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| Winged Victory of the Gulf (c) Agassiz |
Outdoor Sculpture Garden
National Museum of Bahrain
Manama, Bahrain
The Gulf States
exhibit a brilliant almost gardenlike culture (oasis would be too predictable) notable for the graceful lines and
the natural hues that seem to pervade all aspects of life from the music to the
clothing to the buildings to the artwork.
The seas of unending sand, giant dunes and dust-storms unify their
curves and dominate the landscape as the wind from the Arabian Desert merges
the slowly creeping dunes and the lazy, if persistent, repetitive action of the
slow Gulf waves.
The Outdoor
Sculpture Garden at the National Museum of Bahrain in Manama, most effectively
demonstrates this principle.
The second quiet
strength of this art collection is that it is entirely indigenous -- these are
not the works of Matisse and Rembrandt purchased at foreign auctions with unlimited
oil revenues, but rather the quiet, assertive voice of an emerging art culture.
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| The Python (c) Agassiz |
I need to confess
that I have two pieces that are by far my favourites which I have nicknamed Victory of the Gulf and the Python which to me represents the giant
serpent Python that was once
thought to encircle the globe of the ancient Greeks -- the snake that Hercules
amazed the world by lifting so many negligible feet off the ground. The resemblence of this Python to an
oil pipeline is probably not a coincidence to be dismissed.
