Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive.” So wrote the great Persian lyric poet Hafiz. Among the many things that may gratify readers of ANTIQUES, any alliance between food and art must be high on the list. Those two join forces in the new exhibition The Art of Dining: Food Culture in the Islamic World at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), which serves up for public delectation over two hundred objects—tableware, manuscripts, paintings, and more—dating from antiquity to today. “Visitors will have an opportunity to see a lot of stellar works of Islamic art,” says Katherine Kasdorf, the museum’s associate curator of arts of Asia and the Islamic world. “And the theme of food and eating and coming together for a meal is something just about everybody can relate to.”
The Art of Dining is especially well-placed geographically because Detroit is home to one of the largest Arab American communities in the country. “We thought that it’s been a while since the DIA had an Islamic art exhibition,” Kasdorf says, “and that this would be an amazing one to have here.” The show travels from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), whose rendition, Dining with the Sultan: The Fine Art of Feasting, debuted late last year. When the show reached the Midwest, the DIA found Dining with the Sultan needed a name change to better fit its community’s interests. “At the DIA, we do a great deal of outreach, and we have conversations with visitors and other folks in our community to get feedback. . . . We found that the LACMA title wasn’t quite as effective for our audiences.”
Many of the objects on view originate from and were used in homes across the wide geographical area influenced by Islam, encompassing the Middle East, central Asia, and India. Especially compelling is the tableware, which, despite its functional nature, is so ornate that it gives new meaning to the term “fine dining.” Just imagine wine or water pouring from the rooster’s beak of a thirteenth-century Persian fritware ewer, or salt being scooped from a seventeenth-century tinned-copper salt cellar, its lid and base inscribed with poetic verses.
Royals as well as wealthy commoners fed their interest in gastronomy and gourmet culture by accumulating cookbooks. Although subject to scholarly debate, it is believed that cookbooks were not used primarily by cooks but by the Islamic elite, who found in them another source of visual delight. That theory is supported by The Ni’matnamah Manuscript, a highly ornamental collection of recipes featured in The Art of Dining that was commissioned by a central Indian monarch, the sultan of Mandu, in the fifteenth century. An eye-catching illustration from this volume occupies the cover of the exhibition catalogue, showing two finely dressed women serving food from decorative ceramic dishes to a sultan-like figure tucked into a royal throne, in a fusion of the Turkman-Shīrāz and Indic art styles.
Manuscripts unrelated to cooking are also included in the show, though many feature full-page depictions of feasts and other forms of dining. A watercolor from a manuscript of the Diwan of Hafiz entitled An Old and a Young Man and a Woman Having a Picnic (mid-1600s), attributed to the Persian artist Muhammad Ali, portrays a woman and two men happily drinking wine as a tree behind them curves to its right and touches a hill or mountain that swells like an ocean wave. Traditional paintings are also exhibited in the show, among them a nineteenth-century Persian work depicting wealthy women enjoying tea-time around a samovar. Another is a famous Mughal snapshot of plein-air entertainment, Princes of the House of Timor or Humayun’s Garden Party (1550–1555) by Mír Sayyid `Alí.
Not forgotten is the sufra, a cloth commonly used by members of the Islamic diaspora to cover the floor or drape a low table during a meal. In The Art of Dining, the centuries-old accessory gets the digital treatment: four plates embedded with screens sit at the center of a sufra-covered table and shuffle between images of historical dishes crafted by Najmieh Batmanglij, an Iranian-American chef based in Washington DC. Visitors are encouraged to sit down at the table as if at a meal, menus explaining Batmanglij’s recipes and pieces of facsimile pita bread arrayed in front of them. Created for Dining with the Sultan, the sufra exhibit is inspired by the Virtual Dining Table in the DIA’s European arts wing, a pedestal table on whose surface are projected videos showing several courses of French cuisine being served and whisked away, with accompanying sound effects of rustling linen and clinking glasses.
Like a smorgasbord, The Art of Dining aims to offer a sampling that everyone can enjoy. As Kasdorf explains, “I do hope that, whatever background somebody might have had in Islamic art before they entered the show, they can exit with an appreciation and a greater understanding of art from these regions, and that they’ll appreciate the beauty of the objects, too.”
The Art of Dining: Food Culture in the Islamic World • Detroit Institute of Arts • to January 5, 2025 • dia.org
