A couple of weeks ago, I finally stopped in at the Rubin Museum of Art, as I was in the neighborhood anyway and had some free time. It's a beautiful little museum (emphasis on little: totally doable in a few hours, even if you're dawdling) It's a brand new building with six floors and a spiral staircase in the middle of it, so I started at the top and worked my way down. As you might guess, the art of Himalayas, which is what the Rubin concentrates on, is mostly religious, both Buddhist and Hindu, but there's also currently a photographic exhibit called "Nepal in Black and White" that I'd like to go back to as well, and the bookstore stocks a number of photographic essay collections about the region. There's also a theatre, a spacious cafe, and the requisite museum store (which has some nice Nepalese paper for you book arts people).
I got there a bit late so I only had two hours to go through it and spent the most time on the top floor, in "Earthly Immortals: Arhats in Tibetan Painting" (right, from the Rubin Museum). Unlike most museum exhibits, there's a lot of informative text on the walls with these exhibits, explicating the paintings, the region, the traditions, and gently teaching you how to "read" the iconography. Since I know next to zip about Buddhist or Hindu iconography, this was really helpful. The painting was all, throughout the museum, absolutely exquisite, most of it on silk hangings, but some on paper, but the arhat paintings really wowed me. Since these paintings were heavily influenced by Chinese arhat paintings, there were some representatives of the Chinese work, too. The colors and detail, the composition, the whimsy (a monk-attendant peeping through the doors to the arhat's paradise, the expression of astonishment on the face of an arhat who sees a full-grown dragon coming out of his begging bowl, the bushy eyebrows of another), the sheer skill in some of the paintings is just breathtaking. One particular ink drawing was so delicate that it gave me chills.
I breezed through the rest of the floors, but there were still some standouts: in particular, the "black" paintings in "Red, Black, and Gold" which were of powerful and scary gods, painted with black pigment made from the ashes from charnal houses, and historically often restricted from public view. After looking at a couple of them, you can see why. They're chilling too, in a completely different way, though the ones at the Rubin were far scarier than those in the link above. There is also, as might be expected, a lot of sculpture of religious figures in brass and copper, and a lovely wooden Buddha head. The sculpture—or at least the cast metal sculpture—for some reason (probably my iconoclastic Protestant background) fails to move me the same way the paintings do.
I didn't eat at the cafe on the first floor, but it's a pleasant, open space, and the museum shop has a lot of fun stuff in it, including clothing, jewelry, and a great book selection. I picked up an exciting poetry anthology from Norton called Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from The Middle East, Asia and Beyond. It's been a while since I bought a new poetry book, so this was a double treat, because I know so few of the poets in it and a couple of them more as fiction writers than poets.
All in all, definitely worth a look (especially for $10, which is the adult admission fee) and worth going back to.
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