via Khmer NZ
By LEE LAWRENCE
Washington
The very name "Angkor" conjures images of towering stone spires, rocks morphing into giant undulating snakes, carved faces bulging from temple walls. But these palaces and temples housed bronzes—idols, ritual objects and decorative statues that took their place within the endless unfolding of stone reliefs and statuary.
From the rich bronze-casting tradition of Cambodia's Khmer people.
In "Gods of Angkor: Bronzes from the National Museum of Cambodia," the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Art presents 24 such bronzes along with a dozen others that precede the Angkor period (ninth to mid-15th century). Together they establish that the Khmer people of Cambodia have a rich bronze-casting tradition that produced magnificent works.
As though proclaiming as much, the first piece we see is a 13-inch tall, 12th-century statue of a young woman sitting on her haunches, one knee raised, arms out to the side, crooked and pointing heavenward. There is something both celebratory and matter of fact about her, like a dancer striking a triumphant pose after a predictably great performance.
Scholars speculate that the figure once held aloft a brass disk polished to a mirror shine, and it is one of the show's few pieces that is not devotional. Two others flank the entrance—an urn and a bell, both some 20 inches high and covered in etched geometric designs. These are also the show's oldest pieces, attesting that Cambodia's fourth-century craftsmen participated in a broader production of bronzeware in Southeast Asia.
The story gains momentum in the second gallery with seventh-century sculptures in which Khmer artists incorporated stylistic elements from India and China. The fragment of a Buddha displays the elegant, relaxed pose and clinging robe Indian sculptors favored, while five smaller Buddhas adopt the Chinese proclivity for placing both hands in mudras (symbolic gestures).
These five bronzes also provide a glimpse into the institutional collaborations that made this exhibition possible. The figures, unearthed by chance in 2006 by a villager in Cambodia's Kampong Cham province, made their way to the conservation laboratory that the Sackler and Freer (its sister gallery) had just the year before established at the National Museum of Cambodia. The Getty Foundation, which will next host the show, provided most of the laboratory's funding. There conservators cleaned and stabilized the bronzes, whose green oxidation speaks of some 1,300 years underground.
But conservation is as much about reconstructing a work's past as it is about assuring its survival. Pointing to a small standing Buddha, Paul Jett, the head conservator and the show's co-curator, says that tests revealed it was not bronze but rather brass, "which is very unusual. The metal was probably imported, and my guess is that it came as another object that was melted down and recast. This is the earliest brass in Southeast Asia that I know of."
Similarly, X-rays of a charming Buddha with a flowing robe and large, splayed feet did not show the expected thin layer of metal with a ceramic core that is typical of a hollow cast. Instead, radiography revealed an elaborate iron armature embedded in solid metal. "It is made unlike anything I've ever seen," says Mr. Jett, who has worked with bronze sculpture for 30 years. "This is starting to build a body of technical knowledge on these pre-Angkorian pieces of which little is known," he adds.
More familiar to scholars are the bronzes of the 10th through 14th century that make up the rest of the show. As for nonscholars, a good way to appreciate the Khmers' distinctive style is by taking a detour into the museum's permanent collection. After you see the Freer's 11th-century Indian statue of the Hindu bull Nandi, the realism of the Khmer's depiction stands out—its legs are more proportional, its haunches heavier, its face more bovine. Similarly, the 12th-century crowned Buddha in the first gallery is at once stiffer and more realistic than the idealized 11th-century Buddha in the Sackler's adjoining South Asian gallery.
Overall, the casting of intricate ornamentation and dress is remarkable. A telling technical detail: In larger pieces, the core is held in place with pins, which leave holes that casters then have to fill. The chest of an 11th-century crowned Shiva thus bears penny-size marks, similar to old-fashioned vaccination scars. However, while the X-ray of a multiarmed 10th-century Buddha reveals similar pins, the casters did such a masterly job that the surface appears unblemished.
Angkor's mix of Hindu and Buddhist iconography is equally remarkable. Twelfth- and 13th-century Buddhas sit atop coiled cobras (one sporting the copper sheen of a previous restoration); a 13th-century Ganesha sits in full lotus, his navel shaped as an eye, Tantric symbols in his hands; and in a miniature shrine the Buddhist tantric deity Hevajra leaps middance encircled by female adepts.
As you walk around the shrine, peering between its tiny columns, the women appear to dance around their gilded god. And imagine now, as a visitor to Angkor, seeing the other bronzes—whether small or large idols, a lotus-shaped incense burner, a bell that once hung on an elephant, or the kneeling female figure—all glowing with golden warmth amid the stone walls of Angkor's temples and palaces. Mastery and magic.
Ms. Lawrence is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
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