Your Brain Lights Up with Happiness

There must be a neuroscientific explanation for the pure pleasure of
seeing these paintings. Every tree is a fireworks display, a dendritic
rush—the brain recognizing itself in the universe. Painted rivers
glimmer gold and silver, seeming to move by you playfully, as much as
you move by them. The
colors, opaque watercolors, are ecstatic. No
wonder: They’re made of lapis lazuli, malachite, vermilion, indigo
plant, and the bright yellow urine of cows fed only mango leaves.
Women, kings, gods, and animals appear in waves that reverberate across
space. They dance, they chase each other, they give foot rubs, they
swim, they consider their place in the cosmos, they fall in love.

The eye simply registers joy.

The exhibition is called Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings
of Jodhpur. Jodhpur was the capital of Marwar, a desert kingdom in
the northwest of India, a rough area not renowned—until
now—for its art. Many of the paintings in the show, which
originated in Washington, D.C. (organized by the Smithsonian’s Sackler
Center) and is now visiting Seattle Asian Art Museum, were lost in a
palace cabinet until three years ago. After Seattle, they go to the
British Museum and the National Museum of India.

Seattle is lucky to have them; gratitude is palpable in the
gem-colored galleries. Even on a weekday, people compete for the
museum’s free magnifying glasses. (Hint: If there aren’t any hanging on
the entrance racks, go around to the exit.) The glasses are a must:
Some of these marks were laid down by a needle or a couple of squirrel
hairs.

The earliest painting in the show, of a girl waiting longingly for
her lover in 1623, is a torn fragment, but most of the show’s delicate
watercolors on handmade paper—dating from the 17th to the 19th
centuries—are perfectly preserved. They’re also large for Indian
painting of the period, which is known for its miniaturism and
influenced by Persia. The level of detail, stretched across such a
relatively vast expanse, is mind-boggling. It’s impossible to convey in
photographs or even to take in at one look. You move constantly back
and forth, picking up the magnifying glass and putting it down.

The setting for the earliest paintings is the zenana—or
women’s quarters—of the royal palace, meaning that the paintings
are swarming with women arranged around the maharaja, carrying drinks
to him, riding in pleasure boats with him, preparing beds for sex under
the moonlight. (Pity the part of the world living under the Reformation
at the time!) Terraces are festooned with flowers and patterned fabrics
and colored powders thrown into the air; even monsoon clouds are
confectionary spirals teasing the sky.

Scale and perspective look liberatingly wanton. The size of figures
is determined by importance, not location in the scene. Perspectives
are juxtaposed to exuberant effect: a bird’s-eye view up against a
frontal view up against a planimetric view. These paintings are wild,
dizzying, contemporary. Times Square—hell, Google Earth—has
nothing on them.

As rulers changed, so did the art. (For the most part, artists
worked in atelier groups and went unnamed.) A more-religious maharaja
inspired the invention of “monumental” manuscripts, to be held up by
several people as court performers read the stories they depicted.
Three folios, measuring two by four feet each, portray Krishna’s
conversion of an entire neighborhood of young women in one night: He
draws them out of their homes, past their protesting husbands, into the
forest. He multiplies himself so that each woman feels she has him to
herself. Then he abandons them to their sacred longing. The paintings
swarm with desire. (And the women sport reverse cleavage, with shirts
high on their chests, lower breasts exposed.)

By the 19th century, a new maharaja has embraced cosmology and the
metaphysics of hatha yoga (including the belief that certain yogis can
fly and generate fire). The art is either sublimely minimal or even
more intense and radiant than before, almost psychedelic. Ravishing
fields of gold are symbols of empty preconsciousness; stages of being
are divided by thick vertical stripes, as in the 1950s “zip” paintings
of the American artist Barnett Newman.

Debra Diamond, an associate curator at the Smithsonian and the
person who found some of these paintings in the palace cabinet,
specialized in 20th-century American color-field painting before she
switched to Indian art. The two make a comfortable pair—in the
zenana paintings of the 1700s, striped doors and windows shimmer and
glow as if Rothko had been there. The final room in the exhibition may
as well be a color-field chapel. Seven paintings from 1823 hang on
walls painted deep royal blue. The same trio of magically powerful
yogis appears seven times, floating on oceans of texture and color: on
flat gold, or white foam, or orange scales. It is amazing to remember
that people can paint like gods. It is amazing to recognize life on a piece of paper.