Hot on the heels of the show of Bob Dylan’s paintings at the Gagosian, there’s a show of Rabindranath Tagore’s drawings at the Asia Society Museum.  The great Bengali poet and novelist, who died in 1940, is revered both in India and abroad as a pivotal cultural figure, who linked his country’s enormous, mythological past with a free and independent future.  I find what poetry of his that I’ve read in translation a bit sentimental, and his image self-consciously exotic, as if it were designed to please a westerner’s idea of a mystic.  I’ve always preferred the face that Jawaharlal Nehru presented for India – one of refinement and modernity.

Tagore began drawing and painting late on life, when he was 63.  (The show is called Late Harvest.)  There’s no denying his passion for the media.  He completed over 2,500 works before he died.  Some are vivid graphically, with a palette of inky blacks and surreal earth-tones.  But there’s little spatial and emotional complexity in them, and they feel more like illustrations than drawings.  Because many feature naturalistic figures in flattened backgrounds, and have a dreamy, symbolic cast, they reminded me of drawings by Francesco Clemente.  But Clemente’s drawings are erotically and mythologically charged.  They seem naive at first glance and then pull you deep inside.  Tagore’s drawings are simply appreciated and forgotten.

No artwork manufactured before the nineteenth century was meant to be displayed in a museum; it was meant to be out in the world, and almost always integrated with architecture.  We’re all accustomed to seeing classical Greek and Roman statuary as relics, and their oldness and brokenness makes them powerfully romantic.  These ancient and precious things, we think, have been battered by history.  But the show of Gandharan art at the Asia Society Museum is frustrating because the work is very literally fragmented.  The bits of stone statuary on display are so small and so incomplete that it’s difficult to imagine what kind of power they originally possessed.

The exhibit included pieces of stone that once served as stair risers, room dividers, pillars, false dormers, and friezes.  Each has been ripped from its original structure and pinned to the museum wall.  Some, like the figures of Buddha, are effecting.  Some, like the tiny panel above, that illustrates Maya’s dream of Buddha entering her womb in the form of an elephant, are tantalizing.  But each piece is just one flash of something.  Some pieces of sculpture, particularly those that were once part of friezes, were almost certainly intended to be appraised from below, from the side, or in dark shadow.  When seen straight on, in bright lights, as they are now, their compositions become strangely distorted and overbearing.  Each scrap is engaging, but hints at something much larger.