Word: khmer
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Shaken Neighbor. What was ailing the Prince? A suspicious, emotional, French-educated descendant of Cambodia's medieval Khmer kings, he once performed slapstick parts in movies (which he produced himself) and has often played slapstick politics. Friends seriously reported last week that two contributing reasons for Sihanouk's bad mood might be that 1) he had been crash-dieting to lose 15 Ibs. in ten days, and 2) the U.S. transferred a former military advisory chief with whom the Prince enjoyed playing volleyball. The Prince himself accused the U.S. of supporting a clandestine radio, on South Viet...
Roaming the Ages. When "Shorty" Knox joined Albright's board of directors in 1926, the gallery already had a collection of surprising quality. It roams the ages in an almost haphazard way: an African mask, a Khmer sculpture, terra cotta tomb figures from China, a Cycladic idol that dates from the Bronze Age but looks as if it might have been sculpted yesterday. There are a few minor masterpieces from the Renaissance, works by all the major French impressionists, a first-rate collection of American art from Gilbert Stuart through Winslow Homer to the present...
This week, Manhattan's Asia House opened a show of Khmer sculpture assembled by Gallery Director George Montgomery from museums and private collections all over the U.S. It is the first Khmer exhibition ever held in this country, and it is a delight to see. The Khmer artists, though much influenced by India, developed a style of their own that outshone anything produced in what was to become Indo-China. The great temple of Angkor Wat, still Cambodia's most admired show place, was their work, but it and the other ruins of Angkor are so dramatic...
...kingdom, was sometimes even a member of the ruling class. One minister was called "the first of living artists," and there were princes only too happy to bear the title of mason (architect). In subject, the artists favored the deities of Hinduism and Buddhism, which flourished with the Khmers. Like almost all Oriental artists, they modeled their own work largely on what had been done before. The stance of the gods was apt to be ritualistic, and rarely did a Khmer statue show movement...
...figures at Asia House-whether gods, or dancing girls, or Buddha himself-are masterpieces of impassiveness, each face a study in noble calm. The people of Khmer built temple after temple, until they literally exhausted themselves; their kings fought other kings until "the dust of their armies blotted out the sun." But the faces of the gods never changed expression. Their gentle, enigmatic smile was always there, the smile of perfection and of eternal peace...