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Kampuchea Chef Khmer Art Overseas Friday, April 14, 2023
Khmer Art Overseas:
I’m posting a few of the Khmer antiquities sold in auction by Bonhams and Cornette de Saint Cyr in Paris last October. It was a very important two-day sale of the private collection of Robert and Jean-Pierre Rousset’s Asian Art, which they first began collecting in the 1920s. They sold 341 items including a number of Khmer artworks, achieving a total of €14.5 million. One Khmer artifact in particular, which was initially given a pre-sale estimate of between €10,000 to €15,000, went way above that and eventually sold for an incredible €378,375, some twenty-five times its expected selling price. I don’t know the reason for the unexpected record price, though it was an exhibit that Robert Rousset acquired from the Smit Gallery in Bangkok in April 1965 and which was displayed at an important exhibition of Ancient Cambodian Sculpture at New York’s Asia House Gallery in October 1969. A prominent sculpture with a known scholarly provenance is always likely to fetch a higher price, but this was particularly exceptional in recent times.
The damaged sandstone head is of an unknown deity, in the Bayon style of the late 12th and early 13th century, during the reign of King Jayavarman IV. The hair of the exhibit is rendered in vertical braided bands with a pearl band that surrounds the forehead and tightly frames the ears. The hairstyle and the shallow fragment of the ushnisha do not allow for a clear identification of the deity as the features are shared by both Buddha and bodhisattva figures. It stands 23 centimeters in height. For the 1969 exhibition, Asian art expert Sherman Lee wrote: ‘This fragment of a male head - probably that of a Buddha - although very incomplete, gives another version of the Bayon sculptural type. The stylised, bead-shaped locks arranged in vertical rows, the thick projecting eyebrows, the closed eyes with well-formed lids, and the sensuous mouth with its corners raised in a smile.’ Bonhams wrote the following ahead of the sale: This magnificent fragment of the time of Jayavarman VII captures, despite the section lost, an emotion that no other work of Khmer art from an earlier period had managed to deliver. The youthful face already wears all signs of maturity. The high forehead and very thick eyebrow give a feature of naturalistic interpretation that connect, like many sculptures of the period with the portrait of the King. The serene expression is amplified by the eye, closed in a deep meditation, conveying total introspection and perfect tranquility. Executed in a very fine sandstone whose quality was reserved for exceptional pieces, this head is the testimony of the magnificence of the Bayon period and the work of an inspired artist.
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