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December 6, 2002 Where Gods Set Bronze in Motion By ROBERTA SMITH
wASHINGTON, D.C. An exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery doesn't waste much time. Its opening salvo, unleashed within mere yards of the entrance, consists of three spectacular bronzes of the Hindu god Shiva as Nataraja, Lord of Dance. In each, Shiva balances on his right leg while crooking his left up and across his body, communicating the sense of imminent motion be it a spin across the heavens or a tremor of devotion that animates all great Indian sculpture.
His famous dreadlocks are already fanning out from his head like an undulating musical score. His poised body is framed by a large hooplike aureole called a prabha, which is at once the circle of life and a ring of fire. After all, Shiva's dance is one of cosmic force that destroys and then recreates the world. Even the nonspecialist is likely to suspect that these astounding presences add up to the kind of artistic confab that curators and scholars of Indian art yearn for.
Indeed. The dancing Shivas, lent by museums in Dallas and Amsterdam and an unnamed private collector, lead off a succession of works, many of which are well known and widely reproduced, that are rarely, if ever, seen in one another's company. A collaboration between the Sackler and the American Federation of Arts, this exhibition has been organized by Vidya Dehejia, a professor of art history at Columbia University and formerly the chief curator and deputy director of the Sackler. It is the first in the United States to concentrate solely on the bronze temple sculptures created during the nearly four- century reign of the devout, munificent and innovative Chola emperors.
The Cholas ruled the South Indian region of Tamil Nadu, which centers on the holy river Kaveri and the city of Tanjore, from the middle of the 9th century to the late 13th century. At times, they expanded this empire to include Sri Lanka and the Maldives and sent emissaries as far as China. They built ever larger and more elaborate temples festooned with stone images of gods, goddesses and their acolytes; these were thriving centers of faith as well as of devotional dance, music and poetry. Each Chola temple contained a sanctum closed to all but select priests, within which dwelt the primary, emblematic but nonfigurative image of the god to whom the temple was dedicated usually either Shiva or Vishnu, foremost among the numerous Hindu gods, all of whom are representatives of a higher unseen being.
In an egalitarian impulse that seems intrinsic to Hindu heterogeneity, the idea that the gods should be accessible without priestly mediation had been gaining strength for some time. "The lord comes within everyone's reach" is how the great ninth-century Tamil poet-saint Nammalvar put it. The Chola rulers began commissioning bronze versions of the temples' stone depictions of the gods' different earthly incarnations called avatars. A single temple required multiple images of its primary god, like Shiva as Lord of Dance, Destroyer of Three Cities and Seductive Mendicant.
Unlike their stone counterparts, these bronze images were portable. Seen as living incarnations of the gods, they were ritually bathed and fed, and then clothed in lavish fabrics, jewels and flowers; they were carried through the streets like earthly rulers, as part of either elaborate festivals or daily rituals.
This tradition fostered, and was fostered by, the refinement of a sophisticated lost-wax casting process, which had not yet been rediscovered in the West. Soon the components of a golden age were in place: until around 1250, when a period of political disintegration and violence began, the Chola oversaw a period that ranks among the world's high points of figurative sculpture, bronze-casting and religious tolerance.
It would not be an overstatement to say that these sculptures are among the most beautiful ever made, in any material. There are 56 here and they easily overcome the first requirement of any Sackler show: distracting viewers from the depressing reality of a museum that is mostly underground, nearly devoid of natural light and plagued by a confusing missile-silo layout. The sculptures' transporting combination of formal perfection, religious gravity and life-affirming alertness can make the setting all but disappear.
The show offers a reasonably full contingent of gods, goddesses and saints that outlines the Hindu firmament. Shiva and Vishnu appear in several different incarnations. In other works, Shiva is accompanied by his consort, Uma (known as Parvati in northern India). In the show's three "Somaskanda" images, he appears with Uma and their son Skanda. Uma, for her part, is present as the war goddess Durga or as the fierce Kali. The fabulously full-bodied, elephant-headed Ganesh, another son of Shiva and Uma, is also here, then as now one of the most popular forms for both Hindu believers and sculptors. There is a spectacular figure of Uma as the 10th-century Chola Queen Sembiyan Mahadevi, one of the dynasty's first and greatest patrons. (The bronze dancing Shiva form was an innovation of her workshops.) Also represented are several of the Tamil poet-saints, the sometimes humble, sometimes noble beings whose spontaneous poems became part of the temple liturgy under the Chola.
famous Mother of Karaikkal, an ancient ascetic whose upright skeletal of Art, there is a serene yet forceful image of Vishnu as his lion- man avatar, Yogi Narasimha, sitting in a yoga position, his legs folded in front of him (and encircled by a yoga band) two of his four elbows resting on his knees. Basking in the radiance of this extraordinary being, it is pertinent to recall that muddled descriptions of animal-headed, multiarmed figures like this caused Europeans to demonize Indian sculpture, contributing mightily to its art-historical neglect.
While this exhibition will undoubtedly help specialists establish dates and provenance in royal and regional workshops, the opportunities to make