Global Lives of Objects

CELEBRATING 100 YEARS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ASIAN ART

Global Lives of Objects

CELEBRATING 100 YEARS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ASIAN ART

Edited by Massumeh Farhad and Sana Mirza Director’s Foreword by Chase F. Robinson

Itinerant Trajectories

ELLEN CHASE AND SOON KAI POH

Spouted vessel in the form of a bull

Northwest Iran, Iron Age I–II, ca. 1400–800 BCE Earthenware; H × W × D: 22.2 × 13.6 × 35 cm

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Gift of Joan and Frank Mount, S1995.128

The itinerant trajectories of material items are shaped by numerous actors, including conservators in the present day who are commonly associated with the physical preservation of materials, working collaboratively with museum research scientists, curators, and scholars, as well as, not least, those who hold cultural knowledge and whose expertise may or may not yet be formally recognized.

For conservators, the journey of an item is embedded within its material presence; marks, scars, repairs, and other interventions describe the actions of others who have contributed to its present state. The process of conservation involves the synthesis of material evidence and its placement in time, not just to understand an item’s past, but to envision its future preservation. Anthropologists have described the trajectories of material items in terms of their lives, biographies, or itineraries,1 but such notions are intuitively familiar to conservators, whose actions are fundamentally additive to an item’s journey, both materially and in time.

This essay traces the journey of an ancient Near Eastern bull-shaped vessel in the Sackler Gallery’s collection from the conservators’ perspective (see also fig. 1). The vessel was acquired by the gallery in 1995 and is associated with the archaeological site of Marlik, which lies in the valley of Gohar Rud, in the Gilan province in northwestern Iran.2 Composed of more than fifty tombs, the site was first excavated in 1961 by the late Ezat Negahban, uncovering a literal wealth of gold, bronze, and ceramic funerary artifacts, including vessels in the form of stags and bulls. Often considered the pioneer of modern Iranian archaeology, Negahban directed the first scientific excavations in Iran at Marlik. His publications spurred great interest in these zoomorphic vessels in the 1960s.3 These discoveries from Marlik became a part of Iranian national identity, appearing on Iranian banknotes from the period.4 Amid this collecting fervor, the vessel was purchased by ceramics collectors Frank and Joan Mount in 1966, who later presented it to the gallery as part of their gift of Ancient Near Eastern ceramics.5

Although at first glance the vessel seemed to be whole, the conservator who examined the vessel at the time of its acquisition noted that its surface appeared to be heavily

Shining Examples

DIANA GREENWOLD

Mary Chase Perry Stratton (American, 1867–1961) Group of

Pewabic pottery

United States, Detroit, 1903–61

Clay with iridescent glaze; dims. variable Freer Gallery of Art, Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1918.166, F1912.103, F1908.255, F1912.104, F1917.440, F1914.117, F1917.434

“In the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., contemporary ceramic art is represented by a single piece of pottery. This, a Pewabic vase, holding a place of honor in the Whistler Room, displays one of many unusual glazes developed by Mary Chase Stratton.” 1 So reads the introductory sentence penned by the New York Times reporter Adelaide Handy describing the vaunted display of Pewabic pottery in the Freer Gallery of Art in 1940. As Handy notes, works from this small-scale workshop in Detroit are anomalies in Charles Lang Freer’s collection—the only American objects that he collected for his museum, works designed to be viewed alongside masterpieces of Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Near Eastern ceramics. That a Pewabic object rested in a “place of honor” in the Peacock Room, Whistler’s dazzling interior, is testament to the high esteem in which Freer and gallery curators held Stratton’s work. What appealed to Freer about Pewabic’s vessels, products of an arts-and-crafts-style workshop named for a Michigan copper-mining region? How did Freer and Stratton ignite curiosity in one another as collector and creator to develop these wares and to situate them within a collection of American painting and historic Asian art?

Like many women of her era, the Michigan-born Mary Chase Perry Stratton began her career as a hobbyist painting designs on porcelain blanks. She formalized her interests in art and ceramics as a student at the Cincinnati Art Academy, where she befriended successful ceramicists such as Maria Longworth Nichols and Louise McLaughlin. 2 After returning to Michigan, Perry met Horace J. Caulkins, a dentist who had repurposed an oven that hardened dental inlays into a portable ceramics kiln. The so-called Revelation Kiln subsequently became popular in small-scale workshops across the country. Using Caulkins’s technology, Stratton founded the Pewabic Pottery in 1903 and began creating matte vases with raised vegetal elements in the vein of Boston’s Grueby Faience Company. In operation from 1899 through roughly 1911, Grueby specialized in vessels with sculpted surfaces enhanced with matte glazes. By the end of the decade, Stratton had abandoned such sculptural details to focus instead on what she termed “painting with fire,” an effort to use glazes and oxides to produce

artists did—a trial-and-error approach that may similarly have inspired his use of imitation leather in Map of My Mind (fig. 1).2 After his return to Japan, Kawakami’s prints mostly feature landscape scenes made from his North American sketches. He took his early efforts to the door of Yamamoto Kanae (1882–1946), the pioneering progenitor of the newly emerging “creative print,” or sōsaku hanga, movement. In traditional Japanese woodblock printing, prints were the product of many hands, as specialist carvers and printers were commissioned by a publisher to execute an artist’s design. By contrast, in so-called creative prints, the artist was personally responsible for every aspect of a print’s production. Yamamoto was not impressed with the young artist’s work, and his rejection was so brutal that Kawakami did not attempt printing again for two years.

