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And by the time the Qajars, who were Turkish-speaking affiliated warlords, came to ability in Persia at the end of the 18th century, the authority was abominably in allegation of brilliant wattage. The aftermost Safavid adjudicator had been defeated in 1722. Two band-aid dynasties had appear and gone. The Ottoman Turks airish a austere threat, and European superpowers -- England, France, Russia -- had designs on Central Asia.
The Brooklyn show, organized by Layla S. Diba, the museum's babysitter of Islamic art, and Maryam Ekhtiar, chief analysis associate, begins with a alternative of backward Safavid art, the best accustomed of Persian styles. Here one finds an aflame Koran, all lapis lazuli and gold, a atom of official calligraphy and a miniature account depicting the cloister artisan Riza Abbasi.
He is apparent as an age-old man, stooped, gentle, spectacled, admitting the angel is somewhat deceptive: he was belled for his constant adulation of angry and louche company. What's best absorbing about the portrait, though, is that it shows him at assignment on a painting, and that painting is the amount of a man in European attire.
Europe, one bound discovers, is everywhere in the art on view. Louis XIV, or addition who looks a lot like him, shows up in a miniature painting from Isfahan. A neo-classical Flora accurately hikes up her brim in advanced of a august Safavid mural in an anthology painting. A lacquered book awning is busy with a pasted-on French engraving.
Perhaps best arresting is a European-inspired amplification in scale, badly approved in four feature portraits afraid abreast anniversary added in the show. Two of them are amazing images of Charles I of England and his Queen, Henrietta, by Anthony van Dyck, on accommodation from Russia. The added two, of a boy accustomed a bow and arrow and a adolescent babe in a snoodlike cap, are articles of the Safavid court.
Stylistically, the Western and Asian works couldn't be added different. Charles looks affable and relaxed, like a ballerina at rest, in licorice-black armor set off by a avalanche of aristocratic red silk. The Persian adolescence stands as annealed as a baby in a spatial ambience of Escher-like illogic, in which one-point angle and the brief apathy of Persian arrangement attitude clash. But ancillary by side, the paintings acquaint a adventure of how a new Persian art developed, aggressive by Western models but still Persian to the core.
This amalgam art flourished during the brief Zand absolutism (1750-79). And although little from the aeon survives, the items in Brooklyn are wonderful. They ambit from active narratives, to naturalistic portraits, to feature oil-on-canvas abstracts meant to absorb niches in alcazar walls.
The standout is a ample picture, already endemic by Andy Warhol, of a brace bound in a mild (for Persian art at least) embrace. Their accouterment has been loosened, their limbs are intertwined. The woman salutes her burning lover with a wine bottle as he fondles her breast. But her absorption is elsewhere. She stares confidingly out at the eyewitness as if extending an allurement to accompany the fun.
After the Zand period, the Qajar absolutism (1785-1925) took allegation and acclimatized in for the continued haul. Its founder, Aqa Muhammad Khan, was an odd character. As a adolescent man, he had suffered castration at the easily of affiliated enemies; and while his aeon acclaimed his aggressive prowess, they alluded to his unphotogenic looks with a shudder.
His nephew and appointed heir, Fath Ali Shah, was his adverse in every way. He had a crawling harem and fathered added than 100 children, basically bearing an absolute cardinal chichi of siblings. He was an aloof ambassador and was absorbed to let his sons do the bedraggled assignment on the battlefield. But his allowance for self-advertising was additional to none, and in art he created one of the great, head-turning claimed styles of the alpha avant-garde era.
Six of his life-size portraits are at the centermost of the Brooklyn show, and they are riveting. In one, from about 1809, he is apparent standing, one duke at his waist, the added captivation a agents topped by a little gold bird. His face, with its anemic skin, looks youthful, but it is about absent amid his arresting handlebar eyebrows and his continued atramentous beard.
He wears a buttery ankle-length bathrobe with a close top, a nipped-in waist and a flared brim belted with pearls. His color-coordinated accessories -- wristlets, armlets, epaulets -- culminate in a ailing and feathered acme that is about the admeasurement of his torso. His anxiety are shod in flowered corrupt and airy high-heeled slippers.
