Burmese Painting: A Linear and Lateral History

Reviewed by Wendy Law-Yone
Published on the Britain-Burma Society website
Permalink: http://shwepla.net/Books/Reviews9.mv#BP

There are many artistic traditions for which Burma is renowned, but painting is not among them. To all but a handful of practitioners, collectors and scholars, the subject of painting in Burma has remained for the most part irrelevant or arcane.

Yet Burmese painters have long been prime documenters of their country's spiritual, cultural, and social history, with an artistic pedigree that dates back at least 800 years, to the early muralists and fresco painters of Bagan. Why, then, has the painting tradition in Burma been so little explored as one continuous, encompassing whole?

“Elephant Catching at Amarapura”
—watercolour by Saya Chone.

A convincing answer to this and other puzzles surrounding the history and historiography of Burmese art can be found in Andrew Ranard’s Burmese Painting: A Linear and Lateral History. Drawing on a wealth of scholarly and journalistic sources, Ranard has produced an impressive survey of Burmese painters through the ages—from the anonymous muralists of Bagan to the folding-manuscript (parabeik) illustrators of the 19th century; from the court painters and royal portrait artists of the pre-colonial period to the post-war experimenters in Traditional-Western forms; from the exponents of the Mandalay school and the Yangon school, to the most recent crop of arrivals on the international art scene.

“Tondo with Dancers”
in the Myinkaba Kubyauk-gyi, at Bagan.

It’s worth noting, as the author discloses in his introduction, that roughly a quarter of the paintings featured in this book belong to him—a collection grown from a few Burmese paintings bequeathed to him by his parents (his father, Donald L. Ranard, was a senior American Embassy official in Yangon in the mid-1960s). For all the questions of self-interest this might raise, the countervailing advantages can’t be denied. How many art historians are allowed such unhindered access to the original works under discussion? Talk about “owning” one’s material! And if at first we wonder whether this ownership might also account for the inclusion of some rather poor and/or banal paintings, we soon come round, under the author’s persuasive guidance, to his view that “it is impossible to estimate the skill of Burmese painters with snap judgments.”

“Yangon Harbour” c. 1930s.
Oil on canvas by U Ba Nyan.

Once we see, in the frescos of Bagan, the roots of caricature and whimsy still evident in the works of today’s artists, we also understand why, for example, students of the prestigious Burma Art Club of the 1920s took so readily to British cartoon art as taught by its founding members. Or why the great U Ba Nyan, sent as a young man to study at the Royal College of Art in London, might fall under the spell of Frank Brangwyn. (Possibly, as Ranard suggests, because Brangwyn, by then at the peak of his career, was at work on his murals for the House of Lords panels—and mural painting was a tradition that Ba Nyan, like all Burmese painters, was steeped in.)

“Self-Portrait” by U Ba Nyan. 1937.
Oil on canvas. Burma National Museum.

Little by little, image by image, we are made aware of the “lateral” agency in Burmese art—the multiplicity of influences absorbed into the mainstream that perhaps also explains its lack of linear progression (such as can be traced in Western art.) And by the time Ranard stands a few Burmese artists side by side with the likes of Monet, Rembrandt and Van Gogh, the comparisons are not as far-fetched as they might at first seem.

“Three Blind Men” by Paw Oo Thet.

Burma, says Ranard, is a “Galapagos Islands of Art”—a territory rich in mutated forms and idiosyncratic styles born of its unique evolutionary history. In that case, he himself seems well-placed, as a dedicated collector, student, and promoter of Burmese painting, to be its Darwin. But whereas the original Darwin, upon landing on the Galapagos, found the rocks too hot, the plants too smelly, and the iguanas dirty-looking, sluggish and stupid, Ranard’s response to his terra incognita is one of deep affection and appreciation. And it is this—more than its striking coffee-table attributes, more than the copious images reproduced in its glossy pages—that makes Burmese Painting not just a handsome catalogue of a little-known oeuvre, but a sensitive tribute to a long line of Burmese artists—major and minor—whose efforts embody the struggles and aspirations of their countrymen.

Wendy Law-Yone is a Burmese novelist living in London. Her new novel, The Road to Wanting, will be published by Chatto & Windus in the spring of 2010.