Arthur Upham Pope and a New Survey of Persian Art

Arthur Upham Pope and A New Survey of Persian Art Edited by Yuka Kadoi LEIDEN | BOSTON For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV Contents Preface and Acknowledgements xi List of Illustrations xiv Abbreviations xviii Note to the Reader xx Notes on Contributors xxi Introduction 1 Arthur Upham Pope and A New Survey of Persian Art 3 Yuka Kadoi Part 1 Pope, Ackerman, and Their Peers 2 The Scramble for Persian Art: Pope and His Rivals 15 Robert Hillenbrand 3 Gendered Politics of Persian Art: Pope and His Partner 47 Talinn Grigor Part 2 Arthur Upham Pope: Life and Achievements 4 Arthur Upham Pope: His Life and Times 77 Jonathan M. Bloom 5 Archaeology in Iran and the Experience of Arthur Upham Pope 97 Donald Whitcomb 6 Arthur Upham Pope and the Study of Persian Islamic Architecture 111 Bernard O’Kane For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV viii contents Part 3 Curators, Collectors, and Art Dealers: Pope and Pre-Islamic Persian Art 7 ‘The Greatest Enterprise’: Arthur Upham Pope, Persepolis and Achaemenid Antiquities 127 Lindsay Allen 8 Arthur Upham Pope and the Sasanians 169 Judith A. Lerner Part 4 Curators, Collectors, and Art Dealers: Pope and Islamic Persian Art 9 The Rise of Persian Art Connoisseurship: Arthur Upham Pope and Early Twentieth-Century Chicago 235 Yuka Kadoi 10 Arthur Upham Pope and Collecting Persian Art for Kansas City 267 Kimberly Masteller 11 Equivocal Position as Expert or Dealer! The Long and Contentious Relationship of George Hewitt Myers and Arthur Upham Pope 291 Sumru Belger Krody 12 My Dear Holmes: Arthur Upham Pope and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 309 Laura Weinstein 13 Filming, Photographing and Purveying in ‘The New Iran’: The Legacy of Stephen H. Nyman, ca. 1937–42 327 Keelan Overton For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV Contents ix Part 5 Arthur Upham Pope: His Legacy 14 Surveying Persian Art in Light of A Survey of Persian Art 373 Sheila S. Blair 15 Arthur Upham Pope: A Personal Memoir 397 Cornelia Montgomery Index 413 For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV FIGURE 13.1 Luster tilework revetment (including the signed and dated mihrab, see fĳig. 13.2) in the tomb of Imam Reza, Shrine of Imam Reza, Mashhad. Photograph by Stephen H. Nyman, 1937, M3-13 (COURTESY OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, FINE ARTS LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY). For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV CHAPTER 13 Filming, Photographing and Purveying in ‘The New Iran’: The Legacy of Stephen H. Nyman, ca. 1937–42* Keelan Overton I think Arthur [Arthur Upham Pope] has been underrated in terms of his ability as a photographer. There I think he needs real re-study, particularly the photographs in the Survey which were the result of several expeditions and done under the most difffĳicult circumstances . Those photographs are really tremendously important. I know how important they are because I’ve been back since and the buildings have been pretty badly damaged. Without the Survey to go by, one would be hard put to know what they really looked like originally.1 … We [Harvard] have a proportionally very small number of photos ante- dating World War II for Iran . Your [Stephen H. Nyman] photographs will greatly enhance this collection and their association with the monu- mental Pope Survey provided them with a whole extra dimension.2 * This essay is based on research presented between 2012 and 2014: “Doris Duke, Arthur Upham Pope, and Collecting Persian Art in the Early Twentieth Century,” A Scholars Day Workshop: Collecting Byzantine and Islamic Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 2012; “Patterns of revivalism: the Safavid/Pahlavi case study through a pan-Islamic lens,” Historians of Islamic Art Association Biannual Conference, Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2012; and “The global legacy of the Masjid-i Shah (blessing or curse?): the recreation of Islamic space and its tile revetment,” Encounters with Islamic Art: Reception, Revival, and Response, University of Michigan, February 2014. For generous invitations and travel funding, I am grateful to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art. For invaluable archival support, I thank András Riedlmayer and Joanne Bloom (Harvard), Dawn Sueoka and Maja Clark (Shangri La), David Hogge (FGA), and Stephanie Nyman. Finally, I am indebted to Muhammad Mottaghi for sharing his detailed photography and knowledge of inscriptions. 1 Transfer of cassette tape from Edward M. M. Warburg to Rexford Stead, November 1978 (quoted in Surveyors, 272). 2 Letter from Jefff Spurr, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, to Stephen H. Nyman, September 16, 1985. