The Smithsonian InstitutionRegents of the University of Michigan

The Arts of Thailand. A Handbook of the Architecture, Sculpture and Painting of Thailand(Siam), and a Catalogue of the Exhibition in the United States in 1960-62 by Theodore BowieReview by: John RosenfieldArs Orientalis, Vol. 5 (1963), pp. 295-298Published by: Freer Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian Institution and Department of the Historyof Art, University of MichiganStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4629202 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 295

Bundi sphere, for the time being. But when the moment is ripe, we hope that he will pub- lish a fuller account of this particularly attrac- tive style and its diffusion.

STUART C. WELCH, JR.

NOTE: Since writing the above, we have seen material which invites a reappraisal of the earliest phase of painting at Bundi. A Mughal Tuttinama of ca. 1585 in the library of Sir Chester Beatty contains many miniatures which are astonishingly similar in style to the ragamala series from which Mr. Chandra has reproduced Ragini Bhairava, figure 2. Another painting from the same set, in an Indian private collection, is dated the equivalent of A.D. I590, con- firming the existence of painting at Bundi during the Akbar period.

S. C. W., JR.

The Arts of Thailand. A Handbook of the Architecture, Sculpture and Painting of Thailand (Siam), and a Catalogue of the Exhibition in the United States in I 960-62. Edited by Theodore Bowie. Introduction by Prince Dhani Nivat. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1960. 2 1 9 pp., I63 halftones, frontispiece in full color.

The exhibition of The Arts of Thailand is very much in the pattern of The Master- pieces of Korean Art which preceded it to these shores by three years. It has focused attention upon an important sector of Asian arts which is generally less familiar than the great metropolitan styles of India, China, or Japan. It has been a near miracle of organi- zation, combining the connoisseur's viewpoint with the logistic problems of transporting tons of irreplaceable treasures to our doorsteps. It may be fair to report a slight tinge of dis- appointment that the overall aesthetic impact of the Thai exhibit was weakened by the sculpture of the later periods, which shared in the loss of expressive authority and power that became endemic in Buddhist arts (the traditional, hieratic ones) throughout Asia

following the i3th century. But one should also report that there were many delightful surprises among Thai ceramics, gold work, and the smaller objects. Such judgments, how- ever, are quite beside the point. The exhibi- tion has been a stimulating extension of our scholarly and aesthetic horizons. To the teams of scholars and government officials, to the patrons and Buddhist authorities who made the exhibit and its handbook possible, our debt goes far beyond conventional terms of grati- tude. This was a task that has long been needed; its value will be an enduring one.

The handbook of the exhibition is an am- bitious project which in some ways is a model of its kind. It is at once a detailed exhibition catalogue, a popular introduction for laymen (with a simple review of Buddhist doctrine and aesthetic concepts), and a survey of the history of the art and architecture of Thailand outlining a number of scholarly problems. Its greatest virtue is that it presents the objects in the exhibition as an integral part of that history, generously illustrating a great many works which could not be included in the show but which expand and clarify those which are. On the other hand, owing to obvious limita- tions of space, we must be satisfied in the sur- vey with only a brief paragraph or two on many important topics; but apart from the catalogue proper, there are few direct con- nections between the text and the bibliography which would encourage further study, and there are many factual statements which cry out for documentation.

The catalogue was compiled by M. C. Subhadradis Diskul, the Chief Curator of the National Museum, Bangkok, who received much of his technical training in Paris and at Cambridge University. The historical survey is the work chiefly of Alexander Griswold, an American scholar and collector who has been most active in recent years in stimulating in-

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296 BOOK REVIEWS

terest in Thai arts through his growing num- ber of publications, written (as here) with a graceful literary style and vast enthusiasm for the subject. Miss Elizabeth Lyons of New York has added a short essay on Thai paint- ing. Carefully edited by Professor Theodore Bowie of Indiana University, this small hand- book is an up-to-date epitome of its subject, adding much information not available to Reginald LeMay at the time of his pioneer survey published in 1938.

These authors have, with some explicit disagreements, organized the art of Thailand into eight categories which reflect some of the major stages in the development of civili- zation in the region. These can be briefly summarized in their own terms as follows:

I. Dvaravati style, 6th-i ith centuries: The formative style of sculptural and archi- tectural traditions in the region, produced first by the Mdn people. Unfortunately a most shadowy historical entity, these people settled both in lower Burma and in the region within a hundred-mile radius of Bangkok.

