You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Ashmolean is fortunate in having the finest collection of Indian art in Britain outside London, one which includes many works of great beauty and expressive power. For this we are indebted above all to the generosity, knowledge and taste of our benefactors and donors from the 17th century to the present. This book offers a short account of how the collection developed and a selection of some of its more outstanding or interesting works of art. While it is written mainly for the general reader and museum visitor, it includes many fine objects or pictures, some of them unpublished, that should interest specialist scholars and students. Since 1987, the Ashmolean has made many significant ne...
Following India’s independence in 1947, Indian artists creating modern works of art sought to maintain a local idiom, an “Indianness” representative of their newly independent nation, while connecting to modernism, an aesthetic then understood as both universal and presumptively Western. These artists depicted India’s precolonial past while embracing aspects of modernism’s pursuit of the new, and they challenged the West’s dismissal of non-Western places and cultures as sources of primitivist imagery but not of modernist artworks. In Art for a Modern India, Rebecca M. Brown explores the emergence of a self-conscious Indian modernism—in painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture...
The links between the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and India go back for two and a half centuries. Surgeons who had studied botany at the Garden laid the foundations of western knowledge of the Indian flora. Supplementing their written plant descriptions with botanical drawings, commissioned from Indian artists, they established collections which survive today at Edinburgh, the Natural History Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. This book tells the story of these collections, reproducing a selection of 86 exquisite, original drawings - including examples made in all three of the Presidencies (administrative units) of British India (Bombay, Bengal and Madras), between 1770 and 1860.
To scholars in the field, the need for an up-to-date overview of the art of South Asia has been apparent for decades. Although many regional and dynastic genres of Indic art are fairly well understood, the broad, overall representation of India's centuries of splendor has been lacking. The Art of Ancient India is the result of the author's aim to provide such a synthesis. Noted expert Sherman E. Lee has commented: –Not since Coomaraswamyês History of Indian and Indonesian Art (1927) has there been a survey of such completeness.” Indeed, this work restudies and reevaluates every frontier of ancient Indic art _ from its prehistoric roots up to the period of Muslim rule, from the Himalayan...
None
Jainism originates in India where it has been practised since the 6th century BC. The Jains have produced a diverse range of art that has been little known in the West. This volume is illustrated with examples from all ages, offering a comprehensive introduction to the art of the Jains and an insight into the practices, principles and beliefs of the religion. Pratapaditya Pal describes the different forms of art produced in each period: temples and shrines, wood, stone and bronze, illuminated manuscripts, monumental cloth paintings, architectural reliefs and votive tablets. The volume also includes an examination of Jain ritual and philosophical thought, an entertaining account of Jain pilgrimages and overviews of Jain cosmological painting and manuscript illustration.
If the ‘Palace of Love’, otherwise known as the Taj Mahal, is considered to be the emblem of Mughal Art, it is by no means the sole representative. Characterised by its elegance, splendor, and Persian and European influences, Mughal Art manifests itself equally well in architecture and painting as in decorative art.
"At its peak, the Mughal Empire stretched from Kabul in the northwest and covered most of the South Asian subcontinent. Descendants of Timur (Tamerlane), the Mughal emperors ruled over the land from the 16th century through to the late 17th century and are credited with producing some of the most beautiful artefacts and architecture in India. During this period, the rulers encouraged artistry, reformed government and accelerated the development of Indian transport and communications. The Mughals were a Muslim dynasty descended from the famous Mongol ruler Genghis Khan. The dynasty was founded when a ruler from Turkestan, known as Babur, defeated the Sultan of Delhi in 1526 and began to expan...
India in Art in Ireland is the first book to address how the relationship between these two ends of the British Empire played out in the visual arts. It demonstrates that Irish ambivalence about British imperialism in India complicates the assumption that colonialism precluded identifying with an exotic other. Examining a wide range of media, including manuscript illuminations, paintings, prints, architecture, stained glass, and photography, its authors demonstrate the complex nature of empire in India, compare these empires to British imperialism in Ireland, and explore the contemporary relationship between what are now two independent countries through a consideration of works of art in Ir...
This is an explanation of the reasons behind the current artistic renaissance in India, a country steeped in traditionalism, and ruled by a foreign power for two centuries. It demonstrates that the coming of independence created an uninhibited context for Indian creative genius to flower again. In the 1950s artists embarked on a quest for identity that was new, and yet would reflect their country's heritage. Since then, Indian artists have quietly brought about what may be described as a charmed revolution in Indian art. The results of this revolution, as yet little known in the West and seen in this text in colour reproductions, connect India's timeless tribal and folk art traditions with developments in 20th-century Western art, in ways which are as Indian in spirit as they are universal in appeal.