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309906_014 For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV 328 Overton Arthur Upham Pope (1881–1969)—the simultaneously pioneering, domineer- ing, and controversial individual inspiring this volume—typically frames scholarly understanding of American contributions to Persian art history. While Pope’s economic motivations, purveying of Iran’s cultural heritage, and aestheticization of Persian art have been rightly scrutinized, especially in the recent historiography, his photographic skills are incontrovertible (for their day) and the long-term value of his archive is signifĳicant (see Warburg above).3 The current understanding of Pope’s photographic oeuvre is largely limited to the approximately two hundred and fĳifty plates bearing his name in volume 5 (Islamic Architecture) of the original 1938–9 edition of A Survey of Persian Art.4 Another important resource is a collection of 99 large-scale prints, including some Survey images, which Pope exhibited in architectural photography shows during the 1930s and subsequently donated to Harvard University in 1948.5 Approximately two decades later, in 1966, the physical assets of the Asia Institute (former American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology)—to include the bulk of the photographs taken by Pope and his colleagues during the nine seasons of the Architectural Survey—were transferred to Shiraz’s Pahlavi University. According to Rexford Stead, Pope’s “coadventurers” in Iran included “Stephen Nyman and Donald Wilber, Eric Schroeder, Farajollah Bazl, and Robert Byron.”6 The latter four individuals are well-known in the historiography of Persian art, and their names appear regularly in the credit lines of 3 Warburg was a patron of the Damghan excavation; for a photograph of him with Pope, see Surveyors, 231. A variety of opinions on Pope and his approach to Persian art are presented in Muscarella 1999, Majd 2003, Grigor 2004, and Rizvi 2007, among others. For a recent analysis of Pope’s photography, see Kadoi 2016. 4 See Donald Wilber in Surveyors, 264. 5 For a summary of this collection (“A. U. Pope photographs of Iran”), which was part of Pope’s larger efffort to persuade the university to acquire his entire archive, visit http://id.lib.harvard .edu/aleph/012202878/catalog (accessed May 18, 2015). Individual images can be searched on VIA (Visual Information Access), http://via.lib.harvard.edu/via/deliver/advancedsearch?_ collection=via. Pope’s global photography exhibitions are discussed in Surveyors, 273–82; on the far left of the installation shot of the 1932 exhibition at the Musée Guimet (ibid., 273), one can see Harvard, Pope:045. Another important collection of Pope’s photographs is preserved in the University of Michigan’s Islamic Art Archives. The Arthur Upham Pope Collection includes 49 rolls of black and white negatives, hence approximately 1,000 photographs (3/4 more than the published Survey corpus). For further information, visit http://www.lsa .umich.edu/histartvrc/ (accessed February 24, 2014). I am grateful to Christiane Gruber for bringing this archive to my attention and to Cathy Pense and Kim Schroeder for facilitating my research. 6 See Rexford Stead in Surveyors, 24. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV Filming, Photographing and Purveying in ‘the New Iran’ 329 the volume 5 Survey plates. By contrast, little is known of Stephen H. Nyman (1909–88), whose name is not associated with a single Survey plate but who in fact provides one of the most comprehensive, accessible, and behind- the-scenes windows into the American Institute’s effforts in Iran ca. 1937–42. Nyman stands behind the lens of many of the fĳieldwork photographs of Pope and his associates in Surveyors of Persian Art, and it was Nyman who often provided Pope with detailed technical advice.7 This particular “coadventurer” was also responsible for expanding the scope of the Institute’s documentation from photography alone to both stills and fĳilm. The fruits of Nyman’s fĳilming expertise were three color fĳilms each aver- aging approximately twenty minutes: “The Art of Persia” (focusing on the ‘crafts’ of ceramic tilework, khatamkari, printed cotton textiles, and miniature painting);8 “Iran: The New Persia” (a travelogue-like introduction to the coun- try); and “Weaving a Persian Rug” (tracing the step-by-step production of carpets). These fĳilms are rare records of the cultural climate—urban land- scapes, conditions of monuments, artistic production—during the latter years of the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925–41), and, to a lesser extent, the opening ones of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941–79). Nyman shot the majority of his footage between 1937 and 1942, but the fĳinished fĳilms were not copyrighted and circulated by the Asia Institute until 1947.9 In terms of cities and monuments, the fĳilms are rather narrow in scope. Particularly favored are the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, especially the Mosque of Gawhar Shad; the Masjid-i Shaykh Lutfallah, Masjid-i Shah, Madrasa Chahar Bagh, Ali Qapu, and Chehel Sutun in Isfahan; and the Maidan-i Sepah, Bank-i Melli (Ferdowsi Avenue), and Police Headquarters in Tehran.

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