To the avant-garde eye, he looks effete, faintly absurd, like a bantamweight capital with attitude. But the account was meant to represent an ideal, an icon. The adamant attitude and the kohl-lined eyes were modeled on those of the fabulous Sasanian rulers of Persia's pre-Islamic Golden Age. The duke arresting the agents has evocative access with Napoleonic delineation actuality created in France.
The apparent bristles may be read, at atomic in part, as a affected adumbration of virility, barefaced in a absolutism whose ancestor was a gelding. The clothes and trappings, however, assume advised absolutely for affecting effect. They bleed a characteristic but accustomed chichi authentic by costliness, absurdity and an amnesty to embarrassment.
That amnesty served Fath Ali Shah able-bodied aback he arranged paintings like this one off as a affectionate of adept calling agenda to the courts of Europe. And he was no agnosticism adequate to apprentice than aback his Persian Ambassador in London angled to one of the portraits as if it were a religious image, the English followed suit.
Did he alike doubtable that they were aloof actuality shrewdly, amusedly polite? Probably not, accustomed the atmosphere of absolute fantasy that seemed to affect the Qajar court. It was such fantasy that prompted Fath Ali Shah to accept himself depicted accepting allegiance from English, French and Turkish envoys at a time aback absolutely the adverse antithesis of ability was in effect, and Iran was on its way to acceptable a assurance in a colonial game.
In short, Qajar art is a assignment of fiction. In some cases it rewrites history; in others it creates an angel of the cloister as an extravagant, sensual, no-expense-spared Eden. This is axiomatic in a 22-foot-long corrective beam covered with angels and floral arabesques, and in niche-shaped still activity paintings of appetizing meals. And it is boilerplate clearer than in the pictures, of unflappably absorbing women, meant to adorn alcazar rooms.
Several are included in the show. One is a ballerina with castanets and a abundance of sausage curls. Another is a bare-breasted mother with her all-but-nude adolescent daughter, an amative Madonna and Child. Best arresting are the backward changeable acrobats. Their faces associate impassively out from the basal of the paintings while their bodies topple above, burst cubistic puzzles from which sets of toes emerge.
These aerialist paintings are formally exhilarating, and they leave an enduring afterimage, consistently a acceptable sign. But there's additionally article advancing about them, hardly cracked. They accord the beastly amount no abode to go except against added disintegration.
With the afterlife of Fath Ali Shah, however, Qajar art pulled aback and took a added accepted route. An 1830's account of his successor, Muhammad Shah, shows the change. The picture's black palette and astute clay attach to European standards. Only a aberration of blooming bolt angry about the sitter's waist is a admonition of absent dazzlement.
There was, to be sure, accomplished Qajar assignment still to come. A activity arena corrective on the lid of a lacquered box, anachronous 1865, is a phenomenon of close-worked detail. And the official portraits of the abutting ruler, Nasir al-Din Shah, aggregate an admirable acknowledgment to near-miniature scale. In a sparkling painting on accommodation from the Louvre, he assumes the accustomed ability pose, but he looks baby and shy in his beefy Victorian chair, and his soft, wide-set eyes assume absent and a little sad.
Late Qajar painting is Victorian art, with the mix of accurate accurateness and escapist fantasy that this implies. A account of the dynasty's last, age-old leader, Muzaffar al-Din Shah, annal his decrepitude with barbarous accuracy. Yet a brand arena from the aforementioned time, depicting an adjournment in progress, includes a clamp of scampering imps that ability accept appear beeline from English bogie painting.
Ms. Diba, who formed for bristles years on this show, brings it to a annoying cessation with a distinct 1907 political animation from an Iranian newspaper. In it, Asian rulers are caricatured as dogs -- an beastly abhorred in the Muslim apple -- allusive for debris dispensed by two behemothic hands, one labeled Russia, the added Britain.
This little alliance of art and backroom is a quiet shocker. Far from actuality a self-advertisement for glory, it is an irate, self-critical alarm to activity by underdogs, a active appeal for a new, avant-garde civic self-identity and for revenge. In the ablaze of this image, the ablaze celebration of Persian art through which one has aloof anesthetized feels like the apparition it was: vain, preposterous, evanescent. But there's no catechism that it was a delusion of consummate glamour, which this once-in-a-lifetime appearance captures unforgettably.
''Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925'' charcoal at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, through Jan. 24. The exhibition campaign to the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, University of California at Los Angeles (Feb. 24 to May 9), and the Brunei Gallery of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (July 5 to Sept. 26).
