The impression is unforgettable, mysterious and powerful.

As you enter the “glass box” gallery at the southern tip of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s new West Wing, your eye latches onto an 11th-century Chola Dynasty bronze sculpture from India, entitled “Nataraja, Shiva as the King of Dance.”

The work, set against a 16-foot-high wall of glass, represents the Hindu deity of destruction and procreation as he whirls in a dancelike pose within a ring of fire representing the sun.

Standing Female Figure, 1050s, Sandstone, Cambodia, Angkor, Baphuon

When first glimpsed against bright morning light that pours into the gallery, the sculpture rivets the eye with the elegance and refinement of its silhouette.

As you move closer and your eye adjusts to the light, the work shifts from a dark cutout set against the sky to a sensuous sculpture in the round with a gorgeous gray-green patina. Shiva’s bejeweled body, with its gracefully contoured pair of legs and four arms, uses gestures of the hands and feet to communicate salvation and reassurance to the faithful.

Even if you know nothing of Hinduism, it’s easy to sense the spiritual energy of this remarkable sculpture. It’s a major highlight of a trio of galleries in the museum’s new West Wing devoted to Indian and Southeast Asian art.

Organized by curator Sonya Rhie Quintanilla, who joined the museum in 2012 after serving eight years as curator of Asian art at the San Diego Museum of Art, the new installation in Galleries 237, 238 and 239 has the clarity and rigor of a textbook with beauty on every page.

That’s equally true of a portion of Gallery 234 in the West Wing containing examples of art from the Himalayas and Tibet, also part of Quintanilla’s department.

Quintanilla said the works in the Cleveland collection are so widely respected that they accounted for about half of the objects that appeared on her final exams in Indian art history at Smith College, where she earned her undergraduate degree, and later at Harvard University, where she earned her doctorate.

As she gave a recent tour of the nearly finished installation, she swept her arm in an arc and said the objects within view would be enough for her to teach a yearlong course.

“There’s so much in this collection,” she said. “It’s incredibly rich.”

India’s triangular landmass, jutting south from the Himalayas into the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, absorbed invasions and trade from every direction over thousands of years. Artistic influences came from ancient Greece and China, nomadic Scythians, and Mughal emperors who claimed descent from Genghis Khan.

Ancient, yet modern: Standing Buddha, ad 400s, Sandstone, Northern India, Sarnath.

Indian art, in turn, influenced neighboring regions in the Himalayas and Tibet, as well as Southeast Asia.

Quintanilla organized her galleries chronologically and geographically. One consequence of that method is that groups of objects are clustered according to the types of stone favored by empires and kingdoms rooted in various regions.

Gandharan sculpture of the second century, a kingdom that once ruled over present-day northwest Pakistan, is carved in a hard, bluish-gray schist well suited to precise silhouettes and linear patterns of drapery folds.

Mathura-style sculptors of the Kushana kingdom in the Ganges Valley, also dating from the second century, favored a softer red sandstone ideal for the plump, rounded forms of a voluptuous yakshi, or fertility goddess, who stands at the north entry to Gallery 237, the jumping-off point in Quintanilla’s historical survey.

The curator also installed her sculptures within settings that subtly evoke architectural forms associated with Buddhist and Hindu practices. For example, the Mathura sculptures are set on a railing that suggests decorations on the outer edge of a Buddhist stupa, a circular, mound-like structure containing the ashes of Buddhist monks.

Early Buddhist stupas in India were decorated with yakshis and other paradisiacal images meant to gather converts and donors to the faith.

Possessor of wisdom: A detail of Buddha, 600s, Sandstone, Thailand, probably Shri Thep.

Areas of the installation dominated by Hindu art are intended to evoke the iconic power of sculptures through which worshippers visually communicated with the gods by a heightening of consciousness known as darshan.

With the exception of an area devoted to highly detailed Mughal paintings of battle scenes and court life, the galleries in Quintanilla’s domain are dominated by sculpture, which makes them strikingly different from areas of the museum where paintings dominate.

And despite their age – a sizable number of the sculptures are more than 1,000 years old – they appear almost modern in economy and elegance.

For example, a fifth-century Gupta Period standing Buddha from Sarnath, India, carved in smooth, buff-colored sandstone, is a composition of sharply outlined forms reduced to essences that could have been made in the 20th century.

