Half a Century in the Study of Islamic Art

An essay on a presentation made by Oleg Grabar to Diwan al-Mimar on October 9, 2003.  -- continued --

Collecting

The third feature that Grabar mentioned in the context of the study of Islamic art is “collecting.”  According to Grabar, collecting is an important part of dealing with Islamic art.  It began in the Middle Ages when works of Islamic art were expensive items, the rich objects included in Western Christian and royal collections.  It was also part of the internal Muslim system.  The notion of “’Aja’ib” (wonders), the strange works that exist, was part of traditional Muslim culture.  He added that there is a wonderful, extraordinary book entitled “Kitab al-Hadaya wa al-Tuhaf” (The Book of Gifts and Rarities), which originally is believed to have been written during the eleventh century, and includes a list of treasures and the strange things that people owned.  Caliphs, rulers, and princes constantly gave each other gifts, and this is a medieval history of gift giving and collecting. (2)  

Grabar mentioned that collecting can be accidental, a side interest, or a focus.  Some people collect ceramics, rugs, or decorative arts, usually paintings and manuscripts.  Collectors usually have been rich people.  Many of them were jewelers and artisans in the West who collected because they liked beautiful things.  The best collections, such as that of the Parisian jeweler Louis Cartier, were put together by people who made jewelry themselves. 

Grabar added that a variant of collecting consists of the mixed, national, regional, ethnic, cultural, and universal museums that have sprung around.  Every country has to have its national museum.  What goes into these museums is a very interesting phenomenon, and so is the way they are organized.  One problem with collecting is the distinction between private and public collecting, and also accessibility.  Who has the right to collections?  Does everybody have the right to see a work of art, or do collectors only have such a right?  According to Grabar, there is a moral problem in collecting.  Does a collected item become a document for something else or somebody else than the collection or the collector?  How does one transform a collection into an account history?  If one does an exhibition, he or she usually is saying: This comes from collector A, this comes from collector B, this comes from collector C, etc.  In other words, one often starts thinking of the collector more than of the collected items.    

History of Art

The fourth direction Grabar mentioned relating to the study of Islamic art is “the history of art.”  Here, Grabar discussed the issue of where Islamic art is placed in the manuals and books of the history of art.  Sometimes it is not included at all; sometimes it is placed after Byzantine art, but before “real” art begins with the Renaissance; and sometimes it is presented as an example of Oriental art, along with Chinese art.  In other words, Islamic art has not entered into that “automatic system” by which the West analyzes or explains the arts.  One of the major activities that Grabar has carried out over the past twenty years has been to make Islamic art acceptable to the rest of the field of art history.  He mentioned there are several techniques that have been developed to handle this issue.  One technique Grabar calls the “me too” syndrome.  Every time somebody says “we have beautiful buildings,” the other says “we have beautiful buildings too”; every time somebody says “we have beautiful ceramics,” the other says “we have beautiful ceramics too.”  There always is some reason to say “I have that too.”  In this context, Grabar gave the example of the argument in Nikolaus Pevsner’s An Outline of European Architecture (Hammondworth:  Penguin Books, 1942), where he states there is a history of Italian architecture, but there is no Bulgarian architecture.  Grabar believes such an opinion to be unfortunate and strange to hear from an otherwise remarkable man.  Grabar added that every large enough group of people has its architecture.  It may not be great and exciting, but everybody has architecture.   

Another technique Grabar mentioned for handling the problem of excluding Islamic art from the field of the history of art is that of “automatic inclusion.”  According to Grabar, automatic inclusion is something in which publications coming out of the Soviet Union used to specialize.  Nobody pays attention to Soviet scholarship anymore, but Soviet scholarship had been a very interesting phenomenon for about fifty years.  This is because their rules required everybody to have an art.  Whether one liked it or not, one always had an art.  In Soviet books on the history of art, there is, for example, something on the architecture of Uzbekistan in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.  Because everybody had architecture, the Russian authorities compelled their scholars working on art history to look for examples of such an art, even if there seemed to be nothing there.  For example, a book was published about forty years ago in the Soviet Union that provided an art history for Libya.  The book even has a chapter dedicated to Libyan art in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.   

Grabar added that the third attitude he has tried recently is that of the “selected topic,” in the sense that each culture has its own special problems.  If one is to do a history of landscapes, there is not much point to worrying about Umayyad landscapes, because Chinese and Western landscapes include so many more exciting things.  On the other hand, if one talks about ornament, the art of the court, or attitudes towards images, Muslim culture has very unique experiences.  Thus, it is important to identify those features of Muslim cultures that are particularly strong.  Although other cultures may have had traditions of iconoclasm, Muslim examples give particularly strong and interesting characteristics to this phenomenon.  Another interesting phenomenon is that Muslim culture is the only one in which small objects are as important as paintings and other relatively large works of art.   

History of Architecture

The fifth direction Grabar mentioned in the context of the study of Islamic art is the “history of architecture.”  Grabar stated that the problems with handling Islamic architecture are almost similar to those one faces in dealing with the history of Islamic art.  However, the study of Islamic architecture had entered the general streams of history of architecture at an earlier date, although not always successfully.  This, according to Grabar, is apparent in Sir Banister Fletcher’s 1896 A History of Architecture, and the 10-volume Histoire de l'art dans l'antiquite, authored by Charles Chipiez and Georges Perrot, and published between 1882 and 1914.  Both publications do not provide a "history," only an annotated list of monuments.  In more recent times, however, Spiro Kostof’s A History of Architecture (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1985) has brought Islamic architecture within the mainstream of architecture with no difficulty.