Material legacy of divinity

There are two things most Westerners think they know about Buddhism: It is the one religion that can accommodate atheists and one of its goals is to escape the material cycles of this world in favour of an immaterial enlightenment.

That is why Lama, Patron, Artist: The Great Situ Panchen, newly opened at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, may come as a surprise. This landmark show, which was organised by the Rubin Museum for Himalayan art in New York, seems to have a fully religious, divine sensibility — no atheistic doubt in sight — as expressed through the most deluxe of material goods.

Situ Panchen was the powerful Tibetan lama who made or designed or commissioned the featured objects in this show, in the early and middle years of the 18th century. After decades of sectarian strife, during which Situ's religious order, Karma Kagyu, almost got wiped out, Situ set about bringing it back to prosperity. He had grown up in southeast of Tibet, around the kingdom of Derge near the border with China, and as an adult used his semi-autonomous native land as a power base, founding the grand new Karma Kagyu monastery of Palpung and spreading its influence all the way to Beijing.

This show makes clear that the rebirth Situ had in mind for his order had a rebirth in its art placed front and centre.

The new art that Situ encouraged was literally a renaissance — a self-conscious revival of an earlier revolution in Tibetan art that the Karma Kagyu order had brought about around 1600. Called the Encampment style, it was named after the mobile court from which the Karma Kagyu leaders, known as the Karmapa lamas, led their movement. Its paintings took the Day-Glo, twisting figures the Tibetans had inherited from the Buddha's own Indian culture and merged them into the soft, atmospheric landscape settings, mostly in blues and greens and greys, then being imported from China.

This show begins by setting out that back story, via works from both traditions and then from their earliest merger in Tibet. And then we discover that cross-pollination almost came to nothing, since the great Karma Kagyu encampment was razed by sectarian opponents in the 1640s.

It is hard not to imagine that almost a century later, when Situ revived his order's style in art, it was also meant to stand for a revival of the order's larger fortunes.

In his writings, Situ proudly refers to "my new creation based on Chinese scroll painting" that was innovative "in a hundred thousand (particulars of) style". It is tricky understanding what those particulars were: It is very hard to know what is from Situ's own hand, what was designed by him and then farmed out to artisans, what was commissioned by him, what is a close or distant riff on Situ's ideas or a much later copy of something from his time.

Overall, in a picture such as The Arhat Kanakabharadvaja, the style that has Situ at its root gives us a sense of a material but not-quite-real world that never comes into perfect focus (the Chinese landscape contribution to the Encampment style, all in watery blues and greens) but that acts as a background for holy elders (the "Arhats" are colourful immigrants from Bhuddhist India, in sari-bright reds and oranges) who are crisp and infinitely present. Which, of course, seems to get at some of Buddhism's fundamental conceits.

It also shows how "style" is not quite the right word for the Encampment mode: It does not do the usual "stylistic" trick of borrowing good-looking elements from two foreign cultures, then reworking them into something whole and new.

It uses its separate borrowings for very particular ends, keeping them apart but also in superb, and almost philosophical, tension.

After all, here is Situ Panchen, embattled heir to an entire monastic tradition — he became its leader all at once in 1732, at 33, when two senior Karma Kagyu figures died at the same time — and what does the great cleric spend his time doing? Learning to draw and paint, and then promoting new ways of rendering his religion's sacred stories, traditions and figures.

For the first time, this show systematically sets out how Situ, on top of reviving a major religious movement, was also the saviour of an entire artistic tradition.

Situ's name and reputation are not new to scholars — he is a rare Tibetan artist who is decently documented, with surviving diaries and an autobiography and other historical mentions — but his artistic legacy has never been spelled out in images before.

Situ clearly realised that compelling works of art have a kind of divinity to them. His own greatness was celebrated in pictures that depict him as an artist and patron, with lesser painters shown working by his side.

The question is whether that divinity comes from someplace beyond the paintings themselves, or lives only in their pigments and our earthly, art-loving eyes.