An equally remarkable group of Angkorean and pre-Angkorean sculptures from sixth- to 12th-century Cambodia exhibit smooth, polished surfaces along with passages of supremely restrained ornamentation. Their masterly refinement makes them eternally fresh.

The Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian galleries share a lack of embarrassment over the nude human body, yet they pursue entirely different canons of ideal beauty than those of ancient Greece and Rome. Male or female bodies depicted in the sculptures can be attenuated or plump, ascetic or zaftig.

One isn't supposed to laugh in the presence of god, but in this 11th century Chola bronze, Hanuman, the monkey hero of Hindu lore, can't help himself, being a monkey.

If bodies are covered in drapery, the fabric is clingy and revealing. Curving flesh is often clad only in jewels.

Indian art can also be tenderly erotic, as in the case of an 11th-century sculpture of two lovers that once adorned a temple in Madhya Pradesh. In it, a male lover kisses a woman by craning his neck over her face. He fondles necklaces draped over her breasts with his right hand and with his left hand he gently removes a skirt from his lover’s hips to reveal her genitalia.

The museum believes the work may be related to Tantric sexual practices, or possibly temple prostitution or readings of the Kama Sutra, a love manual.

A less-obvious observation about the galleries is that together they constitute a remarkable cultural artifact that records an unrepeatable a moment in the history of American art collecting.

The galleries under Quintanilla’s purview are the legacy of a confluence of money, market availability and curatorial acumen that occurred in Cleveland in the 1950s and ’60s.

Tiny “accession numbers’’ on labels, which list the year in which each joined the collection, show that many works were acquired between 1954 and 1983, when Sherman Lee served four years as a curator of Far Eastern art and then 25 years as director.

Lee, who made the museum what it is today in many ways, capitalized on a $34 million bequest in 1958 from industrialist Leonard C. Hanna Jr., worth roughly $275 million in 2013 dollars.

At the time, Quintanilla said, nationalist scholars in India championed the idea that Indian art should be exported to create greater awareness of the country’s cultural stature.

“Intellectuals wanted major U.S. museums to buy this material,” she said. “Objects were flooding out, and were affordable and available. The 1950s and ’60s were a golden age of collecting.”

It all came to an end in the 1970s, when Indian cultural policy changed, Quintanilla said. Yet by then, Western dealers were stocked – and Lee, armed with the Hanna millions, moved through the market with the precision of a sharpshooter.

Vishnu, 650âÂÂÂÂÂÂ700, Sandstone, Cambodia, Prasat Andet.

In 1973, to aid the growth and understanding of the collection, Lee hired Stan Czuma, a native of Poland, as the museum’s first curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art, a position he held until his retirement in 2005.

“He loved the big, powerful, monumental pieces,” Quintanilla said of Lee’s taste, which explains much of the collection’s character.

A typical purchase from the Lee era is the imposing sixth-century Cambodian sculpture of Krishna Govardhana, which depicts the pre-teen Hindu god-hero who saves the world from a catastrophic deluge by lifting a mountain like an umbrella.

After buying the torso in 1973, Czuma rediscovered the legs and base of the sculpture buried in the garden of a Belgian art collector. In one of the great triumphs of his career, he had the pieces conserved and reassembled.

It would be difficult to acquire such large works today, now that many “source countries” have restricted exports of artworks considered national patrimony. Some have pressed claims in recent years against American art museums for buying works that allegedly were looted and trafficked.

In May, The New York Times reported that the government of Cambodia wants to know whether the Cleveland museum acted legally in 1982 when it purchased a large 10th-century Cambodian sculpture of the kneeling Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god.

Cambodian officials and French scholars believe that the work, a highlight of the new West Wing, was looted from a 1,000-year-old temple called Prasat Chen.

Fred Bidwell, the museum’s interim director, said the museum has received no official inquiry from Cambodia but that it is researching the ownership history of the Hanuman.

“We’re always working to discover more about the provenance of our objects,” he said.

Despite such questions, Quintanilla said she believes the works in her collections were purchased in accordance with international laws. She called it a “guilt-free” zone where it’s possible to focus on images that embody the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain search for wisdom and enlightenment without concern over contemporary debates over cultural patrimony.

“I hope this will be a destination for everybody to feel peace and power, which is what I think everyone is after,” she said.