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Newly on view on our 4th floor: Italian Post-World War II Design

The Brooklyn Museum has been at the forefront of collecting Italian twentieth century design since the mid 1950s. One pivotal event made consumers in the United States aware of the diversity and accomplishments of modern Italian design and initiated the collecting of this material at the Museum—the exhibition Italy at Work, which traveled to twelve venues between 1950 and 1954. The exhibition was initiated by the Art Institute of Chicago in partnership with two organizations devot­ed to the promulgation of Italian design, Handicraft Development Incorporated in the United States and its corresponding institution in Italy, CADMA. Italy at Work included hundreds of objects by more than 150 artisans and manufacturers and featured furniture, ceramics, glass, textiles, metalwork, jewelry, shoes, knit clothing, and industrial design. The exhibition opened at the Brooklyn Museum, and at its conclusion, when the objects were dispersed among the host institutions, the lion’s share, more than two hun­dred items, came to the Museum.

Carlo Mollino (Italian, 1905-1973). Table, circa 1949. Made by F. Apelli and L. Varesio, Turin. Laminated wood, glass, brass. Gift of the Italian Government, 54.64.321 a-c.

Some of the objects on view here have not been seen since 1954 when Italy at Work closed, such as the mosaic by Gino Severini and the table by Paolo di Poli. In addition, some of the more recently acquired works are having their debut Museum installation here as well, such as the chairs by Alberto Meda, Ettore Sottsass, Jr., and Joe Columbo.

Ettore Sottsass, Jr.  (Italian, b. Austria, 1917-2007). “Casablanca” Cabinet, designed 1981. Manufactured by Memphis. Milan. Wood, plastic laminate. Gift of Furniture of the 20th Century, 83.104.

Kehinde Wiley (American, b. 1977). Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005. Oil on canvas. Collection of Suzi and Andrew B. Cohen, L2005.6. Photo taken in the Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Lobby of the Brooklyn Museum courtesy rubykhan via Flickr.

If the large equestrian portrait in the Brooklyn Museum lobby didn’t catch your eye, you need to look again. It’s a portrait by Kehinde Wiley imitating the posture of Napoleon Bonaparte in Jacques-Louis David’s painting “Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Grand-Saint-Bernard.” Wiley substitutes powerful figures drawn from seventeen century Western art with anonymous young Black man dressed in contemporary clothing.

In the last few years, Wiley has lived and worked in different countries around the world appropriating local influences. This is evident in his current show entitled The World Stage: Africa, Lagos - Dakar now on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem (July 17th – October 26th, 2008). It definitely a must see for this summer.

Don’t miss out on seeing more work by Wiley in our upcoming Fall exhibition entitled 21: Selections of Contemporary Art from the Brooklyn Museum.

Also,

New on view on the 5th floor is an installation of works by Petah Coyne from the collection. These works are individual pieces that have been envisioned as an installation. For this, she created flowers and bows to complement and unify the hanging sculptures. In case you’re wondering where it’s located, you can’t miss it. It’s just outside the 5th floor elevator.

Petah Coyne (American, born 1953). Left: Untitled #750 (Bird Wedding Cake), 1993. Wax and mixed media. Gift of the Rothfeld Family in memory of Harriet Weill Rothfeld, and designated purchase funds, 2008.17.2. Center: Untitled #698 (Trying to Fly, Houdini’s Chandelier), 1991. Mixed media. Gift of the Rothfeld Family in memory of Harriet Weill Rothfeld, 2008.17.1. Right: Untitled 816 (Dr. Zhivago), 1995-96. Formulated wax, steel, antique birdhouse, wire, cable, ribbon, silk flowers, candles. Anonymous gift in honor of Charlotta Kotik, 1997.191. Photo courtesy bachullus via Flickr.

Petah Coyne’s fantastical forms, presenting a beauty that slides into the grotesque, allude to death and decay. Her large, arresting sculptures are neither abstraction nor figuration, but exist somewhere between the two. Using a wide range of nontraditional materials including hay, wire, black sand, specially formulated wax, silk flowers, ribbons, artificial birds, earth, hair, and trees, Coyne often veils or covers objects as though they were artifacts frozen in time. Often hanging from the ceiling, her sculptures project a sense of unease and fragility. Although the materials appear delicate, one senses the weight and density of the works (the gossamer-like Untitled 816 (Dr. Zhivago), for example, weighs three hundred pounds).

