Every art season has its “sleepers,” exhibitions of unusual or unfamiliar material that, by their nature, are less popular and sometimes overlooked by casual viewers but nonetheless prove extraordinarily high in aesthetic and scholarly interest.
The local “sleeper” of 1997 is “A Collecting Odyssey: Indian, Himalayan, and Southeast Asian Art from the James and Marilynn Alsdorf Collection,” a show that did not generate advance excitement on the order of the upcoming “Renoir’s Portraits” yet reflects enormous credit on everyone concerned at the Art Institute of Chicago.
It’s an exhibition that truly is about discovery, not only because the museum had never before mounted a show exploring the art of the regions but also because much of the work had been in town for more than a quarter-century yet had gained relatively little popular attention.
“It’s an irony, and it’s true of many great private collections, that they are better-known outside the cities they are in,” says Stephen Little, curator of Asian art at the institute.
“Not that this part of the (large and eclectic) Alsdorf collection is so well known all over. But among people who deal with Asian art, it is recognized as one of only two private collections in the world of such great stature. So it is very exciting for us to present it for the first time to a wider public as a coherent whole.”
The Alsdorfs began collecting South Asian art in the late 1950s and were motivated to continue by each trip taken abroad. James had spent his early years in Japan and China; Marilynn had developed an early interest in art.
Their collecting was spontaneous and, at first, intuitive. But in 1969 the Alsdorfs met Pratapaditya Pal, one of the foremost scholars of Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian art in North America, and during subsequent years of acquaintance he contributed to their involvement; indeed, he has formed the present show of 200 objects from their more extensive holdings.
“When I met them, their interest was already quite deep,” says Pal. “At the beginning, they just bought what they liked. But then they went to India and saw that unlike Greek or Egyptian sculpture, Indian figures still had meaning. Buddha and Shiva and Vishnu were not dead gods of history. And that intrigued them.
“In all the countries from which they collected except Indonesia, which became Islam, all the same gods are still living; people continue to worship them. And the Alsdorfs’ motivation was not to denude (the sculptures) of their meaning. They obviously loved Greek art, and I could see them liking Indian sculpture aesthetically. But I think what shifted them more passionately into this area — it is the bulk of their entire collection — was the factor of dealing with living traditions.”
Like Christianity, Buddhism is a great international religion. It went everywhere in Asia; accordingly, a great deal in, say, Chinese art comes out of the ideas and forms in the present exhibition.
The institute is known around the world for its Chinese and Japanese collections, and in recent years the museum has made an effort to build its Indian holdings to a comparable level of quality. If the works in the current show were one day to come into the permanent collection, the institute could outline the art history of the East more thoroughly than most other North American museums. But, first, it must give an introduction to unfamiliar material.
“That’s basically what we’ve tried to do (in the exhibition),” says Pal. “There are so many disparate countries, the range of time is 2,000 years and most of the art is religious. To make all of this more understandable, we divided the show into thematic units.
“There are Hindu gods and Buddhist and Jain deities in the first two rooms, so within them, viewers can compare, say, a Cambodian Buddha with a Thai Buddha and an Indian Buddha with a Nepalese Buddha. This way they will see how Buddha was born in India, was an Indian teacher, but his message went out and others interpreted it.
“Then we put all the goddesses together, whether Hindu, Buddhist or Jain. This had never been done before. In all museums you’ll see Indian, Cambodian and Nepalese art separately. Mixing them up here allows you to see that Indian representations of woman are assertive in their physicality but Cambodian art has a different feminine structure, elegant and powerfully understated.”
The Alsdorf collection has the largest group of South Asian animal sculptures in the world, so, again, Pal grouped his selections together in a single menagerie to permit comparison and contrast. Here, Little says, they kept children more in mind than adults, as the animal sculptures are accessible to even the youngest viewers, without scholarly introduction or explanation.
Finally, there is a room of smaller pieces — mandalas, body adornments, ritual and ceremonial objects — that Pal compares to the gallery the institute created to display Marilynn Alsdorf’s collection of Renaissance jewelry a few years ago. It is luxuriously appointed, and the works, including a lone ivory Christ child in High Baroque style, are more dramatically emphasized in an exotic coda to the exhibition.
“I don’t think people are as ignorant of some of the concepts at work here as they might have been 25 years ago,” Pal says. “After the Beat Generation and (the counterculture of the late 1960s), people were more familiar with Krishna, Vishnu, Shiva and so on.
“Besides, the cultures represented are part of contemporary American civilization. So the message I have tried to convey is that, yes, we all have our separate identities and cultural shades, but we live in a community. Hence, the show’s arrangement is a mosaic, bits and pieces, but the total design is what we’re talking about.”
Little acknowledges that, piece by piece, the material is challenging not only to viewers but also to scholars because of its freshness as well as high aesthetic merit. Still, the work’s overall purpose should be accessible to everyone.
“The message is not so complicated,” Little says. “One of the primary functions of the Hindu gods is to make a kind of order out of a universe that is seen as inherently chaotic. The mythology of the Hindu gods are the stories that illustrate how and why they did that. Those are stories anyone can understand. One of the beauties of the fact that a lot of the art is religious is that it indicates needs of different peoples are the same. Certain aspects of human nature are basically the same everywhere, in every time period, and I’m hoping visitors to the shows will respond to that.”
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“A Collecting Odyssey: Indian, Himalayan, and Southeast Asian Art from the James and Marilynn Alsdorf Collection” continues at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., through Oct. 26. Among the related events is a free international symposium on Sept. 20 and 21. For details, call 312-857-7182.
