East without Western reading – Weekend – Kommersant
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The exhibition “Splendeurs des oasis d’Ouzbekistan” (“Shine of the oases of Uzbekistan”) has just ended at the Louvre, and the exhibition “Sur les routes de Samarcande. Merveilles de soie et d’or” (“Road to Samarkand. Miracles of silk and gold”). Both are organized by Parisian museums in cooperation with the Fund for the Development of Art and Culture of Uzbekistan, and both are real events for Paris and Parisians who line up to see the treasures of fine art at the Louvre and the treasures of applied art at the Institute of the Arab World. These latter are now the main hit, even against the backdrop of those wonderful exhibitions of various applied arts that take place in various Parisian museums.
The exhibits of the exhibition ideally embody the very concept of “treasure” in the mass cultural consciousness: brocades shining with gold and chapans shimmering with crazy colors of silk ikats, floral ornaments and geometry of suzani and carpets, jewels that amaze the imagination with their shapes, and so on. But there is something more than the general fabulousness and fabulousness that so delights the French public, not alien to the Muslim world with its rich decorative traditions.
The exhibition is centered around Samarkand khans and emirs of the 19th and the first third of the 20th century. 300 objects of arts and crafts from nine museums of Uzbekistan – from clothes and jewelry to saddles and stirrups, the handicraft art of Uzbekistan has hardly ever been seen here in such a variety. And in general, outside of Uzbekistan, the strength and beauty of the local historical crafts are not at all widely known and not at all everywhere. Moreover, there are also 24 paintings from the museums of Tashkent, Bukhara and Samarkand, as well as from the Igor Savitsky Museum in Nukus. It is clear why the presented has a strong effect.
But at the same time, the French definitely have a cultural context in which such miracles and treasures fall. Chief curator Yaffa Assoulin says: “We want to show our guests amazing chapans and luxurious embroidery, which are reminiscent of late artefacts from the Indian Taj Mahal.” And the press release says: “At the time when Matisse was discovering Morocco, avant-garde artists in search of “local color” found for themselves a unique source of inspiration in the richness of landscapes, shapes and faces of Central Asia.” And then it is said about the art school of Uzbekistan, which was formed in the 1920s and developed in three directions, outlined by Alexander Volkov, Alexander Nikolaev (Usto Mumin) and Pavel Benkov. But, of course, this context is much less familiar to the French than Matisse or the Taj Mahal.
What else is known to the French audience? What analogies can arise in his cultural consciousness and what contexts can be actualized? What can a Frenchman remember when looking at the exhibits of the “Road to Samarkand”? Chapan of Emir Mohammed Alim Khan made of velvet embroidered with gold and silk and lined with multicolored silk; women’s dressing gown “kaltacha” of the 1880s made of velvet-bahmal, embroidered with gold and silver thread; “makhsi” boots made of leather and velvet, covered with gold embroidery; silver tiaras “tillakosh” with pearls from Samarkand; A magenta-colored wedding suzane-palak from Tashkent, embroidered with silk thread, so reminiscent of the abstractions of the middle of the last century — what associations does all this evoke in a European? Perhaps he recalls the textbook ballets of Diaghilev – “Scheherazade”, “Orientals”, “The Golden Cockerel” and other firebirds and Polovtsian dances with their conventionally fabulous “oriental” Bakst, Golovin, Goncharova and Roerich. Well, or the outfits of Paul Poiret, who know here no worse than the ballets that inspired them.
And this is where the very, perhaps interesting, thing that the exhibition “The Road to Samarkand” does. These artifacts are separated from all images familiar to the Western consciousness, go beyond all contexts, be it the Taj Mahal, Diaghilev or Matisse, and end up in the historical place to which they originally belong. The exposition becomes, if not a “return of one’s own” (after all, the stage has already been passed), then a statement of the belonging of this very “one’s own”, cleansing it of ethnographism – and this is the very anti-colonial gesture to which the European public is now so sensitive, but made without any pressure and anguish, emotional or ideological.
As for the direct, and not just the symbolic impact of the “Road to Samarkand”, the aesthetic power of its exhibits is quite capable of whipping up the fashion for a specific Central Asian decorative effect, not only increasing the number of ikats and suzani that already surround us, but also, perhaps, change the balance of decorativeness on the Parisian catwalks.
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