ARTS
Divine reminders
John McEwen
Islamic Masterpieces of the Chester Beatty Library (Leighton House till 28 June) is a marvellous exhibition: a feast for the eye, painlessly educational, just the right size (55 items) and delightfullY uncrowded. This last bonus is no doubt attributable to its location in the charming, backwater calm of Leighton House; and sponsorship, not by some plastics conglomerate hot for sales, but the idealistic, comparatively tiny, World of Islam Festival Trust.
The Trust is English, and was founded in the dark days of Anglo-Arabic relations a decade or so ago, with the philosophical, rather than political, motive of demonstrating the sophistication and complexity of so-called 'Islamic' culture in general and the degree to which our heritage is held in common. The Festival itself took place in London in 1976 with a spectacular wealth and diversity of shows, but the Trust continues to beaver away. In 1976 the Chester Beatty Library was not making loans, which was a pity as it contains one of the best of the world's Islamic manuscript collections. The superb Festival exhibition of Qur'ans at the British Library suffered accordingly. This deficiency is now handsomely set to rights because, while the greater part of the present show is given over to illustration, there is a secondary theme devoted to the development of the Islamic book down to the 19th century principally a matter of stupendous Qur'ans. Nevertheless it should be stressed, in case a musty whiff of old leather creeps in here, that the selection has been made in the first place on .the basis of beauty, and in the second of diversity both of subject and cultural origin which appropriately reflects the spirit as a collector of Sir Alfred Chester Beatty (1875 1968) himself. Beatty wai the classic case of someone who collected not because he knew about art but because he knew what he liked. His fortune (though he was born the son of a New York banker) derived from his brilliance as a mining engineer. It is legendary how he could pinpoint where to drill merely from surveying the land from an aeroplane, and as a collector he trusted to his intuition no less successfully and with just as open a mind. The experts were confounded by his unerring eye for a fake and perplexed by his regard for 'secular' as well as 'religious' manuscripts, for his freedom from any kind of indoctrination the legacy, perhaps, of a scientific training. The present 55 items have been selected from 3,500 rare Arabic manuscripts, but the collection is hardly less rich in early Christian manuscripts a selection from which would make a perfect sequel to the Islamic exhibition as well as the manuscript art of Burma, Thailand and the history of the Japanese print. This wonderfully cross-referential library was offered by Beatty to the British Museum in the Fifties on the sole condition that it be kept intact under his name. lie was refused, so, having lived in Dublin for the last 20 years of his life, he entrusted it to the Irish. They gave him a state funeral.
Even James Elroy Flecker would be satiated by the delights displayed in this token sample of the Library's riches. Some of the rarest treasures of Islamic art are here from the `Demotte' Shah-Natna of the 14th century to the 'History of Akbar' of the 17th and an 18th-century North African copy of the 'Guide to Happiness' prayerbook. There is a Qur'an whose binding, one of the finest of the 15th century, is Impressed with an excess of 550,000 blind tooled stamps and 43,000 gold ones' and took five years to complete. There is an array of colour from vermilion to lapis lazuli, orpiment, malachite and gold. The various derivations Indian yellow, for instance, from the urine of cows fed on mango trees and techniques are explained in a useful introductory display, and we are reminded of the geographical sweep of Muslim culture, from India to Spain, and the various influences of succeeding subjugations and expansions Mongol, Turkish, Mughal. There is the story of Nuh (Noah) in his ark, and of Qays and Layla, Arabian precursors of Romeo and Juliet. On a lighter note captions earmark 'The harlot and the banker', 'The Cathedral of Mexico City' (from A History of the New World) and an extraordinarily idiosyncratic 'Picnic scene'.
It takes no imagination to be reminded by every one of these images, overtly religious or otherwise, that the Muslim believes that God is manifest in every aspect of nature, that man is part of this great unity but born neglectful and therefore forever in need of being reminded of the divine order. This, crudely, explains that egalitarianism of Islamic art, the attention to animals and vegetation, the bird's eye view as opposed to hierarchical Western perspective. The exhibition reveals a culture of immense refinement and shames schoolboy notions of Moorish barbarians dying to reach their harem in the sky, or tourist tales of wrangles, fiddles, flies and the unsavoury habits of camels. Most tellingly it declares that art of its very nature transcends politics and of that we are also forever in need of being reminded.
The exhibition is open 11-6 (Mon–Fri); 11-5 (Sat). Closed Sundays. Admission free.
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