Upcoming Lecture: The EFEO Center in Siem Reap will be hosting a lecture on Thursday 2 January 2025, at 5.30pm, titled ‘Khmer Art at the Art Institute of Chicago: Rediscovering a Southeast Asian Legacy’. Nicolas Revire, who teaches in Bangkok, is a senior researcher of the Art Institute of Chicago museum, and will host the free-to-attend presentation in English. He recently played a major role in a pilaster of Krishna being returned to Thailand and the temple of Prasat Phnom Rung, from the museum. The Art Institute of Chicago is the second-largest art museum in the United States, after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with around 35,000 objects in their Asian section. The majority of their Khmer artifacts were donated by the ultra-wealthy husband and wife duo, James and Marilynn Alsdorf, two examples are shown here, while four more were scooped up by the museum directly from the EFEO in Cambodia in 1924.Credit By :Andy.brouwer

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Future Exhibition: Royal Bronzes of Angkor, an Art of the Divine Exhibition - at the Guimet Museum in Paris, France from 30 April – 8 September 2025. The Guimet Museum in Paris is dedicating the exhibition, Royal Bronzes of Angkor, an Art of the Divine, to bronze. The highlight of this exhibition is the statue of the reclining Vishnu from the Western Mebon - an 11th century sanctuary west of Angkor - found in 1936, which originally measured more than five meters in length. This national treasure of Cambodia will be exhibited for the first time with its long-separated fragments, after benefiting in 2024 from a campaign of scientific analysis and restoration in France, with the patronage of ALIPH. It will be accompanied by more than 200 works, including 126 exceptional loans from the National Museum of Cambodia, whose presence makes it possible to draw up a chronological journey of bronze art in Cambodia, from the 9th century to the present day, through a journey leading the visitor to the major sites of Khmer heritage. Angkor, capital of the Khmer Empire that dominated part of continental Southeast Asia for more than five centuries, has preserved from its past glory monumental remains of incomparable magnitude and beauty. But if the architecture of the temples of the Khmer Empire (9th-14th centuries) and the stone statues housed there have been celebrated many times, who remembers that these Buddhist and Brahmanic sanctuaries once preserved a whole population of divinities and objects of worship cast in precious metal: gold, silver, gilded bronze? A subtle and noble alloy notably combining copper, tin and lead, bronze has given birth in Cambodia to masterpieces of statuary testifying to the loyalty of the Khmer sovereigns to Hinduism as well as Buddhism. The prerogative of the king – whose know-how was carefully preserved in workshops near the Royal Palace – metallurgy was a sacred technique, whether in Angkor (11th - 12th centuries), Oudong (16th - 17th centuries) or Phnom Penh (19th - 20th centuries). For the first time, this exhibition-event considers the special role of the sovereign, the sponsor of large bronze castings, from the Angkorian period to the modern period, where, in an astonishing continuity, art and power have remained associated in this field more than in any other. The exceptional loans from the National Museum of Cambodia, granted by the Royal Government within the specific framework of the cooperation established between the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts of Cambodia, the C2RMF (Centre for Research and Restoration of Museums of France), the EFEO (École française d’Extrême-Orient) and the Guimet Museum, bring together for the first time in the framework of this exceptional exhibition masterpieces (statuary, art objects or elements of architectural decor) as well as photographs, casts and graphic documents allowing these works of art to be placed in their cultural context, as well as in an archaeological and historical perspective. [Courtesy of the Guimet Museum website].Credit By :andy.brouwer

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The Brahma from Kutishvara: Returning to the topic of the god Brahma, a headless sculpture at the Angkor National Museum sent me on a field trip in June 2023, to the tenth century trio of brick towers of Kutishvara, located a few meters north of the Banteay Kdei north gate. My previous research had drawn a blank for this headless, four-armed statue before I was sent a picture from 1930, showing a statue of Brahma, in-situ, discovered by Henri Marchal and Henri Parmentier as they cleared the small temple. At that time, it looked almost complete, bereft of just the upper right hand and immediately identifiable as the four-faced god of creation, Brahma. It’s likely the temple’s three brick sanctuaries contained statues of the trio of gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, though the style of Brahma’s dress dates him to a couple of centuries later, to the late 12th century. Unfortunately, Brahma suffered a series of mishaps before and since his arrival at the Angkor Conservation Depot – the most serious of which was losing his head(s) to looters during the civil war period of the 1970s. The loss was included in the One Hundred Missing Objects: Looting in Angkor book published in 1993, but it remains one of the unsolved robberies of that era. In addition, the three hands holding attributes that were secured onto the statue when it was photographed in October 1930 have also disappeared over time, with just one remaining when it was pictured again in 1962. Now there are none. The most notable feature of the Brahma was the tower-like shared cylindrical chignon, with a ribbon of beads at its base, which sat on top of four smiling faces, each with their own diadem and pendant earrings. The simplistic fishtail fan-fold at the front of his pleated sampot with the wide belt, is the only other decoration on the sculpture, and identifies its creation during the Bayon art style period of Jayavarman VII. I visited Kutishvara and was more than pleased to see the circular pedestal, decorated with lotus flowers, remaining in the south tower, where our statue would’ve stood. Next to the broken brick structure was a lintel with Brahma sitting on a lotus at its center, surrounded above and to both sides by at least twenty praying adherents. Two pieces of irrefutable evidence of the statue’s original home.Credit By :Andy Brouwer

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