Dr. David Nalin first visited Asia in the 1960s and became a pioneer in the treatment of cholera. In East Pakistan, now Dhaka, Bangladesh, he became captivated by the region’s culture.
An exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art will present more than 50 works of art from Tibet, Nepal, India and Bangladesh that Nalin collected over several decades, including some pieces loaned by the Newark Museum and the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian, which he donated to those institutions.
South Asian and Himalayan works of art from the collection of Dr. David Nalin – The Rubin Museum of Art
Among the objects in the exhibition will be 18th century thangka paintings, and sculptures of stone, copper alloy, silver, and wood, including Gandharan works dating from the 4th century.
David Nalin has had a passion for collecting since early childhood. His collections of toys, baseball cards, insects, curios, minerals and primitive art made from shells, feathers, beads, and teeth, culminated in his collecting Bengali, Pala/Sena, Gandharan, and Himalayan art. His mature collecting resulted from knowledge gained from frequent visits to The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a child and later travel, in 1967, to Singapore where he visited the gallery of Helen Ling and purchased objects made of jade, terra cotta and ceramic as well as two small 15th -century Thai bronze buddhas.
That same year, Dr. Nalin has reported encountering “the sooty recycling market in the old part of the Bangladeshi capital where runners brought grimy gunny sacks full of metal they had scavenged to be recycled.” Among the objects were Pala sculptures made of bronze or copper, that appeared to be worth far more than the value of their metal content. His collecting and curiosity about Asian art reached new levels when upon his return to the United States he saw similar metal works in an exhibition at the Asia Society. His appreciation for these objects soon turned to concern for their preservation lest more of them be melted down for metal. “Realizing that the crisis of the civil war was already inevitable and with looming mass destruction of Hindu temples and households, I felt an overriding need to preserve as many of these artworks as possible,” he wrote in the catalog to the current exhibition. “Through these first-hand experiences with Pala/Sena art,” he wrote, “and through visiting exhibitions and reading many catalogues and books, I gradually acquired the knowledge, taste and ‘eye’ enabling me to create and preserve several extensive and beautiful groups of chiefly Buddhist and Hindu art works.”
The Rubin Museum of Art’s Chief Curator, Martin Brauen said, “Those of us who appreciate Himalayan art, and particularly those of us who work in the field and study this material, are indebted to David Nalin for his foresight, dedication, and generosity in sharing his collection and supporting scholarship.”
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