Central Asian and Chinese Textiles
in The Cleveland and Metropolitan Museums of Art

October 26, 1997 to January 4, 1998

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Ancient tapestries and silks, woven and embroidered with shimmering gold and vibrantly colored thread, are on view this autumn in a unique exhibition: When Silk Was Gold: Central Asian and Chinese Textiles in The Cleveland and Metropolitan Museums of Art. The exhibition opens at The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) on October 26, 1997, and remains on view here through January 4, 1998. It features sixty-four textiles from the 8th through early 15th centuries. The fragile nature of textiles makes this a once-in-a-lifetime event. After Cleveland, the exhibition will travel to only one other venue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it will be on view March 3 through May 17, 1998. There will be no special ticketing for either showing of this exhibition.

"The Cleveland Museum of Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art have built the most important and extensive collections of ancient Central Asian and Chinese textiles in the West, and in some respects in the world," states CMA director Robert P. Bergman. "These were among the most coveted belongings owned by people of exotic Asian cultures hundreds of years ago. The places and times of their making are best known in the lore of Mongol leader Chinggis Khan's conquests and of the merchant Marco Polo's adventures. Through the partnership and collaboration of our two museums, a truly extraordinary exhibition has been created."

The exhibition has been conceived by Anne E. Wardwell, curator of textiles at the CMA, and James C.Y. Watt, the Brooke Russell Astor Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum. The two curators' shared expertises--Wardwell's in the artistic medium of early textiles, and Watt's in Chinese art history and literature--have advanced understanding of both collections, and given rise to this show and its jointly written catalogue. In their introduction, Wardwell and Watt express the hope "that this exhibition will engender a sense of awe for the magnificence and beauty of textiles created in a period when silk was indeed as precious as gold."

Scholars believe that the textiles that survive are a small fraction of one percent of those produced. Beyond the beauty, value, and gold content of these works of art is a fascinating study of the role textiles played. Much of their role is documented in existing written records in Asia as well as in the West, such as in official dynastic histories or inventories of medieval European church treasuries. Textiles were of paramount importance in politics, economy, and culture. Social positions were defined by textiles and costume. In the practice and spread of Buddhism, textiles were used in the creation of sacred spaces or for the depiction of images believed to embody a spiritual presence.

Textiles were tangible standards of value that were used as currency, as payment of taxes, and as symbols of imperial patronage. For example, records indicate that Song period Chinese emperors paid over 500,000 bales of silk annually in tribute to keep peace with bordering rulers. As diplomats, merchants, and missionaries moved from region to region across Asia, so did artistic motifs and designs, many of which found their way into ceramics or other decorative arts.

Evolution of styles and techniques also resulted from the forced relocation of artisans captured as prisoners of war. In the Mongol period, "Cloths of Gold" were produced in Chinese and Central Asian cities, often where craftsmen from conquered territories were resettled. In these textiles the motifs and background are both woven of gold thread, and the outlines of the designs are delineated by a silk foundation woven of one color. According to histories and eyewitness accounts, "robes of one color" were mandated attire at certain ceremonies for members of the imperial court. Official edicts warned their owners of punishment if they pawned their robes.

This exhibition includes the most important "cloth of gold" known. It has an overall design of winged lions and griffins, based on Eastern Iranian and Chinese styles and weaving techniques that have been synthesized into a fabric that is uniquely Central Asian (CMA 1989.50, illustrated in full and in details above). Its gold thread consists of strips of very thin, translucent paper, gilded on one side and wrapped around a yellow silk core. Repeated about every foot are roundels enclosing pairs of back-to-back lions, their wings joined and their tails ending in dragons' heads; between these roundels are paired griffins whose tails end in feline heads. The background is filled with scrolling, curling foliage. The gold all over is remarkably well-preserved.

