Safavid Iran is the focus of this spring's major exhibition at the British Museum in London, as is the dynasty's greatest ruler, Shah Abbas, writes David Tresilian Hot on the heels of a recent Louvre exhibition on a similar theme, Shah Abbas: the Remaking of Iran is this spring's major show at the British Museum in London. Focusing on the reign of Shah Abbas I, the fifth Safavid ruler of Iran (reigned 1588 -- 1629), the exhibition presents materials bearing witness to the cultural flowering that took place in Iran during Abbas's reign, focusing on architecture, literature and the visual arts. It was during the reign of Shah Abbas that many of the features of the modern Iranian state were instituted. The country's territorial boundaries were more or less fixed, particularly following Abbas's military defeats of the country's great enemies, the Ottomans to the west and the Uzbeks to the east, and a centralised administration was set up at Abbas's new capital, Isfahan. With military success and political unification came increased artistic and religious patronage, and it is the cultural flowering that came in the wake of this that forms the heart of the present exhibition. Abbas undertook an extraordinary building programme at Isfahan, constructing the vast public square, the Naghsh-e Jahan, that still overawes visitors to the city today, together with many of the mosques and other religious buildings that have become familiar parts of the cityscape. With this building programme came enhanced support for the visual arts, particularly for craftsmen producing the decorative elements for the great mosques of the Shah and of Sheikh Lotfallah that border the Naghsh-e Jahan, and for those involved in textile and carpet production. As a result of his patronage of the textile industry, Abbas was responsible for developing an industry that would become almost uniquely associated with Iran, its products becoming one of the country's best-known exports. The result of all this activity, as this exhibition shows, was the firm insertion of Iran into the regional and international order as a power to be reckoned with and as a state that had its own distinctive cultural, and particularly religious, identity. Shah Abbas supported and reorganised Iran's official Shia religion, reducing the authority of the Sufi orders and building up a corps of official clergy trained at the religious seminaries he built and endowed. As Robert Gleave writes in an informative article on "The Ritual Life of the Shrines" in the accompanying catalogue, Abbas, like other Safavid rulers, seems to have been a notably pious man, and his programme of public buildings closely identified the state with Shia Islam. He projected his own power in the shape of the religious buildings he constructed, particularly at Isfahan, and he was responsible for developing the major pilgrimage centres of Imam Ali Riza at Mashhad in eastern Iran, the eighth of the 12 Shia imams and the only one whose shrine is located in Iran, at Ardabil in the north of the country, birthplace of the Safavid dynasty, and, to a lesser extent, of Fatimeh Ma'sumeh, a sister of Imam Riza, at Qum south of Tehran. All of this gives the impression of an almost preternaturally energetic man, equally engaged in the military, political and religious sides of his rule. Contemporary records support this view, and the exhibition contains testimony from many observers, some of them European, of Abbas's energy and intelligence, as well as of the wealth of the country at the time and the opulence of his court. Housed in the former British Library reading room in the centre of the museum's inner courtyard, the exhibition takes the visitor through a series of linked spaces, beginning with a portrait of Iran when Shah Abbas came to power in 1588. Wall texts explain Iran's relation to neighbouring powers, such as the Ottoman and Mughal empires, and links to more distant countries, most notably China, are also explored, the latter having been an important trading partner. There is also investigation of Iran's links to European countries at the time, among them, this being a London exhibition, England. This first room contains twin paintings of Sir Robert Sherley, an Elizabethan adventurer, and his wife, both dressed in Safavid style. Sherley, resident in Isfahan, was employed by Abbas as a kind of diplomat-at-large, making journeys to Europe in search of alliances against the Ottomans. On one such mission, this time to Rome, Shirley had himself painted again, still in Persian dress, by Anthony Van Dyck, court painter to King Charles I. By coincidence these paintings of Sherley and his wife, usually rather hard to find, can be seen across London at the Tate Gallery until 17 May as part of an exhibition of Van Dyck's portraits. From here, the exhibition focuses on Abbas's patronage of the arts, making use of video projections to give a sense of the volumes created by his architects for the religious buildings in Isfahan, and featuring examples of the kind of metalwork, textiles and other materials that would once have furnished them. As various authors in the exhibition catalogue point out, gifts to the religious foundations supported by Abbas often included quite miscellaneous items, and Abbas himself is on record as having given collections of books, carpets and porcelain to the shrines, as well as paying for their renovation and rebuilding. According to the catalogue, on one occasion in 1601 Abbas walked to the shrine of Imam Riza at Mashhad as a pilgrim from Isfahan, a distance of 600 miles, prostrating himself when its gilded dome came into view. This was only a few years after Mashhad had been taken from its Uzbek occupiers, and the catalogue essay by curator Sheila Canby contains the intriguing detail that the Abbasid caliph Haroun al-Rashid of Arabian Nights fame is also buried in Mashhad, having died there in 809 CE during a conflict on the Abbasid Empire's eastern borders. In organising the exhibition, the British Museum has drawn on its own collection of Safavid materials, as well as on loans from various European and international museums. It is an oddity of the exhibition that many of the contributions made by the Iran Heritage Foundation, an Iranian body responsible for the country's heritage, come in the shape of magnificent Chinese Yuan dynasty ceramics, highly prized in Iran during the Safavid period. However, there are also examples of manuscripts, textiles and other items lent by the National Museum of Iran