Coyne is part of a generation of feminist sculptors who came of age in the late 1980s after Minimalism. Like many of her contemporaries such as Ursula von Rydingsvard, she seeks to integrate themes of nature and the self in her works, which become metaphors for the human experience of the life cycle.

To see more, stay tuned she will be having a solo show at Galerie Lelong later this year.

The history of Coney Island from the 1890s and through the first decade of the 20th century is very much the history of three successful amusement parks: Steeplechase, Luna Park, and Dreamland. The Tilyou family had been influential in developing Coney Island ever since Peter Tilyou established one of the area’s first hotels and taverns in the 1860s, and the first of the three important parks was also a Tilyou creation. In 1897, Peter’s son George combined the family’s many sprawling concessions around the Bowery and opened Steeplechase Park on the beach between West Sixteenth and West Nineteenth streets. He was inspired by the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and by an earlier enclosed amusement park at Coney, Paul Boyton’s Sea Lion Park. Tilyou charged admission and provided affordable entertainment (a roller coaster, a scenic railroad, a Ferris wheel, a funhouse, a bathing pavilion, food, and dancing) for a mass audience inside an enclosure that was supposed to keep crime and violence outside. The main attraction was a mechanical horserace that gave the park its name and reflected the popularity of horseracing at Coney, at this time the country’s horse-racing capital. (Racetracks had been built at Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay, and Gravesend to serve the wealthy and fashionable clientele in the 1870s and 1880s.) Tilyou rebuilt Steeplechase after a fire in 1907, and many of the rides, from the Earthquake Stairway to the Human Pool Table, were moved indoors to the Pavilion of Fun, a large steel and glass building. The most long-lived and profitable of Coney’s three historical amusement parks, Steeplechase did not close its doors until 1964, and even today, Tilyou’s emblem, the funny face, is considered Coney Island’s mascot. (more…)

Coney Island has a long history as a place for entertainment. Even before the creation of the three great amusement parks around 1900, the area was enormously popular with visitors looking for fun. The first inn, Coney Island House, was established in the island’s Gravesend section, to the east, in 1829. Guests arrived by stagecoach, and the journey from the city was often grueling and time-consuming. By the 1840s, a daily ferry connection to the western part of the island brought visitors to Coney Island Pavilion, an early pleasure dome offering dancing, dining, and bathing. The eastern edge of the island catered to a middle-class and wealthier audience, but the western part, known as Norton’s Point and the site of present-day Seagate, was closer to Manhattan and attracted a much broader range of people. Excursion boats and ferries were still the most convenient modes of transportation, with just about an hour’s ride from Fulton Ferry or Peck Slip in Manhattan, but the railroad soon became an efficient competitor. With the arrival of the first rail lines in the 1860s, bars, music halls, and entertainment contributed to the grittiness, especially around the terminus, where many small hotels and taverns – Peter Tilyou’s Surf House is an example – opened up. By the late 1870s Coney Island was one of the most visited summer resorts in the United States; an estimated one hundred thousand people visited on the Fourth of July in 1879. It was one of the few resorts that attracted people from all different social and economic backgrounds, including the poor urban working class, which was afforded some leisure time toward the end of the nineteenth century, with a decreased number of working hours and often Saturdays as well as Sundays off.

After establishing Surf House, the Tilyou family in 1882 developed the Bowery, a lane that ran parallel to Coney Island’s main drag, Surf Avenue, between West Tenth and West Sixteenth streets. It was famous for its gambling, dance palaces, concert halls, burlesque theater, and sideshows with snake charmers, jugglers, and acrobats, as well as many independently operated concession stands, arcades, and carousels. From the 1860s through the 1890s, the west end of the island attracted a very mixed crowd, including many prostitutes and criminal gangs, and this part of Coney came to be known as Sodom by the Sea. Nearby attractions such as the Midget’s Palace, a Convention of Curiosities (essentially a “freak show”), a Camera Obscura (where moving images from the surrounding area were projected onto a revolving screen), roller coasters and other thrilling mechanical rides, and spectacular nighttime fireworks contributed to Coney’s immense popularity well before the creation of Steeplechase, Luna Park or Dreamland, the great amusement parks of the turn of the century.

