Regal and Resplendent Udaipur Comes to Cleveland

Rarely seen paintings of royal life in India of yore in a dazzling exhibition

F rom Youngstown and Winslow Homer to Munch and God to court art in Rajasthan. I’m nothing if not various — and inquisitive. A few weeks ago, I saw A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and splendid it is.

I know a lot about American presidential portraits and British, Spanish, and French royal portraits, but Maharana Ari Singh II Enjoying Jagmandir from around 1767 is something new. “Maharana” means “great king,” and we recognize him by the solar nimbus around his head. He’s present not once but six times, processing, resting, shooting fish in a pool, and watching his pet crocodiles eat their lunch. Fancily dressed women follow him, carrying his sword, shield, hookah, parasol, and royal standard. At the right, nobles play parcheesi. Servants carry food and drink, and musicians play.

Though the scene’s exacting in its architecture, layout, clothing, and horticulture, it’s a cross between a bird’s-eye view and a titled view. It’s temporally compressed. Jagmandir was a royal palace built in the middle of Lake Pichola, an artificial freshwater lake created in the 1360s. In the picture, which is 23 by 44 inches, we see a microcosm of court life. The bands of processing women and gardens are a lovely, abstract touch. The palette’s lots of iridescent reds and greens framed by the white palace walls.

What to make of this? It’s one of about 50 objects in Splendid Land, most are bigger so they’re cinematic, and most are painted in the 1700s. I entered the exhibition knowing next to nothing about Indian art, and “nothing” would be my knowledge without the Taj Mahal, which almost every sensate human can recognize. Udaipur, in southern Rajasthan, was established in the 1550s as the capital of the ancient kingdom of Mewar, though it had been a trading hub for a thousand years before.

The art on view comes from the City Palace Museum in Udaipur. Most of the works have never been lent, so Splendid Land, aside from its erudition and beauty, is a special occasion. The show and first-class catalogue were done by the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art in collaboration with the palace museum.

Here, ignorance is less bliss than liberation. These big paintings are more sensory than historical. They’re about royalty but not about glorifying a particular king. Almost never is the Maharana a singular focus. There’s not much perspective and no particular viewpoint. There’s distance, yes, but it’s indicated not by careful recession but by stacks. And, knowing nothing about Udaipur’s royal court rituals, I was freed to focus on mood, color, ambiance, and charm. Connoisseurs and scholars are able to apply to these pictures what they know about poetry, personalities, politics, history, and music. I learned something about all of these things but, as a beginner in Indian art, reveled in a beautifully presented exhibition and the aesthetics of plentitude. There’s hierarchy and patriarchy but they’re diffused. Lots of people and activities spread throughout the picture does it. So does the diminution and disruption of linear space. So does the proliferation of patterns.

It seems, though, that painters in the royal court did do something new and significant in the history of art. They created a new genre, merging temporal, spatial, and ephemeral features along with idealized portraits of Mewar’s kings. Still, for a while I feel like I’m in a new world. It doesn’t have the art-history rules I know so well. I’m going on instinct and intuition. It’s a two-way conversation, with the picture’s visual language based on color, space, and figures that I might as well call quirks because they’re so new to me. And the art’s joyful.

The Kingdom of Mewar wasn’t just Udaipur. Scenes of life and landscape beyond the palace convey a lush, vast, and bountiful world, and a world of charm and beauty. I’d already dropped the academic and, banish the thought, Eurocentric nudge in my brain that this is folk art. After a few seconds of looking at the palace interior, I understood the work in Splendid Land was sophisticated and sublime.

Sunrise in Udaipur, from around 1722, has to be Mewar’s match to our panoramic Bierstadts, Churches, and Coles. Washes of color from scarlet to grey, white, yellow, and blue create a fantastic dawn sky. A greenish-grey lake with slickers of silver set off iridescent fish.

It’s morning-chores time for the farmers and the plebes, but for the king and courtiers, what better way to start the day than a tiger shoot? In this expansive world, it gets only a postage stamp of space.

The court aesthetic isn’t a pickled one. The artists in the 18th century went for focus, detail, and miniaturist sparkle. Maharana Swarup Singh and Courtiers Playing Holi, from 1853, stars a bright-red, powdery color bomb. It’s wild and looks at first like graffiti art. The interior mêlée scene’s framed by a tipped view of the palace and its walls, which look whiter juxtaposed as they are against a dark, blue-grey sky with little, doughnut-shaped, swirling clouds. The white/dark contrast intensifies the central vignette’s crazy red shapes, if that’s even possible. What’s happening? Holi’s a spring festival celebrating color, and one ritual is a romp in the main courtyard where the king and his most powerful nobles douse each other with red powder. A massive number of figures, some a bit more developed than tiny stick figures, others bigger and riding elephants, observe or march in procession.

