The National Museum of Cambodia was designed in traditional Khmer style by a Frenchman in 1917. (Photo by Josef Polleross for The New York Times)
Sandstone Hindu gods from the sixth to the eighth centuries. (Photo by Josef Polleross for The New York Times)September 26, 2006
By JANE PERLEZ
The New York Times
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The bats have been cleared from the rafters, the carved doors and elegant shutters flung open, and from a courtyard planted with coconut trees and lotus blossoms, light pours in daily on one of the world’s great collections of Khmer art.
After a period of near ruin in the 1970’s under the Khmer Rouge, when this city was forcibly emptied, and then years of struggle to raise money and hire staff members, the National Museum of Cambodia has made a comeback. Visitors are coming in droves, catalogs of the permanent collection have been prepared, and conservation is now a major priority.
Best of all, officials say, valuable Khmer pieces that were spirited out of the country for the European, American and Asian art markets are starting to trickle home.
“There is a trend, with a lot of people willing to give back pieces to Cambodia now we have peace,” said Roland Eng, a former Cambodian ambassador to the United States. “I know personally people who are willing to give back their own collections.”
So far, though, most of the objects have been returned by museums abroad, not by private collectors.
In a workshop adjacent to the galleries one recent morning, Sok Soda, a conservator, supervised a team of eight as they prepared to reattach the head of a 10th-century Shiva that was returned to Cambodia in the late 1990’s by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Amid the clutter of the workshop, the severed head lay atop two black pillows like a precious jewel. The torso, broad and muscular, stood nearby, wrapped in green tape and chains after an overland journey by truck from the Angkor Conservation Office at Siem Reap, where curators keep special pieces safe from looters at the Angkor Wat temple complex nearby.
When the head and torso are joined, the reassembled figure will be a star of a show featuring 140 Khmer treasures — stone sculptures, bronze figures, silver objects, paintings — that are to be sent from the museum to Germany for “Angkor — Sacred Heritage of Cambodia,” an exhibition that opens at the Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn in December.
The Met returned the Shiva head in 1997, four years after one of its curators recognized a photo on a most-wanted list of missing Khmer art circulated by a Unesco agency, said Helen Jessup, a Khmer-art historian and the founder of Friends of Khmer Culture, an American nonprofit group that supports arts organizations. From the black color of the stone and its granular quality it was obvious that the head and the torso were a perfect fit.
After long international detective work, the Cleveland Museum of Art returned body parts of a 12th-century Krishna from Phnom Da, the source of some of the most stunning Hindu sculptures in the Angkor region.
The Cleveland museum had acquired a sixth-century Krishna from the Belgian art collector Adolphe Stoclet in 1973. Fragments were unearthed later in the Stoclet garden in Brussels and shipped to the museum, which reattached many of them to the Krishna.
But nine fragments that did not fit the Cleveland museum’s Krishna proved to belong to a Krishna in the museum here in Phnom Penh. They were cleaned and pieced onto the Krishna torso and head last year in the workshop, and the sculpture — still missing a few parts, and showing some exposed steel struts that keep the fragments in place — is now on view.
A tranquil mood reigns at the National Museum, with overhead fans whirring and the soft pad of feet on tiled floors. Saffron-robed monks wander through, leaving stalks of fragrant jasmine at the base of statues of various Hindu divinities.
Built in 1917 by George Groslier, a French archaeologist and enthusiast of all things Khmer, the museum was designed in the Khmer style, with steeply pitched roofs and a flamingo pink exterior. The light in the galleries shifts with the position of the sun, as it does in the temples where the statues once stood.
Opened with much pomp in 1920 — a vintage photograph shows King Sisowath arriving under the shade of many ornate umbrellas — the museum had an art school attached. Students played an integral role in construction, carving the massive wooden front doors and painting gilded mythological figures on the walls of the front room that remain intact.
Air-conditioning is now being installed in one room for an exhibition of Rodin watercolors from the Rodin Museum in Paris. The works depict classical Khmer dancers, whom the artist painted when the troupe traveled to Marseilles in 1906.
The permanent collection is arranged in chronological order, allowing visitors to follow the evolution of styles from the pre-Angkor art of the 6th century, on through the many phases of Angkor, which flourished from the early 9th to the mid-15th centuries.
And when the 140 Angkor statues leave for Bonn, 140 almost equally precious pieces will be taken up for display from the storeroom, another reflection of the museum’s return to normalcy.
