The Met’s imaginary Indian skies
Just when you thought the Metropolitan Museum of Art was finally starting to free itself from its old colonial ways, it goes and mounts an exhibition like Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting, which erases histories, centers whiteness, and asks you to ignore the political images before your very eyes and to think instead about imaginary skies.
First, some background. In 2020, amid growing calls for museums to decolonize their practices, the Metropolitan Museum of Art issued a thirteen-point statement, titled “Our Commitments to Anti-Racism, Diversity, and a Stronger Community.” Notably, the statement did not include a specific commitment to repatriate illegally looted objects in its collection, which number over 1,000, many of which were obtained in the latter half of the twentieth century according to a widely publicized report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. However, the museum did promise to “scrutinize institutional biases” in its presentation of BIPOC art and to “emphasize the diverse social, political, and economic context of Met objects and their entangled histories.” The Met has not published the full provenance of the approximately 120 works they acquired from the Howard Hodgkin estate, which form the bulk of this exhibition, and it may well be that the provenance of at least some of those works is murky. Artists are not always the most fastidious record keepers. Bracketing that question aside, however, Indian Skies is also thoroughly colonialist in its presentation. Co-curators John Guy and Navina Najat Haider show no evidence of scrutinizing their own institutional biases nor any willingness to emphasize the entangled histories of the objects in the show.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room. I don’t mean the paintings of war elephants, which do get prominent wall space. I mean Howard Hodgkin himself. By most accounts, he was a wry, self-deprecating artist with a sincere passion for all things Indian and an equally sincere desire to paint his inner emotions. Born the same year as Gerhard Richter (1932), Hodgkin’s thinly painted Abstract-Expressionist-inspired compositions have a nice color sense and a certain offhand charm about them, but artists like Mary Heilmann have done that sort of thing much better. The main problem with Indian Skies is not that it focuses on Hodgkin’s collection of Indian art, which contains many great pieces, but rather that it presents four centuries of South Asian art as mere visual fodder for his work. It is Hodgkin’s name that’s writ big on the giant banner outside the museum, his image that’s reproduced on a wall panel titled “Howard Hodgkin as artist and collector,” and his whimsical, unscholarly perspective that’s consistently privileged throughout the show. “He showed an almost irreverent disregard for schools and styles,” the curators say in a statement. Well, I don’t expect collectors to be systematic or even reverent, but the museums that acquire those collections have a responsibility to provide context. Guy and Haider ignore the larger historical and political contexts in which the works were made and choose instead to make the figure of “Hodgkin as artist and collector” the prism through which all the art gets refracted. They go so far as to hang two of Hodgkin’s own paintings in the show, even though his messy experiments in lyrical abstraction bear no obvious relationship to the delicately painted representational works installed nearby, apart from—what, containing yellow, orange, and green?
One of these things is not like the others. Installation view of Indian Skies with a Howard Hodgkin painting in the middle
It’s a curatorial move reminiscent of the MoMA’s spectacularly racist Primitivism show of 1984, which placed so-called “tribal artifacts” next to works by “modern masters” like Picasso with little regard for their cultural or historical contexts. In Indian Skies, Hodgkin’s painting In Mirza’s Room gets a wall to itself and is roped off with a museum stanchion—a treatment not afforded to any other work in the show. These visual cues connote both monetary and cultural value—the not-so-subtle implication being that Hodgkin’s art is the true hero of the show. In other words, they’ve snuck a white savior narrative into a twenty-first century South Asian art exhibition. It’s a bad look, particularly when the savior is an old-school British modernist. Actually, this treatment does a disservice to Hodgkin, too. Thrusting his work where it doesn’t belong makes him come off as a bad ham actor chewing up the scenery. If he were alive, would he have approved? I hope not.
Installation view of Indian Skies, featuring “In Mirza’s Room” by Howard Hodgkin, protected by a museum stanchion
Even more shocking, the curators have installed a display case at the entrance of the galleries in the form of a Christian church altar. This sacred reliquary contains a Hodgkin lithograph, titled Indian Leaves (it’s an edition of 1,000), which the Met is hawking for $500 apiece. Yes, some art at the Met now comes with price tags! I suspect even some of the museum’s more conservative patrons who aren’t particularly troubled by the colonialism of the show may still rankle at the vulgarity of price tags.
