Paris of the East at Musee Guimet

Une cour royale en Inde : Lucknow (XVIII ème – XIX ème siècle)

6 April – 11 July

I moved to Paris after an interminably long stint in Los Angeles, a city that is at times culturally anorexic. One of my favorite places to find refuge was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art among its fantastic Asian arts collection.  So it was with delight and surprise that I recognized some of my favorite pieces from LACMA on display at Musee Guimet as part of an exhibit exploring and celebrating India’s fabled art and culture capital, Lucknow.

Lucknow is the capital of Uttar Pradesh, and flourished as the cultural and artistic center of North India in the 18th and 19th centuries. Fostered and encouraged by the Nawabs, the city became widely celebrated for its refinements: cuisine, music, poetry, courtly manners, architecture and art, fueled by a quiet but persistent underlying spirit of revolution… not unlike a certain other mecca of art and culture.

Heavily influenced in the 18th and 19th centuries by the presence of the British and East India Company, the Nawabs of the court of Lucknow fostered and encouraged artworks that bridged both traditional Northern Indian painting techniques and themes as well as popular portraiture and landscape painting of Western Europe and the United Kingdom.  The illuminated pages, paintings, jewels, court robes, photographs and incredible scrolls depicting the city and its daily life by both Indian and European artists illustrate the meeting point between the West and the Near East and their influences on each other shortly before Lucknow became one of the major centers of rebellion in India’s First War of Independence in 1857.

Curated by LACMA, with contributed pieces from the British Museum, the Getty Museum as well as several private collections, Musee Guimet hosts the exhibit along with a series of lectures, film and performance through 11 July.

April 2011, Vingt Paris Magazine