6.5.24 — Courting India
India today is divided by religion, geography, and class—and united by little more than its divisions. Yet it has had a distinguished tradition—and a long, extended moment of royal grandeur in its art.
The Howard Hodgkin collection at the Met lingers over centuries of Indian court painting, with an eye toward nature but a special fondness for its artifice and its rituals. Even flowers seem at a certain remove, filtered by memory and designed to impress the dynasties that cultivated them. Could Hodgkin, the British artist, still have the delights of observation and artifice, 
not to mention elephants? In the show’s title, they all rest under vast “Indian Skies,” through June 9.
India is the world’s most populous country, crammed into the seventh largest by area, much of it in poverty for all its reputation in technology. And its prime minister is determined to exploit its hatreds and divisions in the interest of raw power, much like a certain right-wing leader in the United States. Hodgkin’s collection itself spans four royal courts and geographical divisions from north to south and plains to the Himalayas. Yet all four keep returning to a just a few themes and comparable styles. You might find Mughal faces more subtly shaded and Deccan flatness more tempered by color, Rajput and Pahari art more crowded and colorful still, but you might still struggle to tell them apart.
Successive invaders only added to its conflicts and traditions. As the show begins, around 1600, Persia has retreated from its hopes for conquest, and Hindu gods and godesses return often in the work, but one can still see the influence of Islamic art in a taste for patterns and anecdotal detail. By the show’s end, after 1900, the British empire has reduced the last maharajas to figureheads, and the Indian court along with court painting is coming to an end, too. In between, trade is bringing European painting to the mix as well, and it shows. For all its breadth, Hodgkin’s collection centers on the early 1700s, and its totality parallels what Europe called the Baroque. If it is also an art of flattery and conformity, the late Baroque had its academicism, too.
One may turn to non-Western art for its antiquity, like Cycladic art at the Met now, and the sheer length of its history, like recent shows there of Buddhist art and “Africa and Byzantium.” One may turn, too, to Asian art for its sense of timelessness, scholarship, and solitude, and indeed a rehanging to bring out poetry in Chinese art opened just days before “Indian Skies.” India here, in contrast, is a recognizably modern world. It is a hyperactive world as well. Themes run to wedding processions and hunting, where each figure has its own story. That and profile portraits, with a bearded chin jutting forward because this ruler is in command.
The show opens in the middle. Two dynasties have the room to the left, the remaining two to the right. Chronology is out of the question, but it would be hard to discern anyway. Hodgkin, who died in 2017, is unavailable as curator, but John Guy and Navina Najat Haidar devote the central room to him and, sure enough, the elephants. They accommodate royal riders while reducing them to nearly comic proportions. And the elephants, too, keep busy, on a rampage or joining in the hunt.
Museum-goers are used by now to shows of private collectors, flattering a potential donor while leaving the collector absent in all but name. Hodgkin, though, was a painter not so easy to forget, and the show’s nominal beginning includes two of his paintings, one titled Small Indian Sky. You may know his abstractions in oil for their wide, thick frames that both contain and accommodate the paint. What interested him in India is less clear. He must have liked the wild surfaces, articulating depth within flatness like Modernism itself. A limited palette and touches of bold may have reminded him of his own bright primaries, but I can see a closer parallel only in a single and very exceptional Indian painting that veers onto a field of tart yellow.
This is not a history of Indian art, and those new to that history may still have questions. I hesitate to display my ignorance by writing. Still, it has that marvelous collision between stasis and cultural divisions. Chinese and Western art appear in the flowers, but with a scratchy shorthand rather than elegant calligraphy of the first or the translucent brightness of the second in flowers from Flemish still life to Claude Monet and Georgia O’Keeffe. Intense reds in crowd scenes interrupt the muter colors of opaque watercolor. They bring nature itself to court.
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