Cleveland Museum of Art’s revelatory exhibition on Royal Udaipur landscapes will expand your mental map of the world

CLEVELAND, Ohio — It's a safe bet that most visitors to the Cleveland Museum of Art have never heard of Udaipur, a city of 604,000 in the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan, about 460 miles north of Mumbai.

That will change for anyone who sees "A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur,’’ a new, free exhibition that opens Sunday, June 11, at the museum.

Organized by the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C. to celebrate its 100th anniversary this year, the show focuses on 200 years of landscape paintings commissioned by the kings of Mewar, the royal dynasty that once ruled from Udaipur.

Viewers will come away from the exhibition, on view through September 10, with a new understanding of Indian art, a new mental map of the world's great cities, and a fresh appreciation for mankind's ability to live in harmony with nature.

Established in 1553 as the capital of a kingdom about half the size of Ohio, Udaipur has earned the nickname "Venice of the East’' for a pair of lakes dammed by its rulers to create a lush micro-climate in a semiarid region dominated by rugged, scrub-covered hills descending from the Aravalli mountain range.

Overlooking Lake Pichola, the largest of the two bodies of water, the royals of Mewar (pronounced MAY-wahr) built a sprawling fortified palace of granite and white marble replete with turrets, cupolas, loggias, garden courtyards, and scalloped arches. In the middle of the lake, they built an island palace, Jagamandir, as a getaway where they could entertain vassals and visiting dignitaries away from prying eyes.

Today a center of tourism in northern India, Udaipur bears comparisons with other great cities around the world established before the age of European colonization that were based on brilliant hydrological engineering. They include Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire in pre-Columbian Mexico, and Hangzhou, China, where Song Dynasty emperors capitalized on West Lake as a setting for causeways, gardens, pagodas, temples, and island pavilions.

By the 17th century, the Mewar kings began commissioning Udaipur's highly gifted artists, who ranked among the lower castes in a rigidly stratified society, to document the kingdom's achievements in architecture, hydrology, and landscape.

Despite their low status, the artists responded by creating a new genre of landscape painting that peaked between 1700 and 1900, the years covered by the new exhibition.

The show includes nearly 50 paintings on paper and cloth, more than half of them on loan from Udaipur's City Palace Museum. Loans from other museums and private collections in the U.S., Australia, and Europe round out the show. None of the paintings from Udaipur have been exhibited outside the palace before the show debuted last year at the Smithsonian.

The paintings from the palace collection were cleaned and conserved specifically for the show, said New York University art historian Dipti Khera, who co-curated the exhibition with Smithsonian Curator Debra Diamond.

The overall impression created by "Splendid Land" is that of a kind of earthly paradise. Udaipur is depicted as a stunningly beautiful community living in ecological balance with nature, by the grace of enlightened human interventions motivated and guided by the beneficent Mewar kings.

The show might therefore feel especially relevant after a strangely out-of-balance week in which forest fires in Quebec, caused by climate change, turned the sun orange over Cleveland.

The show will also come as a surprise to viewers accustomed to thinking of Indian painting as synonymous with finely-painted Mughal miniatures designed to illustrate small-scale manuscripts.

Udaipur landscapes, in contrast, are big. The show features scores of highly-detailed images painted in opaque watercolor on large sheets of paper that describe vast scenes of royal festivals, hunting expeditions, and the monsoons that drenched Mewar in life-sustaining rains every summer.

Drawing on techniques from mapmaking, architectural drafting, and conventions of spatial representation borrowed from European prints, Udaipur's artists created spectacular scenes seemingly populated by casts of thousands.

Mewar's kings are shown visiting Hindu shrines, presiding over festivals, enjoying wrestling matches, or contemplating the beauties of Lake Pichola while fish boil up in the waters below, as if to pay tribute to the big guy in charge.

Collapsing time

The show opens with a spectacular panorama of a sunrise over Udaipur's palace, painted in 1722-23. The artist showed the king, Maharana Sangram Singh, disembarking in an elaborate boat on the way to a tiger hunt, where he is later depicted as instructing his son, Prince Jagat Singh, to take careful aim. The prince is then shown standing alongside two companions as he dispatches the tiger with a single musket shot to the forehead.

As in many other Udaipur landscapes, the artist telescoped time by showing multiple moments in the same image. The lunging tiger, for example, is shown three times before receiving the fatal blow.

Another scene from Sangram Singh's reign shows a pair of wrestlers equipped with nasty-looking handheld blades that resemble claws. They appear grappling with each other in numerous stop-action positions spread across a palace courtyard. It's like watching Lebron James catching a pass, dribbling, and shooting, all in the same scene.

While compressing time to convey different stages of a narrative, the Udaipur artists also used imaginative techniques to depict space. Palace walls around courtyards are splayed apart and flattened like parts of a child's pop-up cutout in order to make all parts of a scene visible on a two-dimensional surface.

Landscapes are also flattened and pressed up to the picture plane, evoking cartographic techniques. The resemblance to mapmaking reaches a climax in the show's final room, which is dominated by a pair of huge mandalas, or cosmic maps, that extend from the floor to the ceiling. Emphasizing the importance of Udaipur as a cultural and economic center, the mandalas situate key narratives of Hinduism within the city.

Paintings throughout the exhibition are extraordinarily detailed, finely brushed, and brilliantly colored. Udaipur's artists made pigments from minerals including lapis lazuli, iron oxide, lead, and gold. Organic pigments included Indian Yellow, made from the urine of cows raised on mango leaves according to the exhibition.

The show is awash in a jewel-toned palette of ultramarine, teal, copper-oxide green, russet earth tones, soft pinks, ruby reds, and brilliant yellow. Those hues, accented by the brilliant white of the Udaipur palace and the soft grays of monsoon clouds, give the show a resonant sense of moods that range from celebration to serene contemplation.

That's not by accident. Udaipur paintings were meant to document specific historical events and to evoke a specific mood, or bhava, in Sanskrit.

An 1851 painting, for example, portrays Maharana [King} Swarup Singh and courtiers celebrating Holi, the springtime festival that involves hurling handfuls of red powder. The painting is literally aboil with clouds of red that swirl around the king, singled out by a bright green halo as he gallops through the scene. The mood of sheer delight is easy to sense.

Despite their achievements, the works of Udaipur's artists have remained little known in the West, or even outside Udaipur itself, because the best examples have been kept in storage for centuries and made available to royal audiences only on rare occasions.

Khera, of NYU, has found that elaborate inscriptions on the back of the Udaipur landscapes record descriptions written by scribes in response to reactions among nobles who participated in viewings of the paintings. The show, and its lavishly illustrated catalog, grew out of her new research.

The presence of the Mewar kings is a consistent theme throughout the show. The museum's installation highlights that fact with a wall graphic identifying each of the 13 rulers who presided over Mewar from 1652 to 1955.

Using the graphic as a crib sheet to spot the king in each painting, in Where's Waldo fashion, is a good point of entry to the kind of deep looking invited by the highly intricate Udaipur landscapes.

Seeking out the royals is also a way to notice the particular spin on power conveyed by the paintings. Despite their importance, the Mewar kings are never portrayed as larger in size than their subjects, Khera said. They’re always shown as part of something larger than themselves.

"The king's physical size is not larger than those around him,’’ she said. "The collective is given greater importance.’’

The message is that through his influence, the king makes it possible for Udaipur to live in balance with nature. Heads of government in the 21st century might want to take heed and follow that example.

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