Installation view of a display case opposite the entrance to Indian Skies, which resembles a Christian church altar
Detail shot of display case, showing the price tag for a Howard Hodgkin print
Every painting in Indian Skies, apart from Hodgkin’s, have been fitted with identical three-inch wood frames. These chunky eyesores not only distract from the art, but they serve to level all distinctions between centuries, regions, and styles. “It all kind of looks the same, doesn’t it?” I overheard someone say during my visit. The curators, I’m sure, would be quick to point out that they’ve given each painting its own multi-paragraph explanatory label. Look how well we’ve contextualized everything! But all those paragraphs add up to nearly a novella’s worth of reading, which, for the casual visitor to this crowded, overhung show, is too much. Most visitors, if they read anything, will read the big vinyl-lettered introductory statement, which focuses on Hodgkin, or the one text panel with an image on it (a photo of Hodgkin), which is also, of course, about Hodgkin. For the rest of the show, they will probably trust their eyes, noting relationships between shape and color. That’s how formalist critics like Clement Greenberg looked at art in the 1940s and 50s. The art world, by and large, now recognizes that such an approach was only really useful for evaluating art made by painters who were part of Greenberg’s own social circle. To apply Greenbergian formalism to sixteenth century Indian court paintings would be like judging chess by the rules of American football. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what Guy and Haider encourage us to do by putting everything in identical frames, arranging each sub-section by visual affinities—not theme or chronology—and then inserting Hodgkin’s own formalist-influenced art.
Installation view of Indian Skies featuring four works by unnamed artists from Himachal Pradesh
A very casual or distracted viewer may simply glance at the title, Indian Skies, spend a few seconds peeking into the three small gallery rooms, and leave with the mistaken impression that they saw a lot of paintings of yellow and orange sunsets. Anyone else, who spends more than a few seconds in the show, is bound to feel genuinely baffled by the title, since almost none of the works on view depict skies. Where are the Indian skies? In the few paintings that do depict skies, the sky is usually just a strip of blue at the top—almost an afterthought. People, animals, or architecture are invariably the focus, followed by land, water, and vegetation.
The introductory wall text, by contrast, spews a string of clichés about India’s “intense light,” “heat and dust,” and “suffocating humidity”—atmospheric effects which are evident absolutely nowhere in the show, but which were common gripes among British colonialists in India—an incessant refrain in their private journals and letters home. Indians in the hotter parts of India, by contrast, simply avoided the noonday heat. Consequently, most of the Rajput and Pahari paintings in Indian Skies reflect cool interior scenes without heat, dust, or humidity.
Because the curators crammed so much art into such small galleries, they were forced to stack some of the paintings on top of each other. This is not such a big deal when they put a painting of a ruler holding a falcon above another painting of a falcon, and the wall label discusses falcons. Other pairings, however, are so ahistorical as to border on cultural insensitivity.
In the pairing below, the top painting shows Emperor Amar Singh II having a sexy pool party with his courtesans. It was painted at his royal palace in Udaipur around 1708 in the last years of his reign. The bottom painting was made almost one hundred years later, and it depicts the shrine room of Sansar Chand, who ruled a snowy Himalayan kingdom 750 miles to the north. These rulers not only lived in very different times and places; they had entirely different values. Amar Singh II was proud to be depicted in the thralls of sensual indulgence—a sign of his wealth, aesthetic refinement, and physical vigor. Sansar Chand, by contrast, wanted his countrymen to see him as a pious devotee. Historically, geographically, and culturally, the two paintings are nearly as far apart as Fragonard’s The Swing (1767) and a stern English Puritan portrait from the 1600s. Is there any justification for stacking them like this? An art historian might counter that Hindu society was never particularly puritanical (at least until the British came), and that the deity Chand worshipped, Krishna, is celebrated for his mischievous exploits, including, yes, skinny dipping with buxom cowgirls. In fact, if you look closely, you can see that one of the small alcoves in Chand’s shrine depicts just such an episode from Krishna’s teenage years.
Stacking art without regard to time or place. On top is “Maharana Amar Singh Enjoying the Company of the Women of the Court”, Rajasthan, ca. 1708-1710. Below is “Pavilion with Krishna Paintings”, Himachal Pradesh, ca. 1800.
