and prints sold by European traders on the coastline. A kind of classic Mughal style soon emerged, marked by muted colors and penetrating naturalist investigation.
One important Mughal development came in the form of the highly individualized likenesses that artists produced of noblemen and other elites. A profile portrait of Prince Aurangzeb (ca. 1653–55), the future sixth Mughal Emperor (r. 1658–1707) and third son of the Shah Jahan (who commissioned the Taj Mahal), shows its subject looking confidently to the left, wearing a necklace of flawless pearls, emeralds, and rubies, bedecked in a sumptuous array of patterned textiles. Depicted with impossibly subtle tonal modulation that gives a hint of rounded relief to his graceful outline, the prince sits behind the “jharoka window” from which he would appear to the public, projecting an image of impeccable taste, strength, and health.
In the nearby Portrait of the Courtier Iltifat Khan (ca. 1640), the subject is more sparsely adorned, focusing our attention on the contour of his aquiline nose and the formal order of his neat, trimmed beard, each hair meticulously rendered. Drawn life-size, the work seems to have been made from direct observation—one finds pentimenti of the artist’s initial outlines, later corrected, near the back of the courtier’s turban and ear. Elsewhere, three Mughal studies of birds (Orioles, Mynahs, Imperial Pigeons; ca. 1610, 1620, and 1650, respectively) have been beautifully articulated, and an entire room (which spans all regions) is devoted to paintings of elephants that feast, fight, bathe, train, parade, and prance. Each of these monumental, majestic beasts has as much personality and pathos as any well-coiffed prince.
Turning to Hodgkin’s collection of artworks from the Hindu Rajput and Pahari courts, one first notices the intense colors—deep Indian yellows, burning reds, and varied greens—before admiring their idiosyncratic compositions, seemingly unbound by consistent convention. Less concerned with true-to-life description, works like Maharaja Raj Singh in a Garden Arcade (Rajasthan, ca. 1710–15), which finds a corpulent king dwarfingthe arched terrace he sits in, flanked on either side by two tiny, pliant courtesans, are more highly stylized: here we find ideals, not individuals.
Instead, these artists seemed enthralled by the challenge of decorating a given page or cloth in order to catch and then hold the eye, narrating their chosen scene with iconographic clarity. Many combine multiple perspectives in order to fit a large, complex scene onto a single page. In the apparently unfinished “Monkey Prince Angada delivers Rama’s message to Ravana”(from Siege of Lanka, ca. 1725), attributed to the Guler artist Manaku, we’re given a look at the hero Rama’s military encampment as he lays siege to Ravana’s palace, as well as two distinct views of the interior of that palace, ingeniously arranged to facilitate a legible telling of this fantastical scene.
Another standout, the Maharana Amar Singh Enjoying the Company of Women of the Court (Rajasthan, ca. 1708–10), is divided into three sections, meant to be read sequentially from top to bottom. In the upper image we meet the prince being entertained by a crowd of courtesans who dance, sing, and play music. In the middle section, we look down from a bird’s-eye view as he bathes with those same women in a radiant, rose-red swimming pool. At the bottom, the group galivants about in a meadow, where dense clusters of purple flowers seem to swallow the figures up into a sensuous haze. This daring formal device, which must have thrilled the pattern-obsessed Hodgkin, hauntingly mirrors the orgiastic revelry of its debaucherous subject.
Similar thrills abound in this delightful exhibition, and each work merits careful, extended study. One looks forward to returning again and again to these newly acquired masterpieces on future visits to the Met.