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Newsletter 297 - 3 - 29 - 2006
In this issue:

1) LONG BEFORE AUDUBON, 'THE MISSING LINK' IN BIRD ILLUSTRATIONS
2) SPECIAL OFFER OF THE WEEK
3) WILL THE REAL WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE PLEASE STAND-UP
4) GAINED IN TRANSLATION


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1) LONG BEFORE AUDUBON, 'THE MISSING LINK' IN BIRD ILLUSTRATIONS
BY WENDY MOONAN

The fine line between science and art is shown perfectly by some stunning, previously unknown bird illustrations from the 16th century that are being unveiled recently, part of a New-York Historical Society exhibition focused on 40 John James Audubon watercolors.

Roberta J. M. Olson, the curator of drawings at the museum, who organized the Audubon show, unearthed the watercolors while cataloging the 8,000 drawings in the society's collection. "The society has the oldest public collection of drawings in America," she said. "It was the city's first museum, founded in 1804."

Ms. Olson found four large, matching gold-tooled leather albums containing 218 rare avian watercolors. They were donated to the museum in 1889 by a New Jersey naturalist named Nathaniel H. Bishop, and earlier were at Chatsworth, the home of the Dukes of Devonshire. The albums were never examined, simply labeled "Drawings of European Birds, anonymous, thought to date from the 18th century."

"Bishop was an intrepid Victorian naturalist who donated the albums out of gratitude to the librarians here," Ms. Olson said. "He wanted artists to study them. We don't know how they got out of Chatsworth."

"My detective work was like an episode from 'CSI,' " said Ms. Olson, who has studied bird illustrations for decades."It included archival investigation, scholarly research, and correspondence with the keeper of Chatsworth and other institutions, and consultation with book and paper conservators."

She found the covers of the handmade sheepskin albums were backed by pulverized rope fiber, which is impervious to worms. By studying watermarks, she determined the source of the ivory paper was a mill in Lyon, France, that was active from 1533 to 1566.

The artists employed a complex variety of media: pen and ink, some chalk under-drawing, pastels, watercolors, gouache, dry brush and white lead pigment. "It prefigures what Audubon would do 300 years later," Ms. Olson said. "These are sophisticated, experimental techniques."

She is confident that the birds were drawn from life. "This is one of the first instances in which birds were depicted directly from nature - live bird specimens and one skin," she said. "The anatomy is correct. Nothing is schematic. These are obviously good artists who had a foot in two camps: art and natural history. That's what gives the birds their living, breathing quality."

The birds are frequently shown with bright eyes and open beaks. They create shadows. They perch on the ground, among grass or leaves, pecking for food. Some are accompanied by elegant hand-lettered Greek, Latin or French words defining their species, as well as the names of the painter and calligrapher.

The four watercolors chosen for this show depict a European finch, a male pheasant, a northern bald ibis (now an endangered species) and a bird of prey called Montague's harrier. They are depicted life-size, or almost so, again foreshadowing Audubon.

Ms. Olson concluded that the watercolors were part of a collaborative effort by at least three 16th-century artists: Isaac la Grese, Michel Petit and Pierre Eskrich. The most accomplished, versatile and well known is Eskrich, a French illustrator, woodcutter, engraver, painter and mapmaker who lived from about 1520 to about 1590. (The watercolors in the show are all by him.)

Eskrich, a Protestant living in Roman Catholic Lyon, left in 1552 to seek religious freedom in Geneva. "He and his wife held views that were tolerated in Lyon until the Edict of Chateaubriand in 1551, which took back their rights," Ms. Olson said. "They immigrated to Geneva, which had become a center for Reformation printing and propaganda."

Ms. Olson assumes that the project must have begun in Geneva because Michel Petit was living there in 1554. "It was at this very moment when ornithology developed into a serious scientific pursuit," she said. "Two other illustrated treatises on birds were published in 1555, one in Paris by Pierre Belon, and another in Zurich by Konrad von Gesner. There was something in the air."

She said the Geneva albums were made for a literate, well-to-do person. "The care with which these avians are lavishly modeled in colored pigments, coupled with the beautifully hand-lettered text, suggests the project was intended as a manuscript, a one-of-a-kind commission from a wealthy patron," she said.