Sea bathing was another important aspect of early entertainment at Coney Island. It started in eighteenth-century Britain as a fashionable upper-class pursuit of health, an extension of the spa experience. Growing in popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially after the seaside became more accessible through public transportation, sea bathing soon became associated with pleasure more than health and spread to the working classes. Mixed bathing was frowned on until the mid-nineteenth century, and although it was acceptable for men and women to swim together at the turn of the twentieth century, they were expected to be more or less fully covered. Bathers were advised to wear woolen or flannel bathing suits, and both men and women were prohibited from exposing the nipples. At this time, public beaches with free access existed only on the far edges of the island. The high-end hotels had their own facilities on the east end while the west side was lined with bathhouses such as Balmer’s. Visitors to the bathhouses paid to use lockers and to get access to the beach, where long ropes attached to poles a hundred feet offshore provided a safer experience in the surf.

As Julian Ralph wrote about Coney in Scribner’s Magazine in July 1896: “It is New York’s resort almost exclusively; our homeopathic sanitarium, our sun-bath and ice-box combined, our extra lung, our private, gigantic fan.”

Slideshow created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR. Having trouble seeing the slideshow? Photos are also on Flickr.

The next time you enter the Grand Lobby of the museum, make sure you cast your eyes upwards. In one of the openings in the old brick façade you will find two newly on view objects. They are a Pair of Bronze Owls, two of twenty-two, which originally stood along the roof line of the old Herald Tribune building when it was built in 1893. At that time the owls eyes were electrified, blinking on and off. The owls were created by sculptor Antonin Jean Paul Carles. When the building was torn down in the 1920’s, the owls, Minerva and the Bell Ringers were given to NYU. The latter two sculptures and two owls with outstretched wings were loaned to the city in 1940 for display in Herald Square, where they remain today. The two owls that entered the Brooklyn Museum in 1971 are also on long-term loan from NYU.

To prepare for installation, the owls were first cleaned with a soft brush and vacuum to remove surface dust and then with a detergent and water to remove the more tenacious grime.

Pictured above is Emy Kim, fourth year conservation intern from the NYU IFA Conservation Program, rinsing the owls.

Before the owls were placed into the brickwork they were secured to a mounting board for safe transport and installation. Since the owls weigh in at 251 and 232 pounds they had to first be rigged onto their respect mounting boards. Soldered brass mounts were then created to secure the owls to the boards.

Pictured below at left are Paul Daniel, mount maker, and Jakki Godfrey, project conservator, rigging one of the owls onto a mounting board. Pictured below at right is a detail image of the mounting system.

Finally it was time to install the owls. The mounted owls were secured to a forklift and then gently lifted to their new location. Once in position the owls were secured in place to the brickwork.

Pictured above at left is Jason Grunwald, art handler, making sure the owl is safe as it is raised. Pictured above at right are Jim Hayes, senior art handler and Barbara Duke, art handler securing one of the owls in place.

Last week we finished the installation of the small photography show Goodbye Coney Island? in the Luce Alcove on the fifth floor of the Museum. When I was told over the summer that this space would become available, I immediately thought of the discussions on the future of Coney Island and that this could be a great opportunity to revisit the history of the neighborhood and look at the evolution of Coney Island as an entertainment haven over the past 125 years.

Apart from about thirty photographs – in both color and black-and-white – looking at Coney Island from many different perspectives, the exhibition also includes almost thirty prints from the Brooklyn Museum’s great collection of glass plate negatives. Together they cover almost every decade from the 1870s until the present. Glass plate negatives are fragile and to produce high quality digital scans from which a new picture can be printed is a fantastic way to make these images available. They show scenes from the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century and are a wonderful contribution to the exhibition.

Big changes are anticipated in the near future, with proposals for redevelopment presented by the city as well as by private developers. Coney Island was always a contested playground with disputes over land use occurring at every stage of its evolution. Seventeenth-century power grabs by Dutch and English colonialists, late nineteenth-century corruption scandals, firm management by New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses in the mid-twentieth century, and present-day real estate speculations over valuable beachfront property are all part of the history here. In the past few years, structured attempts to rejuvenate the area have increased, signaling an interest in preserving Coney Island’s character and its accessibility for a socially and ethnically diverse audience. At the same time, developers have presented elaborate commercial and residential schemes that many fear would dramatically alter the nature of Coney. I included a question mark after the title, Goodbye Coney Island?, in order to address both the fear that Coney Island will disappear and the uncertainty of what will come out of the renewal efforts. I believe Coney Island will remain, but yet again change guise as a new incarnation takes shape in the next decade.