The Met’s explanatory wall labels, therefore, could have drawn interesting comparisons between depictions of Krishna in Vaishnava religious art and Amar Singh II’s wild pool party scene. They probably would have had to explain that for a fervent devotee like Chand, Krishna’s exploits did not provide an excuse to indulge in hedonism in the manner of Amar Singh II any more than a seventeenth-century English Puritan would have taken Jesus’s friendship with sex workers as a license to spend every night at a brothel. The curators of Indian Skies don’t get into these questions, however, leaving viewers to draw their own, perhaps uninformed, comparisons between the two images based on the limited information provided and whatever visual similarities they happen to see. Visually, both paintings are interior scenes featuring a rectilinear grid pattern and the colors white and blue. Is that interesting? Not really, but those are the sort of superficial, formalist comparisons the curators seem to invite.
Besides the paintings, the exhibition includes two spearlike processional standards, both presented in tall glass vitrines. One is Hindu, from nineteenth century Rajasthan in the North, and features a mustachioed sun, a symbol of Rajput royal power. It would have been used in stately, music-filled parades. The other comes from Hyderabad in the South and would have been carried by Shi’a Muslims in the seventeenth century to celebrate Ashura, a festival in which participants flog and slice their own flesh to commemorate the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandson, Imam Hussain. The social and religious meanings, and the specific performative traditions, associated with these objects could not be more different, yet the curatorial labels focus almost exclusively on iconography, ignoring the social worlds in which these objects carried meaning. Such contexts could have been filled in, at least somewhat, by videos of contemporary Rajasthani royal processions and Shi’a celebrations of Ashura. After all, these are living traditions. Instead, Guy and Haider fell back on old-fashioned, Eurocentric, connoisseurship-based models of curation and facile formalist comparisons that obfuscate more than they clarify.
Installation view of Indian Skies. A royal processional standard from Rajasthan is in the foreground
Installation view of Indian Skies. A processional standard used by the Shi’a community of Hyderabad stands in the foreground
Speaking of obfuscating more than clarifying, the introductory wall text notes that Hodgkin’s collection spans the late sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, yet it fails to mention the obvious correlation between this timeline and that of the British East India Company, which was founded in 1600, became the de facto ruler over most of India by the end of the eighteenth century, and finally ceded power to the British government in 1858 in the wake of the Great Rebellion. Since so many of the paintings in Hodgkin’s collection depict court life over the centuries in various sultinates, kingdoms, and princely states, what the collection really reflects is a slow but steady usurpation of indigenous autonomy by a multinational corporation’s private army. It also demonstrates the varied responses of official court artists to those changing geopolitical realities. Some artists seem intent on bolstering the public image of their respective rulers, showing them hosting important diplomatic delegations or engaging in macho pursuits like hunting. Other artists paint pretty things like flowers, perhaps as a form of escapism. A few depict British cannons—the same cannons British soldiers used to assassinate entire villages of men, women, and children after the Rebellion of 1857—although the curators have nothing to say about that.
One of the most moving works in the show, a fine-lined portrait of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar II—a mystic poet who was emperor in name only—is appropriately spectral. The unnamed artist captures Zafar’s otherworldliness as well as his humanity. In Indian Skies, which decontextualizes him so thoroughly from history, his eyes acquire an added dimension of sadness. I imagine Zafar peering though those lifelike eyes and wondering to himself, How did I end up here, a footnote to a minor British painter?
The Emperor Bahadur Shah, ca. 1855-58
A very different and much better exhibition could have been assembled with these same ingredients (minus Hodgkin’s art, of course), and it could have told an epic, multi-century story of Indian-British power struggles from the perspective of royal Indian court artists tasked with projecting images of political stability. Given that art commissioned by rulers is by definition political, and given that this collection aligns almost perfectly with the chronology of Company Rule in India, it’s hard to imagine putting together a show with these materials that didn’t foreground politics. It takes real skill, and quite a lot of bad faith, to pretend it’s all about the weather.
Indian Skies runs through June 9, 2024, at The Met Fifth Avenue.
All images courtesy Logan Royce Beitmen
Logan Royce Beitmen is a writer and curator who lives in Brooklyn, NY.