She said the Geneva albums were made for a literate, well-to-do person. "The care with which these avians are lavishly modeled in colored pigments, coupled with the beautifully hand-lettered text, suggests the project was intended as a manuscript, a one-of-a-kind commission from a wealthy patron," she said.


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3) WILL THE REAL WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE PLEASE STAND-UP
BY ALAN RIDING

The first painting donated in 1856 to the new National Portrait Gallery here was of William Shakespeare, already well enshrined as the nation's literary idol. For the gallery, the oil recorded as NPG 1 seemed like a singularly apt founding work for its collection. And now, as the museum celebrates its 150th anniversary, it is again in the limelight.


But does this so-called Chandos portrait actually depict Shakespeare? Indeed, do any of dozens of other "Shakespeare" paintings and engravings offer a true likeness of the man who was born in Stratford-on-Avon in 1564 and died there in 1616?

These are the central questions addressed in "Searching for Shakespeare," a fascinating exhibition on view here through May 29. For this inquiry, the National Portrait Gallery has for the first time united the six oils most frequently said to portray Shakespeare. For further comparison, it is also presenting the 1623 engraving of him in the First Folio of his collected plays, as well as a plaster cast of the bust that was placed above his grave in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford sometime between 1620 and 1623.

And the answer? Well, for all the light that Shakespeare threw on human nature, his own life remains shadowy: his education, the "lost years" between 1585 and 1592, his relations with his wife and children and, yes, even his appearance are very much matters of conjecture.

Still, of all the competing paintings, the Chandos portrait has emerged as the strongest contender. "It's not absolutely watertight," said Tarnya Cooper, the gallery's curator for 16th-century painting, who organized the show, "but the evidence has increased. It is a portrait that probably represents Shakespeare, but will we ever have watertight evidence?"

As part of its search, the gallery has assembled documentary evidence of Shakespeare's life, including the church's written approval of his marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582; the parish register of the baptism of their first child, Susanna, in 1583; the baptism of their twins, Hamnet and Judith, in 1585; Hamnet's burial 11 years later; and Shakespeare's will, in which he left his "second-best bed" to his widow.

The show also displays stage costumes of the era, "quarto" editions of his plays, which carried his name only after 1598, and portraits said to be of his fellow writers Ben Jonson and John Donne as well as of Shakespeare's first patron, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton.

But the focus is Shakespeare himself and, after more than three years of study and forensic tests, the gallery has reached some conclusions about how he looked.

The engraving in the First Folio as well as the bust in Trinity Church are given weight because, in both cases, people who knew Shakespeare - his family and fellow members of his theater company - presumably accepted them as likenesses. While the bust shows him to be round-cheeked and prosperous, the engraving depicts him slimmed down and younger.

The big loser, however, is the so-called Flower portrait, an often-reproduced image that resembles the First Folio engraving by Martin Droeshout the Younger. Although the oil is dated 1609, technical examination has proved that it is a 19th-century portrait painted on top of a 16th-century Italian painting of the Madonna and Child. "It fooled scholars for quite a long time," Ms. Cooper noted.

Also dismissed is the so-called Janssen portrait, which belongs to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. It is inscribed with the sitter's age, 46 in 1610, which coincides with that of Shakespeare. But tests in 1988 demonstrated that the original painting was later tampered with to show a balding man who might pass for Shakespeare. The sitter's hairline has since been restored.

A painting known as the Soest portrait has also been promoted as a true likeness, but it is now described as a memorial portrait; that is, it was painted a half-century after Shakespeare's death. It is a sensitive painting, with the sitter dressed much as in the Chandos portrait. It also suggests that by the mid-17th century, Shakespeare was returning to vogue.

Two images offered as portraits of a young Shakespeare are also in the show. The oil known as the Grafton portrait is inscribed with the sitter's age, 24, and the date of the painting, 1588, which would be correct for Shakespeare. But nothing else links it to the playwright. Further, the sitter is portrayed in scarlet clothes, a color reserved at that time for the nobility.

