by Jon Lackman | 5 January 2011 | Asia, Books, Museums
The College Art Association today announces the winner of the Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for best exhibition catalogue. I’m in the midst of reviewing the shortlist, selected this year by:
Anna Chave, Graduate Center, CUNY (chair)
Andrea Bayer, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Virginia Fields, LACMA
Erica Hirshler, MFA Boston
Anne Woollett, J. Paul Getty Museum
Today I’ll look at Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection and the Stella Kramrisch Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, edited by Darielle Mason. By the by, it seems worth noting that two of the three shortlisted books this year concern the decorative arts, and that two of the three concern Asian art, as have various winners in past years. (Past winners available online, though not past shortlists.)
According to the catalogue, Bengali kanthas are made “from fragments of old family garments and recycled threads … to celebrate marriages and births.” They are “ritual actions, women’s personal expressions, intergenerational bonds, icons of cultural and national identity, links with the ancient past, representations of cosmic reintegration [and] works of art.” They are functional, used as “bed and floor cloths to seat honored guests, blankets and wraps to keep warm … shrouds and palanquin seating … prayer mats, while tiny elongated pieces were often created to enfold mirrors, combs, and other personal items that also had ritual uses.” Most weren’t made to last, but “Elaborately embroidered or especially beloved pieces would be carefully preserved and passed down through generations.”
The kanthas reproduced in the catalogue are visually rich. The base is thin white cotton fabric, atop which appear various images, some representational, mostly in red and blue. There is “a wonderful variety of textures, from intermittent swells to ripples to densely regimented ridges” and indeed they often seem to be landscapes unto themselves.
The catalogue includes five provocative essays. In the first, Pika Ghosh “explores her family’s connection with kanthas in a personal reflection [as well as] ethnographic research to discuss the roles that kanthas and kantha-making continue to play.” In another, Ghosh embarks upon “a ground-breaking study of the religious narratives depicted on these textiles.” Katherine Hacker “examines how, during the first half of the twentieth century, the kantha was transformed from the product of a women’s craft into a symbol of tradition, heritage, nation, and, ultimately, fine art.” Niaz Zaman “has been gathering examples of inscribed kanthas over many years, and she uses this written evidence to probe the layers of Bengali society and women’s place in it.” Finally, conservator Anne Peranteau “documents her analysis of the materials and techniques of the kanthas in the Kramrisch and Bonovitz collections, as well as comparative examples.”
The catalogue concludes with portraits of Stella Kramrisch and the Bonovitzes. In an essay, Darielle Mason paints a vivid portrait of the late Kramrisch, a onetime Philadelphia Museum curator, who led a fascinating life that spanned Moravia, Vienna, Calcutta, and Philadelphia. It verges on the hagiographic at times, but retains some critical distance.
Mason’s treatment of the Bonovitzes is altogether different. Here a short biographical profile precedes an interview with Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz. She is an artist; he is a lawyer and a trustee of the museum. The couple helped underwrite the exhibition and its catalogue, as the copyright page notes, and I’m tempted to say they got their money’s worth. Their profile is vacuously laudatory: “his passionate conviction,” “has often been called a visionary by his peers,” “internationally acclaimed”:
Jill exudes an ethereality, wonderfully tempered by the contemplative candor of her speech, each phrase seeming to blossom forth, freshly thought. In contrast, Sheldon is pent energy and staccato sentences, broken by sudden stillness as he listens with almost feline focus.
Ick. The Bonovitzes may well be this wonderful, but what place does all this have in an exhibition catalogue? Mason’s subsequent questions to the couple are far from probing, and produce little of interest, as far as I can tell. I’m glad the Philadelphia Museum got the Bonovitzes’ collection (assembled in the early part of last decade) in the bargain, but I sure wish it had happened in a more seemly and scholarly fashion. Even the Bonovitzes’ kantha dealer got a page-long plug in the catalogue.
In related news, Tyler Green writes on “The Albright-Knox’s big, embarrassing mistake.”
