Persian Art

According to German Philosopher Oswald Spengler (Decline of the West), civilizations are born and die like human beings, their average life-span about 1,500 years. One crusty old civilization that lived longer than Spengler's average was Persia's. In 4000 B. C. Persia got started. The Greeks and Romans, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, came & went, and still Persia was going strong. Not until the 18th Century, after some 6,000 continuous years of art, culture and prosperity, did Persia finally bite the dust. Even then it was European commercial competition, more than her own decay, that killed her.

In the course of this cultural marathon Persia had ups & downs. She was conquered successively by the Greeks, Arabs and Mongols; she was sideswiped by nearly every artistic bandwagon that rumbled through Europe and Asia. But though her artists copied Genghis Khan's Chinese painters, Greek sculpture and the primitives of 14th-Century Italians, they made their Persian versions as characteristically Persian as an Isfahan carpet. The Persians concentrated on decoration, distorted their figures and landscapes into semi-abstract patterns, prized neatly filled space more than neatly copied nature.

Until recently Persian art as a whole has been a far-off subject to the West. But in the past 15 years several comprehensive exhibitions of Persian art have opened Western eyes. Most important of these took place nine years ago in London (TIME, Aug. 18, 1930, et seq.), five years ago in Leningrad. Last week, in Manhattan's onetime Union Club building, the U. S. had the biggest & best of the lot. Among the exhibition's 2,800-odd paintings, statues, carpets, pots and miscellaneous objects (total value, $10,000,000) were: 1) five of the world's twelve most famed Persian carpets, 2) 300 manuscripts and masterpieces of Persian miniature painting, 3) a comprehensive collection of 500 pieces of Persian pottery of all periods from 4000 B. C. to the present, 4) the most perfect specimens of Persian velvet known to modern times, 5) a newly discovered 14th-Century illuminated Shah-Nameh ("Book of Kings"), containing the only known portrait of the famous Mongol conqueror Tamerlane.

Ringmaster of this gigantic art circus was a talkative, six-foot, grey-thatched former philosophy professor named Arthur Upham Pope who gave up philosophy 15 years ago because he liked Persian rugs better, soon found that he could make five times his professor's salary as an expert rug appraiser.

When he went to Persia in 1925, the graduating class at Teheran University asked him to make a speech on philosophy. Instead, he told them about Persia's own glorious artistic past. The young Persians, who knew more about Henry Ford than they did about Darius, were surprised. Pope was asked to do it again before the Cabinet. The Prime Minister, who became the Shah that year, was so impressed that he gave Pope permission to ransack the art treasures of the country. Pope, sometimes disguised as a Moslem convert, has photographed and collected art works in every part of Persia. Back in Europe and the U. S. he wrote, talked, boomed Persian art incessantly.

Today he is head of Manhattan's Iranian Institute, is conceded to know more about the general subject than any other living man. One woman knows more: his wife and onetime pupil, Dr. Phyllis Ackerman. Surrounded at home by Persian books, pots, cats, he is intolerant of contemporary Western art, architecture, music, hates jazz. Says he: "The assertive egotism of Western artists, the adulation that has so often inflamed their conceit, the assumption that they are apart from common life, unique in endowment and thereby in license, would have puzzled the cultivated Persian in every period except the most recent."

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