Beautiful Buddhas

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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It is not my custom to review exhibitions of works of art of which I know very little, in cultural traditions of which I know even less. It is pointless, dishonest indeed, to regurgitate the hyperbolic press releases of Chinese whisperers, or to copy scraps of information and interpretation from catalogues, the reliability of which I cannot test. I have read too much intellectually dishonest twaddle in fields that I know well ever to trust the opinions, assertions and supposed facts presented by experts and curators as the triumphant gospel truth, least of all in catalogues sold by the Royal Academy - and if you need an example of scandalously slanted and distorted scholarship issued and supported by that once-great institution, let me remind you of an exhibition there a year ago, The Genius of Rome.

I raise that embarrassing ghost because it proved beyond argument the point that the RA has abandoned its responsibilities to scholarship. One might go so far as to assert that it will exhibit anything on any terms that will bring it commercial profit and that erudition and connoisseurship hold no place in any of its dealings. It has forgotten, if its present bureaucracy ever knew, how works of art should be catalogued, forgotten that the contrary views of reputable scholars on matters of authenticity and date should always be quoted, no matter how emphatically the author or editor of a catalogue disputes them. I am prepared, sometimes angrily, to lock horns with the RA's chosen experts, but in fields in which I have no expertise I am content to look, walk away and find some other subject to review.

In the case of the current exhibition, however, of some three dozen Chinese sculptures of Buddha and his attendants, I cannot take this latter course, for they are, some of them, too beautiful for the experience of seeing them to be left to chance and I am compelled to urge readers of contemplative mind to make their ways to Piccadilly. Too beautiful? There is great risk in this assertion, for I make it on the basis of wholly irrelevant aesthetic judgments formed and informed by the history of western art. I look at these Buddhas and see them in the false contexts of the saints that in serried ranks embellish the façades of northern Gothic cathedrals, of the smiling virgins of Desiderio da Settignano and other Quattrocento sculptors of the sweet and pretty, of the hieratic saints of Byzantium's mosaics, and of the idealised standing boys carved in archaic Greece at much the same time as Buddha's birth in the 5th century BC.

With none of these are the Academy's Buddhas even remotely connected. Retrieved from the earth some 250 miles south-east of Peking in 1996, part of a hoard of some 400 under the playing field of a primary school, the circumstances of their damage - apparently deliberate - and burial remain unknown, though the site was once that of a Buddhist monastery and, from time to time, Chinese emperors commanded the suppression of Buddhism and the destruction of its monuments. Coins with the hoard indicate that its burial took place in the first half of the 12th century, the bulk of the sculptures then six centuries old, roughly contemporary with Haghia Sophia in Byzantium, the mosaics of Justinian in Ravenna and the foundation of St Columba's monastery on Iona.

North-Eastern China was almost the furthest extent of Buddhism, which began its slow spread from north-western India to Korea and Japan a thousand years before these sculptures were carved. En route for Peking along the great trade tracks of the silk trade, the imagery of Buddha changed, faces took on a local cast and quirks of style and iconography developed; if some of the Buddhas in the Academy seem still to speak of his Indian origin, others are of a distinctly Chinese cast. Carved in limestone, only one figure in the exhibition is complete and none is in original condition, the rich gilding and extensive polychrome distressed to mere stains and flakes, arms and feet lost, heads detached - but it is this very distress that perversely makes them so appealing to a western eye. I have little doubt that number 25 will, to many of us, be the most impressive of the standing Buddhas; headless, armless, footless and so weather-worn as to be denied in every detail its true identity, it yet demonstrates the unknown early sculptor's grasp, not of the established formula, but of human form and the suspended thrust of energy, one leg taking the weight of the torso's elegant bulk, the other knee bent and at ease as though mimicking the contrapposto of an ancient Roman sculpture. Subtly and discreetly, this sculptor has indicated, as have others in this group - but here almost as an abstraction - the swell of belly and buttocks, giving the androgynous boy a mons Veneris rather than an ostentatio genitalium; in this, Buddhist iconography offers the very reverse of the western conceit of the phallus as a manifestation of power, a conceit that widely informed the western imagery of Christ as Man of Sorrows or entombed, erection the promise of Resurrection.

Stripped, as it is, to what Roger Fry might have described as pure form, this figure suggests that its sculptor had nevertheless looked at a human body and attempted to infuse life into a hieratic tradition, changing the proportions, shortening the torso, lengthening the legs. In more conventional hands it might have been as orientally-iconic as number 24; had the clinging shift in which the boy is clad been heavily decorated with engraved patterns, the simplicity, directness and truth of the sculptor's sense of form would have been as camouflaged as it is in number 26.

I must apologise for having so little to say of these sculptures - scarcity born of ignorance. Had I not been so moved by half-a-dozen of them, I would have written nothing at all, but as it is, I feel impelled impetuously to share my excitement. If I am in error, then so be it - share the prism of my thoroughly western eye, for I feel confident that anyone who knows anything of European sculpture from Cycladic Greece to Archi-penko and Brancusi, will experience something of my response. These workman sculptures shame the bentwood, self-casting and polished mirror men who pass for sculptors now.

? Return of the Buddha, Royal Academy, Piccadilly, W1. Daily 10am-6pm (Friday 10am-10pm). Admission £7.50. Until 14 July.

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