Maharaja Fateh Singh Crossing a River During a Monsoon is from around 1893, so it’s late and in the colonial period, which explains why it’s got probably the most conventional composition of all the art in the show. By this point, court artists had a century’s worth of exposure to British visual culture. The long line of courtiers crossing the river is only one of four stabilizing, structuring bands. The king, known by his nimbus, is asymmetrically placed on the left.

Udaipur is in a green belt, as India goes, but monsoon season was still welcomed and created a new sensory world. The air changed its smell and density, the sky changed color, elephants bellowed and birds cried, and, of course, everyone got wet. The picture conveys how rain, dense, humid air, and river water feel. Lightning’s a snake form.

These objects are watercolors. It wasn’t until I’d spent a bit in the exhibition that I focused on technique. The catalogue’s got an essential section on conservation. The pigments are made from plants and minerals. The sky in Sunrise in Udaipur has powdered gold mixed with watercolor. Many of the works have extensive inscriptions identifying the royal figures and, in this case, the drama of the tiger hunt in which a Mewar prince shot a tiger in the forehead. A good time was had by all, except the tiger.

The exhibition’s intelligently and sensitively organized. Cleveland’s curators know how to present art and ideas so that both are scrutable to specialists and to country bumpkins like me. The themes are night and day, palace life, weddings, the world outside the palace walls, hunts, mandalas, and modern photographs taken before India’s independence in 1947. Splendid Land, so particularist and, odd to say, so much a snapshot, ends with two mandalas, which place Udaipur in a universal context. The Lokapurusha Mandala is from between 1710 and 1740, so, as objects in the show go, it’s early. Udaipur and the human realm are in a flat disk in the center ringed by seven continents and seven oceans.

Lokapurusha is the cosmic man whose winged head rests above the Udaipur cityscape. Divisions of our mundane human world are conveyed in scenic thumbnails surrounding his torso. Scenes and places from Krishna’s earthly life evoke Udaipur, making the city seem sacred. A crocodile symbolizes the constellations. I knew nada about Jainism and found the exposure edifying if not persuasive.

It feels right to see near it a 1940 photograph of the wedding procession of Maharaja Kumar Bhagwat Singh. It’s a crowd scene with hundreds of tiny figures, sacred cows, and ornamented elephants on which the ornamented bride and groom sit. It makes the paintings I’d seen seem documentary. Of course, after 1947, the Udaipur royals lost whatever governing authority they had, though I’m sure they had golden parachutes aplenty. The Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation was very involved in the exhibition, and, after all, the royals stewarded the art collection for hundreds of years.

The catalogue is superb. Curating the exhibition were Debra Diamond, the curator of South Asian art at the Freer, and Dipti Khera, a professor of Asian art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Each wrote a great essay in the book, which is also well illustrated with details. There are lots of photographs of Udaipur as well. It’s an opus in the finest meaning of the word. Connoisseurs and scholars will use it, but I found it accessible and revelatory.

There’s more, but I’ll end with hunt scenes since these are the most immersive. They’re cinematic, bombastic, documentary, and impressionistic. The kings, courtiers, and nobles hunted pretty much anything that moved, and this includes wild boar, tigers, and leopards. There are about a dozen split between the Cleveland and Smithsonian venues. Maharana Jagat Singh Hunting from 1747 belongs not to the City Palace Museum but to the Cleveland museum. Like most of the hunt scenes, it has multiple perspectives, overall a bird’s-eye view but some of the figures are frontal. It’s a mêlée. Beaters use fireworks and drums to frighten wild animals into a small open field in the woods where the king’s party picks them off.

In a tiger-hunt scene, which was shown at the Smithsonian but is illustrated in the book, the big trees are finely detailed with squirrel-hair brushes, but scrub and brush are made from green color dabbed with a cloth. Hills jostle. Mounted elephants and hunters are placed in terracotta fields for legibility. Tigers are in thick brush in hills that surge and collide. We can pick out their sinuous hides and stripes in the green foliage, which is tinted with a lavender color. It’s hard to find art that evokes a battlefield, with its disorientation, obfuscation, and confusion. In the tiger-hunt picture, a bit of lake in the lower left-hand corner gives us some bearings. A pure landscape, it has no sky and no water feature to orient us. Blurred animals suggest speed as they try to attack — or escape — predators.

They’re royal hunts, so the king’s there, but he’s multiply there, coming and going, afoot and on an elephant, seeming to charge and seeming to leave. It’s like a kaleidoscope, and with no LSD. I watched a couple of old, color kaleidoscopes after seeing the exhibition. Whoever pioneered the technology must have been channeling Udaipur.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in a work of art,” I thought. Hyperbole? Yes, but only possibly.