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Hauptbereich
Museen Dahlem
Tue 5 December 2006 - until further notice
Collection of South, Southeast and Central Asian Art in the Dahlem Museums
Kunstsammlung Süd-, Südost- und Zentralasien in den Museen Dahlem
The Collection of South, Southeast and Central Asian Art houses one of the most important collections worldwide of art from the Indo-Asian cultural area, from the 4th millenium BC to the present. This extensive geographic region includes, next to India, the regions Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Autonomous Regions Tibet and Xinjiang of the People's Republic of China, the Southeast Asian countries of Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, as well as the Indonesian Islands.
The Collection
The formative, and almost exclusive, influence on Indian art is religion. The three main religions - Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism - are represented in the Collection of South, Southeast and Central Asian Art in the form of outstanding stone sculptures and reliefs, bronze works and terracotta pieces. With regard to the rich iconography of images of deities, the museum's collection may well be the most sophisticated outside of India. The oldest art works it contains come from Buddhist and Hindu religious buildings of the first centuries AC. The collection's Jain art and the largest part of its Hindu sculpture, on the other hand, originate from temples of the classic period or the middle ages, through to around the 13th century. As part of the redesign of the exhibition space in the year 2000, architectural features of the round stupa and the rectangular temple - the two central units of Indian religious architecture - were integrated into the layout.
As from the 12th century, Islam joined the other main religions in India. During the period of Islamic rule in India, Indian craft prospered. Metal work, ceramics, wood carvings, ivory and jade works, as well as precious textiles bear testimony to this heyday. Gorgeously coloured miniatures from the Mughal period round off the exhibition. Within the field of book art, the museum distinguishes itself through its comprehensive collection of paintings from all four of India's main religions.
The art of the Himalayan countries of Nepal and Tibet is represented by fabric painting (so-called Thangkas), wood sculptures and bronzes. The demon-like gods of protection of the 18th century are characteristic of late Tantric Buddhism.
The Southeast Asian collection includes stone and bronze figures, glazed clay reliefs, as well as grave finds from prehistoric times (3rd to 1st millenium BC), ceramic vessels, and bronze or glass jewellery.
The heart of the collection, and at the same time the architectural focus of the exhibition, is the world-famous "Turfan collection", named after the first of the four Royal Prussian expeditions to the northern Silk Road, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China between 1902 and 1914. The murals, the paintings on fabric and paper, and the clay and wood sculptures of the 3rd to 13th centuries for the most part originate from Buddhist temples. The focal point of this section is the full-scale reconstruction of a square temple decorated with original murals from Cave 123 at the oasis of Kucha.
History
Already in the 19th century, then still under the direction of the Museum für Völkerkunde (Ethnological Museum), Indo-Asian cultural objects were collected systematically. It was not until the period between 1900 and the outbreak of the First World War, however, that more prominent art works were acquired by the Berlin museums. This coincided with a growing interest in Indian culture and, as a result, significant German contributions to research in the field. Between 1902 and 1914, the indologist Albert Grünwedel and the turkologist Albert von LeCoq, researchers of the museums' Indian Department (an independent branch since 1904), carried out four expeditions to the northern Silk Road. They returned to Berlin with unique objects - known as the "Turfan collection" - which, for the first time, offered a vivid impression of the religious and cultural life of the far-away regions of eastern Central Asia in the first millenium AC.
While the First World War had already forestalled the continuation of the Silk Road expeditions, the Second World War caused extensive losses in the Museum of Indian Art's collection (over 2,100 inventory numbers are still listed as artworks lost during the war, many numbers including more than one object). In 1956/57, objects confiscated in the American and British zones of occupation were returned to the collection. A number of art works which the Red Army had taken to the Soviet Union after the end of the war made their way into the Grassi Museum in Leipzig in 1978, and from there they returned to Berlin in 1990. In 2002, the storerooms of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg revealed around 20 percent of the missing parts of the collection.
In 1963, the Indian Department, previously part of the ethnological collection, was given independent status as an art museum, doing justice to the importance of Indo-Asian high cultures within world cultural heritage. With this step, the first independent research institute for Indo-Asian art was created in Germany.
After the building of a new museum complex at Berlin-Dahlem, the Museum für Indische Kunst was able to present its collections in their own exhibition space for the first time. Since then, new acquisitions, gifts and loans from private collections have been added. Since the year 2000, the newly designed permanent exhibition presents around 400 exhibits from a collection including a total of nearly 20,000 objects. The integration of elements of Indo-Asian religious architecture, the round stupa and the rectangular temple, as well as the use of grey quartzite imported from India, lends the exhibition space an atmosphere of the lands of the art's origin.
Presented by:
Asian Art Museum
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