ANCIENT, FROZEN SMILES

By ROBERT HUGHES

The National Gallery in Washington has a marvelous show this summer--"Sculpture of Angkor and Ancient Cambodia: Millennium of Glory." It is by no means a rerun of a familiar subject. Most of the world's major sculptural traditions are abundantly represented in American museums--Egyptian, ancient Greek, Gothic, Italian Renaissance, Indian and Maya. Cambodian sculpture is the exception. Yet there is no doubt that in the small Southeast Asian kingdom between the 6th century and 16th century A.D., some of the greatest stone carving and bronze work in human history was made.

Very little of it has been seen in the West--mere fragments mostly, especially if one bears in mind that most Cambodian sculpture was made as decoration for temples, a small part of a larger whole, its meaning lessened when removed. Because Cambodia was annexed as a French colony in 1863 and remained one until 1953, most of the sculpture that Europeans took from it ended up in France--notably at the Musee Guimet in Paris--rather than in England, Germany or America. But to deduce the scale, continuity and sheer aesthetic majesty of Cambodian art from such fragments is like trying to reconstruct a loaf from a single crumb.

The image of Cambodian culture that haunts the West is vague and almost ineffably romantic: the royal city of Angkor, slowly abandoned under threat of Thai occupation after 1431 but still the chief symbol of Cambodian identity, one of the largest archaeological sites in the world, with its colonnades and giant water reservoirs; its huge, impassive stone faces split by tree roots; its temple mountains and crumbling pine-cone spires. Spreading over some 150 sq. mi., it has excited dithyrambs from visitors ever since the French started going there in the 19th century. "I looked up at those towers rising above me, overgrown with greenery," wrote the novelist Pierre Loti in 1912, "and I suddenly shivered with fear as I saw a giant frozen smile looming down at me.. and then another smile, over there on another tower...and then three, and then five, and then ten."

You can't put Angkor Wat in a box and ship it to Washington, but the organizers of the National Gallery's show have done the next best thing. With the cooperation of the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh and the Musee Guimet, under the general curatorial direction of the art historians Helen Jessup and Thierry Zephir, they have assembled the first full-scale traveling exhibition of classic Cambodian sculpture in more than 50 years. (A smaller show, a dress rehearsal for this one, was seen in Australia in 1992.)

The show is a dignified call for help as well as an assertion of past cultural achievement. After 30 years of civil war and the genocidal madness of the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot, Cambodia's very name reeks of slaughter. The West needs to be reminded of its immense cultural heritage, and of the struggle--against all odds--to preserve it. Only a handful of Western historians and curators, mainly in France and America, are experts in ancient Cambodian art, and its fate within Cambodia for the past few decades has skirted catastrophe. Much of it has been looted from unguarded sites for the voracious Western art market.

The civil war all but destroyed Cambodia's frail, poorly funded cultural infrastructure; French-trained Khmer curators were murdered; the National Museum was reduced to a bat-infested wreck, its roof caving in, and abandoned for four years after 1975. (It has since been partially repaired by the Australian government, but, as one of the contributors to the show's excellent catalog bluntly observes, "The museum staff lacks the expertise and resources to repair and conserve the sculpture, or to catalogue the collection. [This] can only be rectified with international help.") As if this weren't enough, a major problem around the monuments of Angkor is the land mines and other explosives sown by both the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese; some 21,000 of these have been found and defused by a French-led international task force since 1993, but plenty are left.

So there is something almost surreal in the contrast between the detachment and formal purity of Khmer sculpture and the circumstances under which so much of it precariously survives. To walk into this show is to shift gears; to be immersed in an extremely slow-moving tradition to which the idea of innovation, beloved in the West, means little or nothing. Compared with Indian sculpture, from which it ultimately derives, Cambodian art is quite restricted in its range of subject: there isn't the same bewildering pullulation of different gods. In Cambodia the same cast recurs again and again: the Buddha in his various forms; the main Hindu deities: Shiva, Vishnu, the elephant god Ganesha and so forth. And there is very little of the eroticism of Indian sculpture: bare breasts and torsos, but no full nudes, and no copulation.

Art historians divide Khmer sculpture into three long periods, starting in the 6th century to 8th century A.D., when its forms and imagery arose from Indian roots. These early images appear fully formed, without any of the archaic crudity that normally attends the birth of a style. They can be marvelously refined, like the 7th century to 8th century standing figure of the Buddha of the afterlife, the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. There is a perfect balance between the abstraction of the limbs, the rich linear detail of the costume and the benign, almost feminine roundness of this Buddha's torso.

The second period begins in 802, when the royal capital of the Khmer was established at Angkor, beside the sacred river--the "Khmer Ganges"--of Siem Reap. It was to last six centuries. The sculpture of high Angkor tends to be more severe, hieratical and augustly withdrawn than the earlier work. The face of the great 9th century Vishnu figure from the town of Siem Reap bears an imperious expression, and the god's four hands, grasping his symbolic attributes--a club for knowledge, a ball signifying the earth, a chakra or disc symbolizing power and a conch betokening water and the origins of existence--are the embodiment of serene control. Yet there is immense physical energy contained in some Khmer pieces, like the 10th century pediment from Banteay Srei, a marvel of crisp carving and design in which the epic hero Bhima is seen leaping into the air to strike down his enemy.

The grandeur of high Angkor sculpture can be sensed from the biggest fragment in the show, the head and shoulders of a colossal bronze dating from the 11th century. When complete, the figure must have been 20 ft. long: Vishnu Anantasayin, the god Vishnu in cosmic sleep, reclining on the back of the serpent Ananta, afloat on the primordial ocean. It was found by French archaeologists 60 years ago in the western baray (reservoir) of Angkor--a man-made lake five miles long--and despite its corroded and battered state, its missing eyebrows and moustache (which would have been gold), its empty eyes, it radiates an extraordinary sculptural power amounting to magnetism.

The same authority could extend to portraits of historical figures--Khmer kings. Portrait is a relative term here. There is no knowing whether the last great Angkor king, Jayavarman VII, actually looked like the stone effigy made of him in the late 12th century, and it is most unlikely that he ever sat for its sculptor. (No social prestige attached to being a Khmer sculptor, and not a single artist's name in all the 1,000 years of Cambodian art has been recorded.) Which hardly matters, since the subject of this dense, exquisitely carved image is less a man than a conception of kingship: full of presence but withdrawn in meditation, centered, and plain to the point of humility. As pure as any Brancusi, it is one of the most touching icons in all Asian sculpture. As you scan it, the remoteness of the time and the society in which it was made ceases to matter.