Slideshow created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR. Having trouble seeing the slideshow? Photos are also on Flickr.

The search for an object to purchase in honor of the soon-to-be-retired Curator of Asian Art began more than eight months before I arrived at the Brooklyn Museum, so I’m a little foggy on all the details of the earliest phases, but basically, the Curator and her supporters started contacting all the most respected dealers and auction houses they knew to see if they had anything really special available that might suit our purposes. Of course, no one said no. The local dealers said, “come on over, I have some wonderful things to show you.” The dealers in other countries sent images of their best holdings. The team was shown a wonderful array of objects, but as in any shopping experience, there were lots of pieces that weren’t quite right for the collection, some wonderful things we couldn’t afford, and a fair number of things that weren’t up to par.

Had we made these inquiries only fifteen years ago, we would have been offered a much richer variety of objects. Everybody knows that the supply of Asian antiquities has largely dried up, and dealers have been very hard pressed to find good material. That is, of course, kind of a good thing: it means that not as much material is being looted and/or exported illegally from Asia. And it means that a lot of the best material has already made its way into museum collections, where it is shared with the general public. But it also means that if one wants to buy something beautiful, one has to look a lot harder, and one has to sift through more B-level objects than one used to. And the A-level things are getting more expensive.

Shopping for antiquities is always a bit of a minefield, with issues of authenticity and provenance at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Nowadays, prices for Asian art are high enough that it’s worth it for skilled craftsmen to take the time to make good facsimiles. Certain types of Asian art have been forged for centuries. There are a lot of fakes out there. Scientific testing is a relatively good way to get answers about an object’s age, and the best dealers will have things tested before they offer them to their clients. Testing is most reliable for ceramics and some bronzes. But certain materials, most notably stone, are very difficult to test for age (one can analyze the surface of stone for patterns of wear and patination, but it’s an inexact science), and even testable objects can be faked, by creating a mostly new object using old materials.

People who spend a lot of time looking at specific types of Asian art develop a laundry list of telltale signs of forgery, as well as a strong sense of what an authentic object should look like. But the visual cues can be misleading, especially since the best forgers have been looking, too. Not everyone has the same laundry list, so there can be lots of debate, especially surrounding flashy new “finds.” (Some of this debate is clearly a matter of sour grapes: people who missed out on the find saying that it can’t possibly be real.) I’ve seen objects that I strongly suspected were forgeries at some of the best museums and galleries in the world, but I am well aware that my opinion of what is “fake looking” and what isn’t is just that: an opinion. Sometimes an object that looks slightly wrong is simply the authentic product of a provincial workshop or a quirky artist.

The other concern nowadays is provenance, or where the object has been. This is an issue that has received a lot of press lately, but the truth is that the vast majority of museums stepped up their level of caution long before the news coverage began. Certainly, most American museums once participated in phases of happy-go-lucky acquisitiveness, and they once subscribed to imperialist notions that Western collectors were “rescuing” artifacts from developing countries. They didn’t realize that they were doing something that future generations would consider inappropriate; they simply thought that they were bringing great art to the masses (and of course, they were…). But those days have been over for quite a while. Today, museums know that they must serve as models of good collecting behavior: if there’s nothing clean on the market, then you don’t buy anything, even if it would be fun to tout a new acquisition.

The very best way to determine that an object has not been stolen, looted, or removed illegally from its country of origin is to examine its history of ownership. For European and American paintings, that history can often be traced back to the moment when the artist made the painting. For antiquities and non-Western art of all types, the history is never that complete. The very best way to acquire an antiquity is to excavate it scientifically in a government-authorized dig. This is how many of the older Western museums acquired great collections of Egyptian and ancient Near Eastern art. But today, governments rarely allow removal of excavated artifacts to another country, and properly excavated materials almost never enter the market.

As much as it pains me to admit it, most antiquities that have entered the market (ever!) were unscientifically removed from the ground or from ruins, with no documentation of a find site or of the other objects that may have accompanied them. The responsible collector’s role today is to discourage further looting by refusing to buy anything that appears to have left its country of origin in recent years. The longer an object has been out of the ground, the better. Most countries passed laws in the early 1970s that made it illegal to export any object that was more than 100 years old. Museums aim to acquire objects that were exported before the laws were passed.