Another candidate is the so-called Sanders portrait. A label on the back of the panel gives the traditional dates of Shakespeare's birth and death, but it was only in the 18th century that Shakespeare's birth was celebrated on April 23 (he was baptized on April 26, 1564). In addition, the painting is dated 1603, when Shakespeare was 39, but the sitter appears far younger.

Finally, then, there is the Chandos portrait, which has been dated between 1600 and 1610. It depicts a man who could well be the same man in the 1623 engraving and the church monument, with a receding hairline, a high forehead, long hair and a beard. In the portrait, he also wears an earring, which was fashionable among actors in Shakespeare's day.

As early as 1719, an engraver and antiquarian, George Vertue, noted that it was a portrait of Shakespeare painted by John Taylor and that it was bequeathed by Taylor to Sir William Davenant, Shakespeare's godson and himself a mid-17th-century playwright of renown.

So was this Shakespeare around age 40?

In the 19th century, some Englishmen did not like the idea. One critic, J. Hain Friswell, wrote: "One cannot readily imagine our essentially English Shakespeare to have been a dark, heavy man, with a foreign expression, of decidedly Jewish physiognomy, thin curly hair, a somewhat lubricious mouth, red-edged eyes, wanton lips, with a coarse expression and his ears tricked out with earrings."

But Ms. Cooper, who believes the Chandos portrait a "fairly likely" image of Shakespeare, said Friswell may have been deceived by the dark yellow varnish. "Portraits are not, and can never be forensic evidence of likeness," she said, "and comparison based upon the facial proportions of portraits does not therefore enhance our understanding of the various putative images of Shakespeare."

Just days before the opening of this show, however, a German art historian, Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, presented a more definitive view, based on forensic tests and computer imaging carried out in Germany. Using a bust of Shakespeare in the Garrick Club here and a supposed death mask of the playwright, she has offered a computer image of the "real" Shakespeare, one that coincides with the Chandos and Flower portraits.

But while Ms. Hammerschmidt-Hummel won headlines in Britain for her claim, it was quickly dismissed by scholars from the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford and by officials at the National Portrait Gallery, who pointed out that the Garrick bust is an 18th-century sculpture, that the death mask's authenticity has not been proved and that the Flower portrait is false. "I did not find the methodology credible," Ms. Cooper said. Clearly, searching for Shakespeare is proving more fruitful than finding him.



4) GAINED IN TRANSLATION
BY GLENN D. LOWRY

In My Name Is Red, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk describes an epic battle at the Ottoman court in the 16th century. Miniature painting, with its flat, stylized forms, stands in opposition to newly introduced European perspective, with its emphasis on individuality and the illusion of space. The fight between those who support tradition and those who espouse innovation eventually leads to a series of murders.


The tension between old and new, past and present that is at the center of the drama of My Name Is Red is, to a large extent, still being played out today as artists from the Islamic world confront the challenge of making contemporary art for an international audience grounded in European values and ideas. Although there is no single solution to this problem, the 17 artists featured in the exhibition "Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking," organized by Fereshteh Daftari, assistant curator in the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, reveal a number of the issues involved in navigating this terrain.


Look closely at Jananne Al-Ani's untitled 1996 photograph of a woman transformed by the process of being unveiled, or at Ghada Amer's Eight Women in Black and White (2004), with its dense skein of stitches masking pornographic images of women, or at Mona Hatoum's Prayer Mat (1995), made of sharply pointed pins that render the mat threatening. What is most striking is that none of these works is what it appears to be. Each one presents a seemingly straightforward external appearance that upon closer inspection becomes ambiguous, so that first impressions quickly give way to meanings that resist immediate understanding. These are layered and complex works of art that play upon our assumptions-about hijab (the Islamic code of modest dress), pornography, and piety-in order to create a new and different set of assumptions about identity, gender, and ideology.


Al-Ani, Amer, and Hatoum were born in countries where Islam is the predominant religion-Iraq, Egypt, and Lebanon, in 1966, 1963, and 1952, respectively-and, like a number of other artists from the Islamic world under consideration here, they no longer live there. They practice their art as exiles, living mostly in Europe and the United States. To what extent can-or should-their work be considered within the context of Islam and, more particularly, of Islamic art? Is there an appropriate language or set of concerns to describe their work? How should we locate these artists in terms of their practice and ideas?


