Bridal party

Wedding objects from many cultures prove fascinating

From left: Architectural Fantasy Cake by Cile Bellefleur Burbidge, Wedding Cake Dress by Christian Lacroix, and Wedding Cake Basket by Mary Kawennatakie Adams.

SALEM - If you associate weddings with kitsch, with artifice, with almost pathological levels of optimism, relax: I'm not here to set you straight. But "Wedded Bliss," the tendentiously titled exhibition of nuptial art from across the globe at the Peabody Essex Museum, is not out to convert anyone, and it is about as far from the tackiness of a wedding industry trade fair as you could get.

The show opened in the spring but has struggled to attract audiences, which is a shame, since it is chock-full of delights. To some extent, the museum may have itself to blame. It erred, I suspect, not only with the chirrupy title, but with its decision to use a black-and-white studio photograph of a dreamy young bride to promote the show.

The image is attractive enough - it shows off a 1970 dress by Priscilla of Boston which looked fine to me. But what makes this show complicated, revelatory, and endearingly messy is precisely its distance from the air of celestial artifice promoted by photographs like this. Instead, "Wedded Bliss" features a wonderful array of objects earthily connected to weddings from dozens of disparate cultures, from the rough-hewn to the glittering, from slickly painted portraits to intricately hennaed hands.

The curator, Paula Bradstreet Richter, claims the show originated in lunchtime conversations with museum colleagues busy planning their weddings. She is to be commended for taking these discussions, and then the whole subject, so seriously. The show goes much deeper than makeup and confetti. It includes wedding cakes and imperial crowns, origami and gowns, dresses, caskets, chests, jewelry, textiles, paintings, photographs, fans, and even a Jewish wedding contract.

The premise is simple: Weddings inspire art. Most of this art is rich in tradition. After all, the business of marriage all over the world is steeped in custom, and though the variations are endless, the themes are the same.

But because weddings are also about individuals, much of what made it into "Wedded Bliss" is intensely intimate, private, even erotic. Consider, for instance, the small watercolor painted on ivory of two pearly white breasts surrounded by sensuous swaths of gauzy white fabric. The artist, surprisingly, was not some concupiscent male voyeur attempting to illustrate the word "nubile." Rather, she was Sarah Goodridge, the distinguished 19th-century Boston miniaturist and proud owner of these fine physical attributes. Because the painting descended in the family of the statesman Daniel Webster, whom Goodridge painted at least a dozen times, art historians have surmised that the painting was presented as a love token to the widowed Webster. Goodridge was 40 at the time.

Though they were engaged, Webster and Goodridge's intimate relationship did not, in fact, end in marriage. Neither did the impressive marriage proposal - a painted self-portrait framed in a silver locket - sent by an 18-year-old Benjamin West to his beloved, Elizabeth Steele. Steele kept the miniature but rejected West.

Other objects allude to the tension marriages create between private feeling (lovesickness, hankerings, etc.) and social convention. Most striking among them is a wooden busk for a woman's corset decoratively carved by Vermont's Ebenezer White in 1782. On this uncomfortably rigid device, intended to enforce good posture, is the following inscription: "IF U LOVE ME AS I LOVE U THEN I & U WILL MAKE 1 OF 2." Lovingly, the contraption embodies all that is bittersweet about marriage.

For me the true stars of the show are the textiles and dresses. Nothing in the exhibition - indeed in the whole Peabody Essex (and believe me, the competition is stiff) - is more beautiful than the 19th-century suzani from Uzbekistan. Suzanis (the word derives from the Persian word for needle) are simply embroidered hangings or bed coverings. This one, from the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, employs gorgeous floral motifs in rich red and dark green silk, with outbreaks of sky and royal blue, yellow, and orange.

What I love about it, apart from the color, is the free-form nature of its decoration. The larger rosettes near the edges of the cotton cloth should be uniform and evenly spaced, but the central one at the top has drifted amiably over to the right. Note, too, the delightful pattern-within-a-pattern in the bottom right corner of the inner rectangle.

The whole thing is ravishing. But what is its connection with weddings? Simply that suzanis were dowry gifts, intended both as an indication of the bride-to-be's wealth and embroidery skills, and a means of perpetuating tribal symbols and totems.

In a cosmopolitan spin typical of this exhibition, Richter has hung the suzani next to several entrancing tapestries from southern Sweden. Their designs are stricter, more geometrical, but the colors are dazzling, and the intended message the same.

The catalog includes a marvelous essay by the Italian photographers-cum-anthropologists Tiziano and Gianni Baldizzone, who've spent years observing and photographing wedding customs around the world (their vibrantly colored photos are included in the show). "Weddings," they point out, "represent important sources of work for craftspeople . . . whose specialist knowledge and creativity often make them responsible for ensuring that traditions are respected and followed. . . . They often enjoy the full respect of the community and the absolute faith of those families who entrust them with the organization . . . of their children's weddings."

A section on wedding attire highlights kimonos, tunics, robes, and bridal headdresses from China, Korea, Japan, India, and Indonesia. One of the finest items is a woman's hip wrapper from Java decorated with hand-drawn motifs applied with the wax-resist method (known as "batik tulis"), all of it overlaid with gold thread. Like so many Indonesian textiles, it combines a sense of exquisite restraint with extreme sumptuousness.

Restraint is nowhere to be seen in the wedding cake designed by masterful Danvers cake-maker Cile Bellefleur Burbidge, near the end of the show. But this all-white extravaganza, designed just last year, is hard not to admire, and its placement next to other wedding cake-related objects (a whimsical ceramic teapot by Maria Superior and a wedding cake-shape basket by Kahnawake Mohawk artist Mary Kawennatakie Adams) is apt.

These three related objects in turn provide the perfect setting for Christian Lacroix's "Wedding Cake Dress," a short, witty concoction decorated with light pink appliqued rosettes that mimic effects typical of wedding cake icing. Lacroix's invention is a reminder that even flat-out kitsch can be redeemed by a flirty little wink.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.