For museums, the ideal objects on the market are those that we know have been residing in a living-room or gallery since the mid-20th century or earlier. Ideally, one can get written documentation of the object’s recent history: the original bill of sale, maybe, or an old exhibition catalog with an image of the piece. Unfortunately for museums, this sort of documentation adds enormously to an object’s monetary value, and sometimes one sees rather ugly works of art selling for high prices because they have really good provenance. But aside from offering the collector a rare opportunity to acquire an antiquity without too great a dose of guilt, good provenance also offers a degree of reassurance about the authenticity of the object, because people weren’t making as many forgeries in the early 20th century as they are today (they were making some, but often not very well).

So all of this brings up the question of the provenance of our new Shiva. We were definitely looking for an object with an unimpeachable history of ownership, and the Shiva image satisfied our requirements. I can’t tell you the precise details, because some of the people involved are still living and have asked to remain anonymous. But suffice it to say that Brooklyn’s Shiva has provenance back to the mid-1960s, when a very well known Asian art collector purchased the piece from a reputable New York dealer. The bronze was in his collection for a short time, and then he gave it to a friend and colleague, who kept it in her apartment for more than 30 years before a prominent dealer finally talked her into selling it to the Brooklyn Museum.

Armed with the “wish list” and approximate budget I described in my previous entries, the team of curators and trustees who were interested in finding a suitable object to acquire in honor of Amy Poster went out into the market. Every field of art has a slightly different market, so here’s a brief run-down of what it looks like for Asian art (I’m mostly talking about antiquities here, although the market for contemporary Asian art is remarkably similar).

First, there are auction houses, mostly holding sales in New York, London, and Hong Kong, although there are some regional houses in Europe and other American cities that also get good things. These are pretty straight-forward selling venues, with prices made public and almost everything trading hands out in the open. One doesn’t need to be in the “in crowd” to buy at an auction, but there are some vaguely secretive elements, such as the reserve (or minimum acceptable price) for any given object and the fact that many buyers choose to bid by phone or through agents, so you don’t always know who’s buying what.

Museums often have trouble buying at auction because lots of people have to sign off on a museum purchase ahead of time and of course when you head into an auction you don’t know what the final price will be. Auction houses publish catalogs listing the objects in an upcoming sale about a month in advance, and then those objects are on display for about a week before the sale. That’s barely enough time for most curators to secure the permission they need before buying something. Savvy curators will often arrange to preview select objects from a sale long before the catalog is available. Really savvy curators will take a conservator along with them to see a potential purchase so he or she can assess its condition and look for tell-tale signs of reconstruction or forgery. Of course, if the auction is in a distant city, then going to see things in person is either costly or impossible. Sometimes, curators will ask someone they trust to check out the object for them, but that’s frankly a little nerve-wracking.

On those somewhat rare occasions when a museum pursues an object through auction, they often send an outside agent (maybe a dealer, maybe just a friend) to do the bidding. There are several reasons why they might want to do this, but the main concern is that if everyone sees a curator bidding on something, they might think “it must be a really good object because a museum wants it; maybe I should bid on it, too” and of course one doesn’t want too much competition. But whoever is doing the bidding on the museum’s behalf, they have been given strict instructions about the absolutely highest amount they can bid. I have lost objects by one bid because of these limits, but of course they’re necessary so the museum stays within its budget.

The other major source for Asian art is the many galleries and private dealers who are located all over the world, with particular concentrations in New York and London. Galleries have regular business hours when you can walk in for a casual browse. Private dealers are open by appointment only and are often located in less obvious places, like apartments. A particularly handy way for a novice to get to know these businesses is the pair of Asian art fairs that take place in New York in March, because the fairs attract dealers from all over the world. But there are plenty of galleries that are not represented at the fairs, so discovering them (and figuring out which ones are trustworthy) is often a matter of word of mouth.

Buying from a dealer or gallery can be much less stressful for curators because there is no set deadline for purchase and because one can negotiate and then set a price before presenting the potential acquisition to the administration for approval. It’s often possible to bring an object from a dealer into the Museum for in-depth examination by the curator and conservators prior to purchasing it, which is another luxury that auction houses cannot offer. Museums are famous for moving at a glacial pace in almost everything they do, and making acquisitions is no exception, but I do try to be considerate by pushing the decision process along: dealers have bills to pay like everyone else.

Whether you visit a gallery or a private dealer, there is a good chance that what you see when you visit is only a fraction of what they have in their inventory. And this is one of the major ways that these businesses differ from auction houses: dealers will often save special objects for their best clients. I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen a fabulous object in a collector’s home and wondered “where did they find THAT?” only to be told that they got it recently from a well-known dealer who never showed it to anyone else.

