It’s hard to say with certainty how hyper-realism found its way into Indian painting. The sharp eye and curiosity of the first Mughal emperor, Babur, is said to have inspired painters to record nature with microscopic exactitude.
Exhibition
In his 1978 work Orientalism, Edward Said accused Western artists and intellectuals of instrumentalising their perception of the Islamic world to support the narrative of Western dominance and colonialism. The British Museum’s show of Orientalist painting from the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, allows us to evaluate the truth of Said’s statement.
Connoisseurship is an elusive concept. What makes wealthy and refined collectors tick? Where does their obsession for the object come from? The Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon celebrates the 150th birthday of founder Calouste Gulbenkian’s birth with a show “A Gosta pela Arte Islâmica” that tries to answer those questions.
It seems somewhat surprising that not a single one of Leonardo da Vinci’s several thousand drawings had ever been exhibited in Hong Kong, but that was apparently the case until the opening of the “Art and Science, Then and Now” exhibition, running at the City University of Hong Kong Exhibition Gallery through 15 December.
Western complaints about Chinese-manufactured copies are nothing new. In 1801, a certain Captain John E Swords approached Gilbert Stuart to purchase a copy of the painter’s famous portrait of George Washington. Stuart, who had burned before, extracted a promise from Swords as a condition of the sale that he would have no further copies executed.
For the better part of a century, painters flocked to Paris. Mary Cassatt and James Whistler came from the United States, Gris and Picasso from Spain, Kandinsky from Russia. Paris was the place to be even for, as is less known, for Chinese artists. It is a curious comment on China’s interaction with Art-with-a-capital-A that while many people will be familiar with Monet, few (including, one suspects, the Chinese themselves) will know much if anything about Pan Yu-lin (or Pan Yuliang, as she is also known).
While technically a “fair”—that is, the items are for sale—China in Print is held at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum and does double duty as a free-to-the-public exhibition.