The role of the portrait in India between 1560 and 1860 served as an official chronicle or eye-witness account, as a means of revealing the intimate moments of everyday life, and as a tool for propaganda. Yet the proliferation and mastery of Indian portraiture in the Mughal and Rajput courts brought a new level of artistry and style to the genre.
The ninth exhibition in the Indian Portrait series focuses on the introduction of Parsi portraiture in India and an insight on their art, culture and education etc. Paintings, photographs, CDVs, cabinet card albums, engravings, lithographs, prints & collectibles etc. are the different mediums that helped to preserve history. It contains over 170 portraits and was exhibited in December 2018.
This is a survey of the past century of Indian painting, incorporating reproductions of 250 works by 80 artists from Rabindranath Tagore to M.F. Husain. The book also has an historical essay, conversations with 35 of today's leading Indian artists, biographical outlines and exhibition histories. The author's aim is to make the entire realm of contemporary Indian art accessible to the general reader by evoking the nuances of the world in which these artists live and work.
A catalogue showcasing the artistic journey of portraits from miniature to modern art. It starts with the miniature paintings done by different schools like Pahadi, Rajasthani, Central Province, Deccan, Company period, Bengal, Colonial Influence and goes all the way up to modern art. The catalogue has 37 portraits which were exhibited in October 2010.
The 50th anniversary edition of this classic work on the art of Northwest Coast Indians now offers color illustrations for a new generation of readers along with reflections from contemporary Northwest Coast artists about the impact of this book. The masterworks of Northwest Coast Native artists are admired today as among the great achievements of the world’s artists. The painted and carved wooden screens, chests and boxes, rattles, crest hats, and other artworks display the complex and sophisticated northern Northwest Coast style of art that is the visual language used to illustrate inherited crests and tell family stories. In the 1950s Bill Holm, a graduate student of Dr. Erna Gunther, former Director of the Burke Museum, began a systematic study of northern Northwest Coast art. In 1965, after studying hundreds of bentwood boxes and chests, he published Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form. This book is a foundational reference on northern Northwest Coast Native art. Through his careful studies, Bill Holm described this visual language using new terminology that has become part of the established vocabulary that allows us to talk about works like these and understand changes in style both through time and between individual artists’ styles. Holm examines how these pieces, although varied in origin, material, size, and purpose, are related to a surprising degree in the organization and form of their two-dimensional surface decoration. The author presents an incisive analysis of the use of color, line, and texture; the organization of space; and such typical forms as ovoids, eyelids, U forms, and hands and feet. The evidence upon which he bases his conclusions constitutes a repository of valuable information for all succeeding researchers in the field. Replaces ISBN 9780295951027
The seventh exhibition in the series, focuses on the development of portraiture after the coming of the camera to India. It fuelled the enthusiasm of the Indian artists and photographic studios mushroomed across the country. Artists started using photographs to enhance portrait paintings, they developed a new aesthetic that integrated aspects of painting and photography in one image.
The first biography in over sixty years of a great American artist whose paintings are more famous than the man who made them. George Catlin has been called the “first artist of the West,” as none before him lived among and painted the Native American tribes of the Northern Plains. After a false start as a painter of miniatures, Catlin found his calling: to fix the image of a “vanishing race” before their “extermination”—his word—by a government greedy for their lands. In the first six years of the 1830s, he created over six hundred portraits—unforgettable likenesses of individual chiefs, warriors, braves, squaws, and children belonging to more than thirty tribes living along the upper Missouri River. Political forces thwarted Catlin’s ambition to sell what he called his “Indian Gallery” as a national collection, and in 1840 the artist began three decades of self-imposed exile abroad. For a time, his exhibitions and writings made him the most celebrated American expatriate in London and Paris. He was toasted by Queen Victoria and breakfasted with King Louis-Philippe, who created a special gallery in the Louvre to show his pictures. But when he started to tour “live” troupes of Ojibbewa and Iowa, Catlin and his fortunes declined: He changed from artist to showman, and from advocate to exploiter of his native performers. Tragedy and loss engulfed both. This brilliant and humane portrait brings to life George Catlin and his Indian subjects for our own time. An American original, he still personifies the artist as a figure of controversy, torn by conflicting demands of art and success.
“Wonderful . . . A book to make both layman and connoisseur alike realize why pre-modern Indian painting is one of the great arts of the world.” —Neil MacGregor Through close encounters with over a hundred carefully selected works, spanning nearly a thousand years, and ranging from Jain manuscripts and Pahari and Mughal miniatures to Company School paintings, B. N. Goswamy unlocks the many treasures that lie within Indian painting. In an illuminating introduction, and as Goswamy relates the stories behind each work and deciphers the visual vocabulary and language of the painters, he brings to life the cultural, social, and political milieu in which they were created. Lavishly illustrated, and combining erudition with great storytelling, The Spirit of Indian Painting reveals the beauty of this richly varied body of work in a new and brilliant light.
