Nov. 16, 2018: As a girl growing up in South India, Tushara Bindu Gude thought of the island of Sri Lanka as an almost mythical place. Referred to in Indian literature as the ‘jeweled isle,’ the country of 21 million is famed for its precious gems. Now, in ‘The Jeweled Isle: Art From Sri Lanka,’ Ms. Bindu Gude and Robert Brown, curators at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, have created a thoroughgoing survey of Sri Lankan art and culture. “There really hasn’t been a show like this that I know of anywhere, including in Sri Lanka,” says Prof. Brown. “It traces the whole parameters of Sri Lankan art.”
The roughly 250 objects in the exhibition, which opens Dec. 9, span two millennia and include loans from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as private collections. The exhibit’s first gallery features a small 18th-century seated Buddha statue made of gilt and copper alloy - a sign of the enormous importance in Sri Lankan art of Buddhism, which was likely introduced to the island around the third century B.C. While Buddhism virtually died out in India, it continued to thrive in Sri Lanka, where it remains the dominant religion today. A set of 14 watercolor panels about 5 feet high, painted in the 17th to 18th centuries, also features Gods like Indra and Vishnu drawn from Indian traditions, with various demon attendants and astrological deities.
The second gallery focuses on the city of Anuradhapura, which thrived as Sri Lanka’s capital for much of the first millennium A.D. Religious tradition holds that the Buddha flew to Sri Lanka and left his footprint on a mountain peak, and a number of representations of this footprint have been found in Anuradhapura. A painted cloth almost 7 feet tall, created in the 18th century, represents this tradition: Designs in red, green and yellow cover the back of a giant foot, the toes and even the toenails.
The Hindu influence returns in the third gallery, focusing on the city of Polonnaruwa, which in the 11th century became the capital of a new dynasty established by Hindu invaders. A copper-alloy statue from the 12th century shows the Hindu God Shiva “twirling on one leg within an aureole of flames as he enacts a cyclical cycle of destruction and creation,” Ms. Bindu Gude says.
Throughout the exhibition, vintage photographs help to conjure a vanished world. In the 19th century, commercial photographers like Britain’s Charles Thomas Scowen found a ready market for exotic Sri Lankan scenes such as “Caparisoned Elephant Carrying the Tooth Relic in Procession,” a Scowen-company photo from circa 1880-90. The photo depicts three highly ornamented elephants marching side by side, with the one in the center carrying on its back a small gazebo-like structure that shelters the country’s most famous relic - one of the Buddha’s teeth. A late-17th century account by the Englishman Robert Knox describes the same annual festival, then already many centuries old, and its dancers, drummers, and “giants” - presumably stilt-walkers, says Ms. Bindu Gude.
Another photographic viewpoint comes from Reg van Cuylenburg (1926–88), who had a Sri Lankan mother and English father. Twenty of his works are in the exhibition, all recent gifts to LACMA. Between 1949 and 1958 van Cuylenburg made several tours across Sri Lanka. Ms. Bindu Gude finds that his portraits of workers, farmers and festival dancers “present particularly dignified images of the island’s diverse humanity” - a Sri Lankan’s own view of his homeland.
The subject of another gallery in the exhibition is Kandy, the capital of a new Sri Lankan kingdom founded in the 16th century. Scowen and his company carefully documented the gardens of Kandy. The exhibition includes black-and-white photos of flowers using such deep contrasts that it’s easy to forget they’re not in color.
Equally vivid is a jewel casket, one of many created as diplomatic gifts from the island’s rulers to the European powers that made contact with Sri Lanka starting in the early 16th century. Such caskets often fused Christian and Buddhist imagery. This example, wrought with ivory, gold, glass, rubies, turquoise and gilt bronze, incorporates dancers, lions and vine-like designs intended to be auspicious, Ms. Bindu Gude says.
The casket is just one of the items that evoke “the jeweled isle.” A 16th-century Christ child, carved from rock crystal and adorned with gold and gemstones, testifies to the coming of Europeans in that era, while an 1873 hair ornament of gold is inlaid with garnets. Gem lovers can also see stones themselves on display: Sapphire colors include Ceylon blue, orange and yellow.
The final gallery focuses on a contemporary work inspired by Sri Lankan tradition. Lewis de Soto, a 64-year-old Californian artist of partly Native American ancestry, created a 26-foot-long reclining Buddha sculpture, inspired by a 12th-century stone carving from Polonnaruwa. The sculpture of vinyl-infused cloth is inflated and deflated by an industrial fan - an allusion to the yogic practice of ‘spiritual breath,’ Ms. Bindu Gude says. The work is personal as well: Mr. de Soto created it in the wake of his father’s death, and gave the sculpture his own features. “We wanted to show that the traditional art that we have looked at has repercussions even in California,” says Ms. Bindu Gude.
-The Wall Street Journal