However, by the late 1920s, Kawakami’s prints had attracted the attention of the leader of the sōsaku hanga movement, Onchi Kōshirō (1891–1955). In 1928 Onchi involved

Map of My Mind

Kawakami in a major project involving several artists, One Hundred Views of New Tokyo (Shin Tōkyō Hyakkei). While celebrating some of the best-known traditional views of the city, the series also showcased visions of the new, modern metropolis, which had been rebuilt and redefined in the wake of the destruction caused by the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. One of Kawakami’s contributions shows a sleek department store in the ritzy Ginza area (fig. 2). Not only are the location and the shoppers’ clothing modern, but the use of a bright chemical magenta also suggests the glowing charge of neon lights. Our knowledge that Kawakami had once wished to become a designer of departmentstore window displays creates an additional layer of personal significance.

After that series, Kawakami had relatively little involvement in the broader sōsaku hanga movement, and he claimed that this separation from artistic circles allowed him to freely pursue his own interests. While teaching English, Kawakami became a collector of antiquarian books and historic foreign-language dictionaries. He was particularly transfixed by artifacts generated through the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century encounters between Japan and the Portuguese, a genre known as nanban. 3 Although this idiomatic style marks him out among print artists, he was not alone in his interests. The early twentieth century also saw the emergence of nanban as a subject of scholarly attention, and the most significant collection of nanban art in the world, assembled by Ikenaga Hajime

Fig. 2. Kawakami Sumio. Inside the Department Store, from the series One Hundred Views of New Tokyo, Japan, Shōwa era, 1929. Woodblock print; ink and color on paper; H × W: 17.8 × 24.1 cm

of the 1969 album Nashville Skyline , for which the portfolio is named. 4 In the early 1960s, Dylan recorded and released traditional American folk songs, but went on to break genre conventions by integrating political and literary influences with country music, rural themes, and the electric guitar. In 1969, Dylan recorded the American folksong “Nashville Skyline Rag” and popularized it through the Nashville Skyline record, thereby making it more widely available and accessible to a broader audience. Similarly, prints are multiples—more easily disseminated and appreciable by more people than singular paintings—and Ay-Ō sought to bring American folk paintings into a broader sphere.

Often portraits of loved ones or depictions of scenes with deep personal meaning, early American paintings were treasured by those who had commissioned them or received them as gifts directly from the artists. The episode depicted in Hicks’s painting is from the Biblical verses of Isaiah 11:6–9, an imagined future where creatures that are usually

Fig. 1. Overall view of Peaceable Kingdom

considered to be natural enemies coexist in a tranquil harmony, guided by the infant Christ. Such a rapprochement was particularly meaningful for Hicks, who hoped for a reconciliation to heal the schism in the Quaker community to which he belonged.5 The painting includes a cluster of figures on the left, illustrating the treaty between William Penn (1644–1718) and the Lenni Lenape tribe. Penn was a personal hero of Hicks, who regarded this moment as concrete instantiation of harmonious accord among men.6 Ay-Ō, who had been living in Lexington for two years by this time as an instructor at the University of Kentucky, depicts this episode without Hicks’s romanticized distortion of the realities of the exchange between these two peoples. Ay-Ō was certainly conscious of that history, remarking in his essay that his Kentucky residence was close to the descendants of those who had driven out the original inhabitants of the Appalachian Plateau “by force or by fraud.”7 In Ay-Ō’s version, the group has been stripped of color, effectively bleaching them from the rainbow paradise.

Fig. 2. Edward Hicks (1780–1849). Peaceable Kingdom, ca. 1834. Oil on canvas; H × W: 74.5 × 90.1 cm

Sent a Letter

CAROL HUH

Dayanita Singh (Indian, b. 1961)

Sent a Letter, 2008

7 artist books housed in a handmade cloth box; H × W × D (box): 15.5 × 8 × 10 cm, H × W × D (each volume): 13.5 × 0.7 × 9.4 cm Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Gift of Drs. Umesh and Sunanda Gaur, S2021.7.1.1a–b

For her first photography assignment nearly forty years ago, Dayanita Singh followed master tabla player Zakir Husain across India to observe and document how Indian classical musicians improvise within a framework of notes to express a range of moods. The “genius,” as Singh put it, “lay in how you played with those notes.”1 During her travels, she became increasingly aware of the nuances and creative possibilities of working within a compositional structure that would become fundamental to her own approach to photography. Often referring to her own images as notes or “raw material,” Singh has built a distinctive body of primarily black-and-white photographs of people and places in India.

While her portraits or views of empty rooms are masterful studies of light and line, each image is only a component in her highly subjective process of creating compositions that explore relationships between images. Refusing the conventional presentation of prints on a wall, she also designs “portable museums” for her photographs, in the form of custom-built towers, rolling carts, or accordion books housed in boxes and suitcases. Singh plays with the presentation format, encouraging the viewer to rethink the physical experience of her work, as well as reinforcing the mutable nature of images as they move from place to place.

Sent a Letter is Singh’s first experiment in creating a structure for her images. The work consists of seven volumes housed in a linen clamshell box of her design. Six of the volumes emerged from photographs she took during her travels in India and are simply titled Calcutta, Bombay, Allahabad, Padmanabhapuram, Devigarh, and Varanasi. After each trip, she printed contact sheets of her medium-format negatives and cut out individual frames to paste into small journals, one to keep and the other to send to a friend. A seventh volume, Nony Singh, is attributed to her mother and gathers together a collection of family photographs. Aside from the colophon, the only text accompanying the images are the city names on the volume spines and a brief biography of her mother. The following words, a variation on a familiar nursery rhyme, encircle the exterior of the box and set the work’s tone of intimacy and playful transience: