'Terra-Cotta Diplomacy' Brings Persian Art West In
Rare Loan From Iran
By FREDERIKA RANDALL Vienna
The Wall Street Journal
March 2, 2001
There were people standing four-deep in front of the cases at "7,000
Years of Persian Art" here on a recent Saturday morning -- a lot of
people, considering that, outside of Vienna, this dazzling show at the
Kunsthistorisches Museum is one of the best-kept secrets on the continent.
Since it opened three months ago, nearly 200,000 visitors have braved the
crush to see the 180 objects on transfer from the archaeological collection
of the Iranian National Museum of Teheran.
Why the excitement? "Persian Art" is elegantly mounted but
austere, scholarly and not even very large: In short, it has none of the
attributes of an exhibit intended from the start as a crowd-pleaser. My
guess is that the crowds come for the same reason I did; they want to catch
a glimpse of a civilization and a country that has been largely off-bounds
to the West for the past 20 years. This is the first time the Teheran museum
has lent anything from its collection since the revolution of 1979. It's
only the second time, following an exhibit that traveled under the shah's
aegis in the 1960s, that a selection from the National Museum's collection
has gone abroad. Who knows when it might happen again?
The 7,000 years of history in question run from the middle of the seventh
millennium B.C. to the Arab conquest in the seventh century A.D., with
a little coda to the exhibit that illustrates how Islamic art drew inspiration
from Persian traditions. The time frame, in other words, begins long before
the mighty Persian empire rose to power under the Achaemenid dynasty that
began with Cyrus in 558 B.C., reached its height under Darius I, and held
sway until the arrival of Alexander the Great in 334 B.C. (After Alexander's
death in 323, the Parthians and the Sassanians rebuilt the dominion of
Persia, which remained a great power nearly up to the Arab arrival.)
The archaeological finds on show thus come not only from modern-day
Iran's vast, culturally and geographically varied territory, but from the
areas west across the Tigris and east into Asia held by the Persians in
antiquity. While it's possible to see some common threads running through
this long history and broad territory, Prof. Wilfried Seipel, the director
general of the Kunsthistoriches Museum and the show's curator, has put
the emphasis on a careful cataloging of the objects, not on iconography.
Some of the most astonishing things here come right at the beginning
of the chronologically ordered show. And they are tiny. A mesmerizing clay
miniature of a mother with a child in her arms is just 1.6 centimeters
(5/8 of an inch) high, small enough to sit on a fingernail. From the Tepe
Zaqeh archaeological site in northern Iran, it was made between 6500-6000
B.C. -- possibly the oldest example we have of that most durable of artist's
subjects, maternity. From the Choga Mish site in the southwest, two minute
amulets of pink stone, measuring about 2.5 centimeters (an inch) each and
deftly carved like a tiny pig and a deity, are 6,000 years old.
Other highlights include painted terra-cotta bowls from northern Iran,
so finely crafted it's hard to believe they date to the fifth millennium
B.C.; delightful pottery "rhytons," ceremonial vessels in the
shapes of rams and antelopes, made in northern Iran in the second and early
first millennium B.C.; a glittering fifth century B.C. gold drinking horn
resting on a winged lion, dug up Hamadan in the mountains toward Kurdistan;
the great stone relief panels that decorated the palaces of Persepolis
during the fifth century B.C. reign of Darius; and a twisted bronze mask
of a man's face found in the southwest region of Khuzistan, possibly a
portrait mask of Alexander the Great. One interesting question the curators
raise is if the Persians absorbed art and ideas from their traditional
rivals, the Greeks, after Alexander's arrival on the scene. A first century
B.C. bronze statue of a man with elegantly draped clothing is one of the
items that suggests they did.
It was thanks to the timid defrosting of relations between Europe and
Iran in late 1999 that the Kunsthistorisches Museum was able to host "7,000
Years of Persian Art," Prof. Seipel told me. Taking advantage of Austria's
generally good relations with Teheran, he had written to his Iranian counterparts
at the National Museum more than four years before, and after President
Mohammad Khatami came to power, a reply came. At the time, the Iranians
were thinking about how they could use art to build diplomatic bridges,
the way former President Richard Nixon once used "ping-pong diplomacy"
to break the ice with China. "Terra-cotta diplomacy" with Teheran
proved slow and complicated, however.
"Initially they wanted the Kunsthistorisches to host an exhibit
of Islamic art, but I wasn't interested in that," said Prof. Seipel,
whose own training is in archaeology. Although he didn't say so, it seems
likely that the state-owned Austrian museum wanted to avoid any suggestion
it was being used as a mouthpiece for the theocratic regime in Iran. It
took an entire year to nail down which items could be borrowed, even though
the deal had the crucial support of former Iranian Culture Minister Ataollah
Mohajerani, a liberal who also backed new Iranian cinema and freedom of
the press. "It was a very nerve-wracking project at the beginning,"
said Prof. Seipel. And by the time the exhibit opened in late November,
conservatives had forced Mr. Mohajerani to hand in his resignation.
After it closes here March 25, the show travels to Bonn in June and,
if legal details can be straightened out, to the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York. (Iran wants the U.S. to guarantee federal immunity from
seizure to be certain it will get its artifacts back.)
Last month the Kunsthistorisches was in the news when it signed a three-way
partnership with the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Guggenheim Museum
in New York. It's easy to see what the Vienna institution contributes to
that deal. Not only does it have one of the world's great art collections
-- it has the savoir faire to bring off a tough show like this one.
-- From The Wall Street Journal Europe
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