Robyn Maxwell
PER
Robyn Maxwell Maxwell
Robyn Maxwell, the coordinating curator and an expert on the textiles of Southeast Asia, said that the deliberate thrust is that there is no one Islamic art. Ms. Maxwell, who also teaches the history of art at the Australian National University, said she was always astonished when the basic texts on Islamic art cover Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and India, and then abruptly stop, rarely mentioning Southeast Asia. In the context of controversy over Islam's rules about depictions of the Prophet Muhammad and, more generally, the human figure, Ms. Maxwell said, this was a way to show that the Islamic courts in Southeast Asia sanctioned images of humans, if in distorted form. Robyn Maxwell, the coordinating curator and an expert on the textiles of Southeast Asia, said that the deliberate thrust was that there was no one Islamic art. Maxwell, who also teaches the history of art at the Australian National University, said she was always astonished when the basic texts on Islamic art cover Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and India, and then abruptly stop, rarely mentioning Southeast Asia. Maxwell said, this was a way to show that the Islamic courts in Southeast Asia sanctioned images of humans, if in distorted form.