ART: ANCIENT, FROZEN SMILES

The National Gallery in Washington has a marvelous show this summer--"Sculpture of Angkor and Ancient Cambodia: Millennium of Glory." It is by no means a rerun of a familiar subject. Most of the world's major sculptural traditions are abundantly represented in American museums--Egyptian, ancient Greek, Gothic, Italian Renaissance, Indian and Maya. Cambodian sculpture is the exception. Yet there is no doubt that in the small Southeast Asian kingdom between the 6th century and 16th century A.D., some of the greatest stone carving and bronze work in human history was made.

Very little of it has been seen in the West--mere fragments mostly, especially if one bears in mind that most Cambodian sculpture was made as decoration for temples, a small part of a larger whole, its meaning lessened when removed. Because Cambodia was annexed as a French colony in 1863 and remained one until 1953, most of the sculpture that Europeans took from it ended up in France--notably at the Musee Guimet in Paris--rather than in England, Germany or America. But to deduce the scale, continuity and sheer aesthetic majesty of Cambodian art from such fragments is like trying to reconstruct a loaf from a single crumb.

The image of Cambodian culture that haunts the West is vague and almost ineffably romantic: the royal city of Angkor, slowly abandoned under threat of Thai occupation after 1431 but still the chief symbol of Cambodian identity, one of the largest archaeological sites in the world, with its colonnades and giant water reservoirs; its huge, impassive stone faces split by tree roots; its temple mountains and crumbling pine-cone spires. Spreading over some 150 sq. mi., it has excited dithyrambs from visitors ever since the French started going there in the 19th century. "I looked up at those towers rising above me, overgrown with greenery," wrote the novelist Pierre Loti in 1912, "and I suddenly shivered with fear as I saw a giant frozen smile looming down at me.. and then another smile, over there on another tower...and then three, and then five, and then ten."

You can't put Angkor Wat in a box and ship it to Washington, but the organizers of the National Gallery's show have done the next best thing. With the cooperation of the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh and the Musee Guimet, under the general curatorial direction of the art historians Helen Jessup and Thierry Zephir, they have assembled the first full-scale traveling exhibition of classic Cambodian sculpture in more than 50 years. (A smaller show, a dress rehearsal for this one, was seen in Australia in 1992.)

The show is a dignified call for help as well as an assertion of past cultural achievement. After 30 years of civil war and the genocidal madness of the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot, Cambodia's very name reeks of slaughter. The West needs to be reminded of its immense cultural heritage, and of the struggle--against all odds--to preserve it. Only a handful of Western historians and curators, mainly in France and America, are experts in ancient Cambodian art, and its fate within Cambodia for the past few decades has skirted catastrophe. Much of it has been looted from unguarded sites for the voracious Western art market.