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Norma Jean Calderwood’s Islamic art at the Sackler
BY RANDI HOPKINS
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Norma Jean Calderwood’s name pops up all over the Boston art scene, from the Norma Jean Calderwood Courtyard Café at the Museum of Fine Arts to the Norma Jean Calderwood directorship of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The Calderwoods — Norma Jean’s husband, Stanford, died in 2002 — left their mark, and Norma Jean’s name, on many a Boston cultural institution, including multiple curatorial positions at the Museum of Fine Arts and at Harvard University, green space at both of those institutions, a professorship at Boston College, and the directorships, in addition to that of the Gardner Museum, of the Cambridge Art Association and the Huntington Theatre Company. Mrs. Calderwood’s personal passion, and the focus of her extensive study and travel, was Islamic art, a term that encompasses a variety of traditions that have flourished since the late seventh century across a geographic area ranging from southern Spain and North Africa to the islands of Southeast Asia. In March 2002, the Harvard University Art Museums announced that 120 objects acquired by Mrs. C during four decades of travel and study had been donated to Harvard’s Sackler Museum. Starting this Saturday, the Sackler will show off its new treasures in "Closely Focused, Intensely Felt: Selections from the Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art," an exhibition of paintings, drawings, metalware, lacquer, and, most significantly, ceramics originating primarily in countries within what Harvard’s press release calls "the Iranian cultural orbit" (an area that at times extended into present-day Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Iraq, and Georgia) between the ninth and 19th centuries. Calderwood bought the first piece in her collection in Tehran while on a Museum of Fine Arts tour of Iran, an experience that led her to begin auditing art-history courses at Harvard and later to enter Harvard’s PhD program in Islamic art. During the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, she’s said to have visited 15 countries in Asia, making four trips to Iran and others to Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iraq. She also taught Asian and Islamic art at Boston College and lectured on the subject at the MFA, expanding her knowledge and honing her eye while continuing to add to her collection. Her expertise led her to assemble ceramic works that illustrate the achievements of Persian artists and artisans over a period of almost a thousand years, and to acquire important works on paper, including paintings, text folios, and illuminated frontispieces. The ceramics on view in "Closely Focused, Intensely Felt" include fine examples of bowls and plates with "sgraffiato" (Italian for "scratched") decoration and boldly painted designs of people and animals and epigraphic pieces (featuring Islamic calligraphy) ranging from those that feature graphic, stark black inscriptions to those in which floral and geometric patterns in one or two colors intersperse with the script. In lecture notes, Calderwood has explained: "The art of ceramics was one of the major achievements of the Islamic world. From lowly kitchen and storage pots of pre-Islamic times there developed wares that in technical inventiveness can stand alongside any in the world. This achievement is very little known or very little understood in the West, where connoisseurs of fine ceramics have looked continually to the Far East for the standards by which ceramics are to be judged." This gem of an exhibition should do much to expand our understanding of the cultural and technical contributions made by this historic region at a time when such understanding is sorely needed. "Closely Focused, Intensely Felt: Selections from the Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art" is at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway in Harvard Square, August 7 through January 2. Call (617) 495-9400, or visit www.artmuseums.harvard.edu
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