Shiva
The Cleveland Museum of Art has revealed it was the secret buyer of a rare, 1,000-year-old Indian sculpture of the Hindu god Shiva, sold by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo in a highly controversial auction.
Bidding at Sotheby's in New York through the London art dealer John Eskenazi, the Cleveland museum paid $4.072 million for the work, a record price for an Indian sculpture.
In a written statement, Martin Lerner, a retired curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, called the Shiva "one of the most important Indian sculptures to have come on the market in recent memory."
Carved and polished in dark gray granite, the life-size sculpture depicts the Hindu deity Shiva, known as "the Destroyer," as he shares identity with the deity Brahma, known as "the Creator."
Czuma called the work a superb example of best artistic period of the Chola Dynasty, which dominated southern India from the 10th to the 13th centuries.
The Albright-Knox acquired the Shiva in 1927 as a gift from a donor who bought it from the respected dealer, C.T. Loo. The work's "provenance," or ownership history, places it beyond the reach of contemporary laws aimed at preventing the looting of ancient artworks.
Czuma said the sculpture probably adorned an outdoor niche on the north side of a major temple in southern India, but it is not known when the work was removed. He said it was the finest of a group of five major stone statues of Shiva as Brahma acquired by American museums before World War II.
The sculpture combines the attributes of Shiva as the destroyer and Brahma as the creator to encapsulate the Hindu belief in death, reincarnation and progress toward perfection, Czuma said.
The sculpture combines the attributes of Shiva as the destroyer and Brahma as the creator to encapsulate the Hindu belief in death, reincarnation and progress toward perfection, Czuma said.
In the sculpture, Shiva is sitting on a double lotus blossom. He has a third eye and four heads, each looking in one of the cardinal directions, Czuma said. The deity's four arms indicate his special powers. Two of his hands hold a lotus and a rosary. The other two hands are positioned in gestures of blessing and teaching.
"The carving is fantastic," Czuma said. "You almost feel the flesh of the image. It was a really great master that created it."
"The carving is fantastic," Czuma said. "You almost feel the flesh of the image. It was a really great master that created it."