Kutlug Ataman's calligraphic animations, for instance, take as their point of departure one of the most fundamental aspects of Islamic art: the act of writing. But then they subvert that act-in the case of World (no. 1) , 2003, by morphing the calligraphy into the shape of a phallus, an image abhorrent to practicing Muslims. The beauty of Ataman's calligraphy challenges us to come to terms with the shape it draws and asks us to reconcile our appreciation for writing with our awareness that the words and the image they make are at odds with one another.


While Ataman's World treats Islamic art explicitly, addressing directly the long history of calligraphy, Y. Z. Kami's portraits deal only indirectly with Islamic mysticism, particularly the Sufi tradition of spiritual development. His finely rendered portraits of both friends and strangers, seen head-on and often at monumental scale, seem at first to be straightforward depictions. They are painted in muted colors with a gently scalloped stroke that gives the surface of the paintings an almost feathered appearance. But what is noticeable about his figures is their stillness: their eyes are often cast downward, as if they are about to close, and there is no sign of movement. Each figure is caught as if in a trance, at peace with the world, a condition that Kami associates with mysticism and spirituality. The sense of quiet and calm they evoke becomes for Kami a visual analogue of the Sufi tradition.


At first glance, the presence of any identifiably Islamic dimension is invisible in his work. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that Kami's portraits are suffused with a deeply felt understanding of Sufi values. The differences between Ataman's and Kami's work suggest both the range and the complexity of issues involved with any examination of contemporary art that deals with Islam or Islamic art.


Islamic art for these artists is a tradition-perhaps one among many-to be questioned and explored as part of an exercise in self-definition. As for artists who work across cultural boundaries, their challenge is to make art that is at once both deeply personal and broadly meaningful while addressing the issues and experiences of the different worlds in which they live. All of these artists have succeeded by avoiding what cultural historian Ian Buruma calls the "trap of hybridity," in which self-conscious efforts to merge different traditions produce little more than superficial decoration hiding ill-digested ideas.


Other artists use different strategies. For instance, Shahzia Sikander, born in Pakistan in 1969 and educated at the National College of Arts in Lahore and at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, decided to learn the traditional techniques of Persian and Indian miniature painting as an act of defiance, because miniature painting was scorned by her teachers and peers at home. Responding to the harsh regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in the 1970s and '80s, Sikander (as she told critic Ian Berry) realized that "military presence has a way of prevailing, and either you respond in ways that are reactive or that become subversive. . . . The conventional approaches in the painting department pushed me toward miniature painting because no one else was interested in it." Combining images from different sources, Sikander creates densely layered paintings that transcend traditional notions of narrative to combine "overlapping commentaries on lived experiences, art history, and pop culture."


Given Sikander's interest in the dualities and contradictions of formal and conceptual structures, her paintings cannot be read in a straightforward manner but must be seen as personal meditations on the larger issues of culture and identity, tradition and modernity, Islam and the West-questions to which she consciously avoids providing clear answers. Recently Sikander has begun to use computer programs to animate her drawings. The results often suggest a kind of entropic collapse, as the individual parts of these images disengage from one another and then recombine in more and more complicated ways until they fold in on themselves. The process allows Sikander to add layers of literal and conceptual meaning while deconstructing the idea of the individual, autonomous miniature painting. In both her painted images and her animations, Sikander uses the process of layering to knit together elements from Hindu mythology, Persian tales, and personal experience in order to explore the shifting nature of the space-m


Raqib Shaw was born in Calcutta in 1974 and grew up in Kashmir before attending the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Like Sikander, he uses the formal language of Persian and Indian miniatures to make large-scale, brightly colored, almost hallucinogenic enamel paintings. The subjects of paintings like The Garden of Earthly Delights III (2003)-which is, among other things, an homage to Hieronymus Bosch-grow out of Shaw's vivid imagination. He has described himself as living locked in a world he has created for himself-a world that is the result of having grown up with Muslim parents, studied with Hindu tutors, and attended a Christian school.


