Malraux’s Buddha Heads: Fragments of the Past and the Sculptural ‘Gothic-Buddhist’

Prof. Gregory Levine
Associate Professor in Japanese Art
University of California, Berkeley

Monday, 26. October 2009
18:30 – 20:00
KO2 F 174
University of Zurich
Karl Schmid-Strasse 4
8006 Zürich

In 1931, André Malraux exhibited in Paris fragments of 4-5th-century Buddhist sculpture from Afghanistan. The exhibition, primarily of torso-less heads, caught the eye of the press, but the undocumented nature of the finds invited harsh comment from the academy. Malraux remained fuzzy about provenience, but he described the fragments as objects rescued from distant sands, exotic to European eyes yet strangely familiar. They commune intimately, he suggests, with the French Gothic; they are works of “Gothic-Buddhist” art. Shortly thereafter a selection of Malraux’s fragments were shown in New York; several entered North American museum collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

As works of “Gothic-Buddhist” art, Malraux’s fragments became part of larger modern debates about early Buddhist art and, through his Voices of Silence, were incorporated into his universalist, psychological readings of the formal similarities that appear between works of temporally and geographically distant cultures. Malraux’s fragments prompt a number of questions regarding the modern circulation and reception of Buddhist sculpture. They also provoke reconsideration of the body parts of Buddhist iconic statuary removed from sacred sites in Asia, incorporated into scholarly discourse, resituated within museums and domestic spaces, and replicated in popular and consumer cultures.