The bad news for curators is that most of us can’t afford to be regular or top-dollar customers, so we are often shown things after they’ve been passed by private collectors. The good news for curators is that dealers like to see their objects go to museums. And this is another way that a wish list can help a curator. If you tell a dealer that your museum is looking for a really nice Chinese Buddhist sculpture, then there’s a much better chance that they will contact you as soon as they have one. Sometimes they even contact you before they have it, saying “I think I can get a collector to part with this, if you think the Museum might be interested.” And this is where dealers can be your greatest allies when searching for an acquisition: they have seen more objects than any of us, and they’ve made careful note of where those objects were, how much they sold for, and how willing the current owners might be to sell.

It turns out that we found our Shiva through just such assistance from a dealer, but more on that front later…

I have been discussing the process of acquiring a new masterpiece for the collection, and in my first installment, I introduced the object, a bronze image of Shiva from southern India. This sculpture was cast by the master artisans who created numerous temple icons in bronze under the patronage of the Chola dynasty, which ruled southern India from the 9th through the 13th century. In my previous entry, I noted that a Chola-period bronze was one of the types of objects we were targeting for the purchase we hoped to make in honor of my predecessor.

Chola bronzes have long been considered the apex of Indian sculptural achievement. These images feature outrageously sensuous figures, with soft, curving bodies and long, languorous limbs, usually only minimally clothed but with plenty of jewelry that drapes to accentuate the contours of the torso. The males have impossibly broad shoulders; the females have enormous round breasts. They don’t look like real people, but they’re not supposed to: they’re gods, and as such, they are supposed to be more beautiful, more relaxed, and more powerful than any human could ever be. To see what I’m talking about, please have a look at our image from behind.

Shiva as Chandrashekhara, view of reverse. Southern India, Chola period, c. 970 A.D. Bronze. Height 25 inches. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Asian Art Council and other donors in honor of Amy G. Poster, 2007. 2.

Nice, huh?

Chola bronzes have been the darlings of collectors since they were first “discovered” by Western art historians in the late 19th century. As a result, most of the really great examples have already made their way to museums in India, Europe, and the U.S. (there are still quite a few being worshipped in temples in southern India as well). Any museum wishing to boast a good collection of Indian art should have at least one Chola-period bronze. Some museums have rather large holdings of these beautiful figures; the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena has dedicated an entire room to their exquisite collection of South Indian bronzes – leaving curators from other museums feeling green with envy. Several museums with otherwise fine collections of Indian art, like Brooklyn, have a few minor Chola pieces but would really like to find one show-stopper. Hence, the appearance of a Chola bronze on our “wish list.”

Actually, we really can’t say that Brooklyn only had minor examples of Chola bronzes. The truth is that we were given an important bronze in 1992 by a donor with a very good eye. The image is of the Hindu goddess Durga, and I am illustrating her below.

Durga. Southern India, Chola period, c. 970 A.D. Bronze. 57.2 x 20 cm. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of Georgia and Michael de Havenon in memory of William H. Wolff, 1992.142.

She isn’t as curvy or as sensuous as most female figures produced by the Chola-period craftsmen (most of the goddesses stand with one hip thrust dramatically out to the side and the rest of the body swaying back to compensate). Nor is she as large as many images of the period. As a result she is a bit of a sleeper. However, she was included in both of the big, splashy Chola bronze exhibitions that took place recently in the U.S. and London because it turns out that images of Durga are extremely rare, and she is quite early in date. So Brooklyn can actually boast one very important Chola bronze.

So why were we looking for another one? Well, a museum collection isn’t just a trophy cabinet, it’s a teaching tool. When using our collection to teach people about the history of Indian art, it is nice to be able to point to specific objects and talk about how they reflect major themes and trends in taste or aesthetics, religious belief and practice, or patronage of the arts. And the truth is that our Durga does not do a great job of reflecting the major themes and trends of her period because she is simply too unusual. If you really want to illustrate the important art-making period of the Chola kings, you need an image of the Hindu god Shiva, who was far and away the most prominent deity of the time, or possibly an image of his wife, Parvati. So in looking for a Chola bronze, we were really looking for an object that could stand in for the tradition as a whole. This was not going to be an easy thing to find.

Next time, the curator and her supporters begin their hunt…