Shaw resists being defined as either a Kashmiri or an Islamic artist, and just as Sikander was attracted by the outcast status of the miniature, he turned to painting because his peers at Saint Martins looked down on it. He wanted to create a new kind of imagery, richly detailed and self-consciously beautiful, that could converse with the history of art. By evoking the patterned surfaces of miniature paintings and Kashmiri textiles, with their finely wrought lines and dense networks of forms, Shaw sets up an expectation that is sharply undermined by his subject matter of writhing animals, humans, and aquatic creatures, often copulating with each other and ejaculating in bursts of exuberant color-none of which would be possible in an Islamic context.


Marjane Satrapi was born in 1969 in Rasht, Iran. She grew up in Tehran, then left for Vienna in 1984. She returned to Iran in 1988 but left again for Europe six years later, this time moving to Paris, where she currently lives and works. Satrapi takes a very different approach from those of Shaw and Sikander: instead of subverting the formal structures of an Islamic mode of representation, she appropriates the visual language of the Western comic strip. The two volumes of her comic book Persepolis tell her story of growing up in Iran during the revolution that deposed the shah, the subsequent war with Iraq, her exile in Austria during her high-school years, and her return to her homeland.


Drawn in black and white, the simple cartoon images and their texts provide a running commentary on Satrapi's life as she comes of age and learns to deal with the religious regime running Iran. Her self-definition is complicated by her move to Austria: to integrate herself into her new country, she has to forget who she is and where she comes from. Then, when she returns to Iran, she discovers that she is a foreigner at home as well. Satrapi feels that the language of drawing escapes cultural specificity. As she told Dave Weich of Powell's Books, "When you draw a situation-someone is scared or angry or happy-it means the same thing in all cultures. . . . Also it is more accessible. People do not take it so seriously. And when you want to use a little bit of humor, it's much easier to use pictures." Her story is laced with skepticism about politics, directed toward Islam, Iran, and the West, and with the recognition that the Iranian regime forces its citizens to live double lives. In Persepolis Satrapi makes


Rachid Koraichi, one of the older artists in the exhibition, was born in 1947 in Ain Beida, Algeria. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Algeria and then at the École des Arts Decoratifs, the Institut d'Urbanisme, and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he has lived since 1971. Koraichi, who comes from a distinguished Sufi family, is interested in Islamic traditions of mysticism, numerology, and writing. Often taking the form of bannerlike textiles, his work makes extensive use of calligraphy, so that on the surface it appears to be entirely within the vocabulary of Islamic art. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that what looks like Islamic calligraphy is in fact an invented language of signs and symbols, mixing Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Berber, and Tuareg elements to create what Koraichi calls an "alphabet of remembrance." Highly personal and idiosyncratic, this alphabet allows Koraichi to take typically Islamic forms, with their formulaic inscriptions, and subvert them for his p


Although all the artists under consideration here were born in one world and live in another, they do so from relatively privileged circumstances. They are well educated and come from mostly solidly middle- or upper-class families. Amer's mother, for instance, is an agronomist and her father a diplomat; Kami's father was a businessman; Shaw's from a long line of successful merchants. Many went to school, either in Europe (like Amer, Shaw, and Satrapi) or the United States (like Sikander). They are part of a sophisticated and growing population of émigrés from the Islamic world who live in the West. While they form a counterpoint to the disenfranchised, often poorly educated, and marginalized Muslims living in France, Germany, and England (who now make up between 5 and 10 percent of the population in those countries), they share with them a recognition that the traditional boundaries between the Middle East and the West have become blurred and that this has created a confusing and challenging environment.