2. grivijaya style, 8th-13th centuries: Works of sculpture found largely in penin- sular Thailand, dating from the period of hegemony there of the Sumatran kingdom of grivijaya and revealing strong influences from India (especially of the Cholas of Tanjore) and Indonesia.

3. Lopburi style, i ith-I4th centuries: An extension into northwest Thailand of Khmer arts and culture focused at Lopburi, the Khmer viceregal capital.

4. The "Chieng Sen" style, I2th-2oth centuries: A long series of hieratic Buddhist bronze cult images coming from the northern- most portions of the country, the subject of a lively controversy as to their antiquity and locus of production. One party, represented by Prince Diskul but also including Reginald

LeMay, holds that they were made as early as the I 2th century (possibly even as early as the ninth) and that they are to be named after Chieng Sen, a town right beneath the point where the Laos, Burma, and Thailand borders meet, where many examples have been found. However, in the viewpoint of Mr. Griswold, this particular type of Buddha image did not originate until the second half of the isth century and the principal place of production was Chieng Mai, an hypothesis spelled out in detail in his Dated Buddha images of northern Siam (Ascona, I957; re- viewed in Ars Orientalis IV, I96I p. 448ff.).

S. Sukhodaya style, I3th-I5th centuries: The expression of the Thai people recently migrated from southern China and freed of Khmer rule, an art of "harmonious eclecti- cism" from many sources, of a sinuous grace which was to become a hallmark of later Thai sculpture. Its centers were the work- shops of Svargaloka (Swankalok) and Sukho- daya (Sukkotai). Questions regarding its ori- gins are greatly affected by the problems of the Chieng Sen images.

6. U Tong style, I2th-I5th centuries: Named after the Thai prince who founded the capital city of Ayudhya about 1350, this sculptural style retained a strong legacy of Khmer influence. But here again, there is ex- plicit disagreement between Prince Diskul and Mr. Griswold, the former dating U Tong bronzes generally a century earlier than the latter.

7. Ayudhya style, i5th-i6th centuries: Emergence of a distinct national style free of immediate foreign influence, with cult images produced in vast quantity.

8. Bangkok, late i 8th century to present: Decorative and religious arts made after the establishment of the current capital of Thai- land and the opening of contacts with Europe.

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BOOK REVIEWS 297

These categories are useful semantic tools for students, provided (as the authors warn us) they are not considered as more than that, for the history of the arts of Thailand is clearly still in its age of discovery and pri- mary organization. Typical of the subject anywhere in the Indian cultural sphere, there are many unsolved problems of dating and historical background, with lacunae in the political and ethnic history of the region, a small corpus of dated images, and an incom- plete archeological survey of the area. Thus the open disagreements of Prince Diskul and Mr. Griswold are the normal results of diffi- culties inherent in the subject, and to their credit, the two scholars treat these objectively and with a sense of humor.

The problems are also compounded by the fact that research in the Thai field must fol- low two separate directions. The first is the internal task of uncovering and classifying the works produced in the area throughout a millennium and a half. The other is to trace the many currents of foreign cultural contacts which affected this material, for it is safe to say that Thai art, in the sense of an expres- sion of the modern Thai peoples, did not begin until the I3th century, following their migration from southern China. Prior to this time, the works of art produced in the area were most vitally affected by developments in India (in its several cultural provinces) and Ceylon, Indo-China, and Indonesia. Thus the early stages of the arts of Thailand are an integral part of the thoroughly inspiring and thoroughly complicated study of the implan- tation of Indian culture in Southeast Asia and its reinforcement by successive waves of in- fluence and changing religious doctrines, by the development of local traditions and their interactions. If the handbook has recorded many recent additions to the archeological record-notably the Ayudhya gold treasure,

the crystal objects from Chieng Mai, and a number of previously unfamiliar dated images -it is considerably weaker in the handling of the second set of problems.

One regrets, for example, the absence in the handbook of the rare "pre-Mon" bronzes of Korat or Nakon Pathom or even Pon Tuk (Dupont, Archeologie Mone de Dvaravati, Paris, I959, figs. 336, 338, 340). These be- long to a distinctive series of Amaravati- style Buddhist export bronzes from the Kistna River region and/or Ceylon which establish an important line of contact from those re- gions at a notably early date (perhaps late third century, but the precise dating is proble- matic)-Buddha images from Sempaga in the Celebes, those from Senguntang near Palem- bang (Sumatra) and Dong-duong (in the Cham country), etc.