A young child's silk coat and pants also join diverse cultures. They are among the finest royal textiles, relying for their appeal not on the intrinsic value of any metallic thread at all, but rather on beautifully colored and woven silks (illustrated here, CMA 1996.2a). They date from the period of the Tibetan kings (ca. 600-842 AD), and were almost certainly meant for a prince. The outer fabric of the coat is one of the few silks from Sogdiana (today's Uzbekistan and parts of Tajikistan) in Central Asia whose original colors of rose red, deep blue, green, yellow, and white are strikingly fresh today; it has roundels of stylized pairs of ducks in profile, originating from Iranian Sasanian imagery. The pants, however, are made of white Chinese silk woven with naturalistic rosettes and flying birds; and both pants and coat are lined with the same brown Chinese silk damask, woven with the classic Tang design of concentric floral medallions and palmettes.

The Yamataka mandala (cosmic diagram) with imperial portraits has the richest known history of any of the works on view (illustrated here, Yuan dynasty, ca. 1330, Metropolitan Museum 1992.54). It is the only complete example known of an imperially commissioned kesi, or silk and gold tapestry, from the Mongol empire. Four donors are portrayed in its border: Tugh Temür, great-great-grandson of Khubilai Khan, his elder brother Khoshila, and their wives. The political unrest around 1330 was such that, within a few years of this textile's making, three of the four donors are known to have died unnatural deaths at the hands of their relatives in struggles over the throne. Within a decade, uprisings began across China that eventually led to the expulsion of the Mongol rulers in 1368 and the founding of the native Ming dynasty.

Welcoming Spring (illustrated here, Metropolitan Museum 1981.410) is the embroidery chosen to be reproduced on the exhibition catalogue's cover. It is remarkable for its size--over two feet wide and seven feet high--and its lively and complicated imagery and extraordinarily detailed workmanship. It is a mountainous landscape with trees, flowers, and a stream, and with two boys crisscrossing it, riding and herding goats. Eight different embroidery stitches make up the picture. It is from the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368). Spectacular Buddhist embroideries from the early Ming period that followed (1368-1435) represent the last great moment of imperial patronage of the arts in China before its revival under the early Qing emperors centuries later.

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be fully illustrated. It will contain an introductory essay about these textile collections and essays by the exhibition's curators about the attributions and contributions to textile history of works in the show, and an essay providing historical context by Morris Rossabi of Columbia University and of the City University of New York (formerly of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland). Rossabi is a prolific author most popularly known for Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times. The catalogue will also have entries for all works in the exhibition, maps, an appendix on techniques, and a selected bibliography. (See catalogue.)

The uniquely complex challenges of mounting such an exhibition include painstaking conservation work on each textile and new exhibition design approaches using fiber optic lighting for preservation. Assistant conservator of textiles Karen Klingbiel has been responsible for work on more than twenty of CMA's works. The Cleveland installation is largely the work of exhibition designer Jeffrey Baxter and lighting designer Chris Tyler under the direction of chief designer Jeffrey Strean. Labels, maps, and a chronology will help visitors understand the emerging discoveries of how and where they were made.

A wide variety of programs is being planned for all ages. In Cleveland, a drawloom will be installed for weekly weaving demonstrations and for a weekend family fair; the fair will also feature demonstrations of the other skills required to produce the works on view: sericulture (silk-making), the making of gold thread, spinning, embroidery, indigo dyeing, and papermaking. Visitors will have the opportunity to try the techniques as well. A lecture series will include experts in Asian art and the history of Central Asia and China as well as specialists in textile technology and history.

This exhibition has been organized by The Cleveland Museum of Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition is sponsored in Cleveland by The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation in memory of Miss Gertrude Underhill, the Cleveland museum's first Curator of Textiles. The Smith family's relationship with the museum has been long-standing. Kelvin Smith (1899-1984), co-founder of the Cleveland-based Lubrizol Corporation, developed a collection of over three hundred Chinese and Japanese works of art with the help of former CMA director Sherman E. Lee. Kelvin Smith's widow, Eleanor Smith, presented this collection to the museum upon Smith's death. Mrs. Smith and her daughters were friends with textile curator Gertrude Underhill (1874-1954), and continue to honor her memory through support of this exhibition. Underhill, when promoted to the textile curatorship in 1944, was quoted as saying of Cleveland's collection, "It includes silks worth a thousand times their weight in gold."

When Silk Was Gold is also supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency dedicated to expanding American understanding of human experience and cultural heritage. Promotional support for the Cleveland showing is provided by WCLV 95/5. The catalogue is made possible, in part, by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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