The Islamic world historically has been defined by those countries where Islam is the predominant religion-from Morocco in the West to Indonesia in the East. Linked by successive waves of conquest that began to radiate out from the Fertile Crescent in the seventh century A.D. and bound by a common religion and accompanying social code, these countries are home to more than 1 billion people. But to speak of an Islamic world presupposes that Morocco and Turkey, Egypt and Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia, for instance, with their very different social, cultural, and political systems, belong together in some fundamental way simply because they share a religion. The "Islamic world," like the notion of a culturally unified Europe, needs to be thought of as an idea, not a hard reality. Both Europe and the Middle East, as Edward Said pointed out more than 20 years ago and Robert Bartlett noted more recently, "are obviously not natural facts but cultural constructions, invented, indeed, as a pair of contrasting polariti


For some Muslims, Western secular culture and the conspicuous consumption that often goes along with it are seen as undermining their faith; others acknowledge the democratic systems of the West but struggle to balance that appreciation against a religion that they feel leaves little room for liberal values. Muslims who have either grown up in Europe or North America or moved to the West and adopted Western values often find themselves both alienated from the Muslim community and, to varying degrees, rejected by Western communities-or, worse, targets of suspicion. Across this range of opinion and experience, the problem of defining oneself in this world is extremely difficult, especially in the wake of the terrorist attacks first in New York City and Washington, D.C., and later in Madrid and London, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.


For the artists in "Without Boundary," this has meant finding a way to express themselves that transcends being identified as "Islamic" to avoid being dismissed or stereotyped. Using the language of contemporary art firmly positions them within the culture of modernity, with its emphasis on self-reflection, criticism, and skepticism. Although artists like Koraichi, Shaw, Ataman, and Shirin Neshat, in particular, use formal devices associated with traditional Islamic art, their work nonetheless operates within the context of contemporary art through the subversion and critique of the sources they appropriate. Where Islamic art rarely allows for personal expression, their work is rooted in individual experience and expression. Calligraphy and miniature painting, myths and folktales, Koranic and Sufi traditions are all part of a complex world of images and ideas available to these artists that inflect their work but do not delimit it.


In a fluid and global environment where technology collapses borders and physical distances are moot, these artists can, in theory, practice anywhere they want. In reality, given the conservative nature of many Islamic countries-with their restrictive policies concerning freedom of expression, political activism, nudity, sex, religious debate, and homosexuality, among other social and cultural issues-they offer difficult, even impossible environments for artists who make challenging art, especially art that questions or critiques religious beliefs. It is largely for this reason that all of the artists under discussion live and practice primarily outside their countries of birth.


But if these artists have found places to work in Europe and North America, they have also had to contend with the fact that many of the social and religious issues they faced in traditional Muslim countries now confront them in different but no less real ways in Europe and, to a lesser extent North America. The conflict of values inherent in this situation can be seen as a catalyst for much of these artists' work. Caught between the tensions of Islam and modernity, Europe and the Middle East, freedom of expression and communal values, faith and secularity, the artists in "Without Boundary" tend to be skeptical of religion, politics, and social mores. Their work seeks to undermine our expectations and assumptions through a strategy of subversion.


Although Sikander, Kami, Satrapi, and Koraichi-like all of the artists under consideration-draw on experience in the Islamic world to make their work, their art as a whole resists easy categorization. They have used the means of contemporary art, from the exploration of gender and identity to the use of irony and humor, to transform their personal experiences of Islam and Islamic art into universal ones. What relates them to each other is less their connection to Islam (which, in any event, is extremely varied) than what Homi Bhabha calls an "attitude of ambivalence" and their use of subversion as a means to undermine any direct understanding of their art. Islamic art is one subject to be explored and critiqued, but it is not the only issue their art addresses-and for Ataman, Amer, Hatoum, and Shaw, it is not even their primary interest.


While the artists in "Without Boundary" were born in the Islamic world, and have their roots there, that world is undergoing dramatic change. Their work operates in a unique psychological and metaphorical space, fraught with the tensions and contradictions that characterize Islam today. By neither confining themselves to making art that addresses only Islamic issues nor denying the importance of Islam in their work, these artists resist definition. Their ambivalence and at times skepticism further complicate any easy reading of their work. But each offers us a unique way of looking at or thinking about Islam and the world through highly informed, deeply felt, and visually moving works of art that are as provocative as they are engaging.


Please check out our website at CJR Fine Arts for artists like Tarkay, Pino, Neiman, Ferjo, Fanch Ledan, Fairchild, Keeley, Schluss, Benfield, Maimon, Hessam, Treby, Kondakova, Mcknight, Shvaiko, Park and many, many more!

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