And for the Dvaravati style, Mr. Gris- wold seems to trace the origins of its Buddha images to such late Gupta Period sites as Ajanta and Kanheri, using peculiarities of hand gestures and types of samghati as his guide. This is obviously not a simple matter, but the solution disregards the very clear styl- istic affinities with the late Guptan schools of sculpture at Sarnath and its derivatives in northeastern India, such as Nalanda or Raj- gir. And regarding the strange mudrds which became one of the distinctive hallmarks of Buddhist sculpture in Thailand (either the vitarka or abhayamudrds made by both hands symmetrically), it also seems a premature solution to imagine that they were the result of mistakes made by craftsmen asked to copy regular Indian originals from a faulty source. In view of the highly developed Tantrik con- ceptions of mudris and the variant forms found in the Kurkihar, Nalanda, and Nega- patam bronzes-none precisely parallel to the Thai ones, to be sure-it seems more likely that such a prominent symbolic motif grew

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298 BOOK REVIEWS

out of a doctrinal or sectarian need (which is Dupont's feeling, op. cit., pp. I8I-I84).

Lines of contact leading away from Thai- land also dominate the study of three other classes of objects which include some of the most handsome and interesting pieces in the exhibition-the Hindu carvings from gri Deb and Vieng Sra, the grivijaya bronzes of Chaiya and elsewhere, the Khmer-style Lop- burn bronzes. To correlate these objects with their historical sources would require a major expenditure of effort and space, and probably for the latter reason the handbook has largely avoided the issues; the Brahmanical and grivi- jaya works are discussed in barely ten lines of text apiece, the Lopburi with somewhat more. But these are among the most vital sectors of the story.

There are several smaller issues which might be raised here. For example, among the wealth of material in the catalogue, a small Lopburi-style bronze Buddhist trinity is identified as representing "perhaps" a Bud- dhist trikdya, the three "bodies" of the Bud- dha (p. I90, No. 63), a thing which is a priori impossible in view of the conception of the dharmakaya as a metaphysical entity, essentially immaterial, inconceivable, and un- manifest. Similarly unlikely is the tacit ad- mission regarding a lovely Dvaravati-style stone emblem of the dharmacakra with two deer and a small Suirya figure, that it may sus- tain a pious tradition that Buddhism had been introduced into Thailand as early as the reign of Asoka Maurya (p. I84, No. i).

Also there are some rather awkward lin- guistic problems, inevitable perhaps for an area in which loan words from Sanskrit and Pali have been mixed with Thai, which is structurally incompatible with them, being a monosyllabic and tonal tongue affiliated with South Chinese dialects. The authors have se- lected the more evocative Sanskrit spellings of some place names and discarded the more

familiar Thai phonetic ones. Sawankalok is now Suvargaloka and Sukkotai is Sukhodaya. But the authors are not consistent. Korat is not changed into Nagara Rajasim(h)a, Chaiya has not been transmuted into Jaya, and Lop- burn remains Lopburi (fortunately a chart of place names has been provided which clarifies the matter). Also it is shown that a stuipa has a dome recalling in shape a punnaghata- mixing Sanskrit and Pali terms. None of this is serious in itself except as an indication of a generally loose control of the Indian and Singhalese elements in the study, whether aesthetic, doctrinal, or linguistic.

In its generous and ambitious scope, the handbook far exceeds the usual requirements of an exhibition catalogue, but it is not thor- ough enough to stand as a definitive art his- torical survey. Yet having revealed with clarity many of the major issues which remain to be solved before a new integral history of the arts of Thailand could be written, the handbook (together with the exhibition) is a giant step toward that goal. Until then, this book will remain a most useful source for scholars.

JOHN ROSENFIELD

Jrchaeology in China. Vol. I: Prehistoric China. By Cheng Te-k'un. Cambridge (W. Heffner and Sons Ltd.), I959, xix+i56 pp., maps, tables, 44 pIs., list of characters, bibliography, and index (pp. I57-250).

It is close to 40 years now that archeo- logical fieldwork has been going on in China, interrupted by the Japanese invasion, but vigorously resumed under the Communist Government. A summary of the discoveries made during those four decades is highly wel- come. As planned, Dr. Cheng's presentation will comprise several volumes, the first of which deals with the prehistoric remains- from the Lower Paleolithic to late Neolithic

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