Islamic Art From the Louvre Comes to the Smithsonian

Anna Lee reports in Hyperallergic that the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC, will open "From the Louvre: Masterpieces of Islamic Art" on September 26. The show gathers twenty-six works from the Louvre spanning twelve centuries of Islamic art history, travelling to the United States for the first time. Among them is an oil painting of the Persian ruler Fath-Ali Shah Qajar, along with carved rosewood doors and jade cups. The selection also draws on the Ottoman Empire in Turkey, the Mughal Empire in South Asia and the Umayyad dynasty in Spain. The most striking object, and the one Hyperallergic leads with, is the Baptistery of Saint Louis, a metal basin made around 1325 to 1340 in what is now Egypt or Syria for washing the hands, which later became a religious heirloom in France. The history of that single object says a good deal about the distances these works travelled before reaching a museum case. Many of the pieces were functional to begin with, and most of them belonged to elite households. Simon Rettig, associate curator of Islamic art at the museum and co-curator of the show, says the aim is to move past a monolithic overview of Islamic art.

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