Search results for ""Author Andrew Topsfield""

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it is written mainly for the general reader and museum visitor, it includes many fine objects or pictures, some of them unpublished, that should interest specialist scholars and students.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 new acquisitions of Indian art and these are highlighted in this collection. As the book’s title implies, it also ventures beyond the bounds of the Indian subcontinent by including works from Afghanistan and Central Asian Silk Road sites as well as many from Nepal, Tibet and Southeast Asia. From the early centuries AD, Indian trading links with these diverse regions of Asia led to a widespread cultural diffusion and regional adoptions of Buddhism and Hinduism along with their related arts. Local reinterpretations of such Indic subjects, themes and styles then grew into flourishing and enduring artistic traditions which are also part of the story of this book. The selection of works ends around 1900. By the 16th century and the early modern period in India, growing European interventions and Western artistic influences under Mughal rule saw a significant shift in sensibility and the practice of more secular and naturalistic forms of court art such as portraiture. By the late 19th century, fundamental cultural changes under British rule and the advent of new technologies brought about a gradual decline in many of India’s traditional arts.

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This volume celebrates the wealth and diversity of the arts of India created for the life of courts and temples from 1000 BC to the twentieth century. Paintings, objects and photographs, ranging in date from the second century BC to the late twentieth century, reflect the variety and continuity of India's aesthetic traditions. Andrew Topsfield has contributed background essays describing aspects of Indian life related to the themes explored in the book: The Sacred Realm: Nature, Temple, Gods, Goddesses, Saint and Sadhus; The Court: Courtly Life, The Hunt, Royal Portraits, Couples and Women, Courtly Manuscripts. Catalogue entries by experts in the field comment on narrative episodes from the epics, iconographic symbolism, religious, as well as social and contextual references related to the works shown. An extensive and authoritative essay by Dr. Vishakha Desai, The Experience of Creativity in Indian Art, is included as well as an essay by Cynthia Hazen Polsky, To Beckon the Modern Eye. Each work is fully illustrated and most of these works have not been previously published. This book accompanied an exhibition of selections from the Polsky Collection and the Metropolitan Museum at the Asia Society, New York.

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Hodgkin collection here for the first time both in its entirety and in its full maturity, after a lifetime's constant improvement and refinement. Many of the works shown are recent acquisitions by Hodgkin which have never been exhibited previously. Renowned British painter and printmaker Howard Hodgkin, also an art collector, is one of the great aesthetes of the age, say critics. The celebrated artist's full collection of great Mughal art is being presented for the first time at the Ashmolean Museum in an exhibition running from early February to mid-April 2011. The catalogue includes over 110 Indian paintings and drawings from these remarkable private works that Hodgkin began acquiring whilst a school boy. "You need things to look at, things to affect your feelings, and your intelligence, and your heart" the artist has said. Many paintings shown are recent purchases never before exhibited revealing how Hodgkin has constantly refined the collection over the years. The collection comprises most of the main types of Indian court painting that flourished during the Mughal period (c.1 550-1850), including the elegant naturalistic works of the imperial Mughal court, the poetic and subtly coloured paintings of the Deccani Sultanates, the boldly drawn and vibrantly coloured styles of the Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan and the Punjab Hills. Hodgkin's own art is collected worldwide in museums as diverse as the Tate and the Phillips Collection and Yale Center for British Art in America. Named by England's Queen Elizabeth II as a Companion of Honor (2003), his unique works hold glimpses of incandescent impressions of Turner; the emotional explosiveness of Van Gogh, the colder abstractions of Pollock and De Kooning and the late canvases of Kline. Hodgkin once said his collecting had affected him as an artist but "Not in the way people think", that collecting had made him "Very aware of quality, and increasingly demanding of my own work."

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