“Cambodia,” for as long as I can remember, has
been a word associated mainly with political strife. In
recent years, its cognate, “Khmer,” was linked most
often, horrifyingly, with “Rouge.” Another close
relative, “Angkor,” on the other hand, signaled a place
of mystery, a city of towers and tumbled stones, gripped
by the roots of voracious jungle growth. Angkor was
remote and fascinating, like Petra or Baalbek or Machu
Pichu, a ruined architectural marvel that I hoped,
vaguely, to visit one day. But apart from my general
sense of the architecture of Angkor Vat, these loaded
words existed for me unaccompanied by images of what
Cambodian art looked like.

I was made forcibly aware of this gap in my
knowledge by the Brancusi retrospective two years ago—specifically,
by the stunning group of economical,
ambiguous torsos in the Paris installation—which jarred
loose the dimly remembered fact that Brancusi had
admired Cambodian sculpture. When my mental image
bank failed to come up with anything useful for
comparison, I resolved to visit the Asian art museum in
Paris.
I remembered my resolution only this past
spring, when I arrived at the Gare du Nord to find Paris
covered with banners for a great exhibition of “l’Art
Khmer” at the Grand Palais. Several visits revealed how
abysmally little I knew, but also helped make up for
courses not taken; this summer’s substantially different,
but equally choice version of the exhibit, “Sculpture of
Angkor and Ancient Cambodia: Millennium of Glory,”[1]
at the