After a period of near ruin in the 1970’s under the Khmer Rouge, when this city was forcibly emptied, and then years of struggle to raise money and hire staff members, the National Museum of Cambodia has made a comeback. Visitors are coming in droves, catalogs of the permanent collection have been prepared, and conservation is now a major priority.
Best of all, officials say, valuable Khmer pieces that were spirited out of the country for the European, American and Asian art markets are starting to trickle home.
“There is a trend, with a lot of people willing to give back pieces to Cambodia now we have peace,” said Roland Eng, a former Cambodian ambassador to the United States. “I know personally people who are willing to give back their own collections.”
So far, though, most of the objects have been returned by museums abroad, not by private collectors.
In a workshop adjacent to the galleries one recent morning, Sok Soda, a conservator, supervised a team of eight as they prepared to reattach the head of a 10th-century Shiva that was returned to Cambodia in the late 1990’s by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Amid the clutter of the workshop, the severed head lay atop two black pillows like a precious jewel. The torso, broad and muscular, stood nearby, wrapped in green tape and chains after an overland journey by truck from the Angkor Conservation Office at Siem Reap, where curators keep special pieces safe from looters at the Angkor Wat temple complex nearby.
When the head and torso are joined, the reassembled figure will be a star of a show featuring 140 Khmer treasures — stone sculptures, bronze figures, silver objects, paintings — that are to be sent from the museum to Germany for “Angkor — Sacred Heritage of Cambodia,” an exhibition that opens at the Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn in December.
The Met returned the Shiva head in 1997, four years after one of its curators recognized a photo on a most-wanted list of missing Khmer art circulated by a Unesco agency, said Helen Jessup, a Khmer-art historian and the founder of Friends of Khmer Culture, an American nonprofit group that supports arts organizations. From the black color of the stone and its granular quality it was obvious that the head and the torso were a perfect fit.
After long international detective work, the Cleveland Museum of Art returned body parts of a 12th-century Krishna from Phnom Da, the source of some of the most stunning Hindu sculptures in the Angkor region.
The Cleveland museum had acquired a sixth-century Krishna from the Belgian art collector Adolphe Stoclet in 1973. Fragments were unearthed later in the Stoclet garden in Brussels and shipped to the museum, which reattached many of them to the Krishna.
But nine fragments that did not fit the Cleveland museum’s Krishna proved to belong to a Krishna in the museum here in Phnom Penh. They were cleaned and pieced onto the Krishna torso and head last year in the workshop, and the sculpture — still missing a few parts, and showing some exposed steel struts that keep the fragments in place — is now on view.
A tranquil mood reigns at the National Museum, with overhead fans whirring and the soft pad of feet on tiled floors. Saffron-robed monks wander through, leaving stalks of fragrant jasmine at the base of statues of various Hindu divinities.
Built in 1917 by George Groslier, a French archaeologist and enthusiast of all things Khmer, the museum was designed in the Khmer style, with steeply pitched roofs and a flamingo pink exterior. The light in the galleries shifts with the position of the sun, as it does in the temples where the statues once stood.
Opened with much pomp in 1920 — a vintage photograph shows King Sisowath arriving under the shade of many ornate umbrellas — the museum had an art school attached. Students played an integral role in construction, carving the massive wooden front doors and painting gilded mythological figures on the walls of the front room that remain intact.
Air-conditioning is now being installed in one room for an exhibition of Rodin watercolors from the Rodin Museum in Paris. The works depict classical Khmer dancers, whom the artist painted when the troupe traveled to Marseilles in 1906.
The permanent collection is arranged in chronological order, allowing visitors to follow the evolution of styles from the pre-Angkor art of the 6th century, on through the many phases of Angkor, which flourished from the early 9th to the mid-15th centuries.
And when the 140 Angkor statues leave for Bonn, 140 almost equally precious pieces will be taken up for display from the storeroom, another reflection of the museum’s return to normalcy.
2 comments:
Thanks to everyone who involved to build this heritage center. I'm prouded to share it to my children during our trip in Cambodia this year.
This is a good news from the National Museum of Cambodia. Congratuation to all that made it happened. There is still more to be done to protects our Khmer treasure and heritage for many generations to come... i hope this initiative flow into other sectors of the Cambodia's development.
But please make ensure it belong to Cambodia and it people not any individual!.
Post a Comment