Pots & Pictures

Detroit has an art museum of which any of the three larger cities of the U. S. could well be proud. Trying, on a woefully curtailed budget, to do some of the things that are expected of a really first rate metropolitan museum, the Detroit Art Institute last week was holding an impressive exhibition of Persian art. Though borrowed entirely from Manhattan Collector Hagop Kevorkian, it was a show worth the most chauvinistic Detroiter's time. On display were dozens & dozens of luminous blue-green pots, plates, vases, more than 100 jewel-like miniatures, illustrations for books and unbound manuscripts that first brought Persian art to the attention of the Western world.

Though the show made no attempt to rival the historic Persian exhibitions in London's Burlington House (TIME, Jan. 12, 1930), it did offer a comprehensive outline of Persian illumination from its great period of Chinese and Mongol influence in the 13th Century to its degeneration at the end of the 17th Century. It gave gallery-goers some understanding of the feeling that prompted the 15th Century Shah Ismail to lock his favorite miniature painter Behzad in a cave before going to war with the Turks; that made Persian merchants value one line of perfect script at one gold bar of the same size, one miniature, at one ruby.

Interesting was the fact that Detroit's exhibition was not assembled by the best known U. S. Persian scholar, Dr. Arthur Upham Pope, but by a member of the Detroit Institute's own staff, swarthy, hook-nosed Dr. Mehmet Aga-Oglu, a Persian scholar of almost equal authority. A Russian-born Turk, Dr. Oglu probably would never have known the difference between the Timurid School (1390-1480) and the followers of Bichiter the Great if his childhood ambition had not been to become a naval officer.

At school in the Caucasus he learned that no Mohammedan could enter the Russia's Imperial Naval Academy. His passionate desire to understand the difference between the Moslem and Christian worlds won him two doctorates, taught him to speak, in addition to his native Turkish, Russian, Persian, German, French, English. Before going to Detroit he had been curator of Oriental art at National museums in Vienna and Istanbul. In 1931 he, like Dr. Pope, went to work on the second great exhibition of Persian art in London.

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