in Tehran. Ideally, one would want to have the catalogue in addition to visiting the exhibition, since this contains detailed notes on the exhibits and overviews of the history of the shrines. This exhibition is being promoted as the latest in a series taking an historical figure as a kind of peg on which an account of the time in which he lived can be hung. The last example of such life- and-times exhibition-making was the museum's Hadrian exhibition in 2008, which arranged an account of Roman civilisation around the figure of the Emperor Hadrian. It is hardly the museum's fault if Shah Abbas, unlike Hadrian and other rulers before or since, did not make his own image into a token of the power of the state. Whereas images of Hadrian proliferated throughout the Roman Empire during the latter's rule -- the Hadrian exhibition made much of the emperor's famous visit to Egypt in 130 CE and of his self-presentation as an ancient Egyptian pharaoh -- a similar proliferation did not take place in Safavid Iran, and information about Abbas himself is sparse. As a result, it might be felt that this exhibition has been arranged around an absent centre: there are no images of Abbas of the kind made for his European contemporaries, such as Queen Elizabeth I of England, for example, or King Philip II of Spain. Perhaps there is also some deeper preference at work besides the demands of an inherited format. When the Louvre in Paris organised an exhibition on Safavid Iran two years ago ( Le Chant du monde, l'art de l'Iran safavide, reviewed in the Weekly in October 2007), the materials on display were presented in relation to an idea, "the song of the world," signaling the way in which they expressed an opposition in Safavid culture between the prose of this world and art's function as a shadow of the paradise to come. Is it possible that in Shah Abbas: the Remaking of Iran one sees an expression of the British love of biography? In the exhibition itself the biographical approach is quickly abandoned, and attention turns instead to the development of the art and architecture of the city of Isfahan and of the shrines at Ardabil, Mashhad and Qum. Shah Abbas: the Remaking of Iran, British Museum, London, 19 February -- 14 June 2009. A tradition modified ALSO IN London, and also featuring artwork from Iran, is an exhibition entitled Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East at the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea. A new exhibition space, carved out of the former Duke of York's headquarters off the King's Road, the Saatchi Gallery is the personal project of British advertising executive and art collector Charles Saatchi. The gallery opened last year with an exhibition of contemporary art from China, and this second show presents work by nearly two dozen contemporary artists from across the Middle East. Saatchi seems to have acted as his own curator, and the artworks on display have been chosen to reflect the gallery's aim of presenting work by contemporary artists who may never have exhibited in London before. There is a lot of painting on display, though out the back in an extension there is a collection of sculpture, broadly speaking, that makes up a kind of separate installation (in the opening show of Chinese art this space was used for a memorable installation of model pensioners in motorised wheelchairs, moving around like slow-motion dodgems). Elsewhere, there is some photographic work and a few other large constructions, a model of Beirut made up of odds and ends and complete with street sounds being memorable. The scale of the work tends to be on the large side, and Saatchi seems to favour bold gestures. He also seems to be drawn to certain, perhaps rather predictable themes: from this show of Middle Eastern art one might be forgiven for thinking that contemporary Arab and Iranian artists are mostly concerned with issues of gender and particularly with what might be thought of as women's issues. Many of the pieces on display take women's work as a theme, making gestures of protest at its confinement to the household and the domestic sphere in recipes that owe something to similar work produced in the United States and Europe. While this is not the case for all the artists shown, it is possible to get the impression that these are artworks reading off the same hymn-sheet, all in search of the same, possibly western buyers. It is noticeable how many of the Arab artists whose work is on display are not themselves resident in the Arab world. Interestingly, this seems not to be the case for the Iranian artists whose work is on display, and one wonders, not for the first time, about the workings of the contemporary art scene in Tehran. To the untrained eye the work as a whole seems to reflect not only the taste of its collector, but also that of the western market for which it has been assembled. However, the Saatchi Gallery is free, has an ambitious programme of exhibitions, and architecturally makes ingenious use of what seems to have originally been an office building, judging by the still somewhat cramped vertical circulation. At the top of the building there is a supplementary space, labeled the Phillips de Pury & Company Gallery, in which a separate collection of modern art from the Middle East is on show. This includes works by many well-known names, such as paintings by Egyptian artists Gazbiyya Sirry ('Fantasy from Life', 2006) and Abdel-Hafiz Farghali ('Istanbul,' 2008), and sculpture by Adam Henein. Most of the artists whose work is on display in this room were born in the 1930s or 1940s, meaning that the work, even when produced quite recently, can be seen as belonging to one or two generations. Painting by modern Iraqi artists is also on display, including work by one of the earliest of modern Iraqi painters, Abdul-Qadir al-Rassam (b. 1882), and by a founding member of the Baghdad Group, Shakir Hassan al-Said (b. 1925). The room as a whole shows off some of the ways in which artists from the region worked over the mid to late 20th century. Perhaps the ideal visit to the Saatchi show would be to start at the top and work downwards, even if this means resisting the curator's intentions. Or perhaps someone in London could be persuaded to host a large-ish show of modern Middle Eastern art, which could serve as a background for the contemporary work that the Saatchi Gallery has placed on display. Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East, at the Saatchi Gallery, London, until 9 May.
