The Wonder House of Lahore

A walk through some London museums.

In "Kim", Rudyard Kipling starts the story with Kim and his friends playing outside the Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, a museum of antiquities and local arts. He describes the contents with a sense of awe:

"In the entrance-hall stood the larger figures of the Greco-Buddhist sculptures done, savants know how long since, by forgotten workmen whose hands were feeling, and not unskilfully, for the mysteriously transmitted Grecian touch. There were hundreds of pieces, friezes of figures in relief, fragments of statues and slabs crowded with figures that had encrusted the brick walls of the Buddhist stupas and viharas of the North Country and now, dug up and labelled, made the pride of the Museum".

The museums of London are wonder houses of similar style, contains some truly marvellous pieces. Here is a bit of what we saw.

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Anselm Kiefer, Royal Academy

Kiefer was a young boy in Germany at the end of WWII. His work is filled with the heavy burden of guilt and uncertainty that affected that generation. The show has paintings, drawings, and mixed media works that range from small pages to vast, gallery-filling canvases. The smaller works showed a delicacy and intimacy that I found very moving. His art is distinctive, symbolist, allegorical, and often quite disturbing. A series of pictures purport to be landscapes, filled with eerie, floating, classical statuary. Tucked away in each, off-centre and out of notice, like the figures in Jeffrey Smart paintings, are self portraits of the artist as a young boy, wearing his father's army greatcoat, and making a Hitler salute. They were very powerful. Kiefer was controversial in Germany, at a time when people avoided talking about the Third Reich. He said that as the Nazi's appropriated art to further ideology, it was important for artists to reclaim it, to fight back. I found this show fascinating and very moving. The looming U-boat pack in the forecourt was especially menacing.