TANTRA: Tantric, Jain and Cosmic Art from India
48 pages, paperback, 245 x 320 mm, 60 colour illustrations
PRICE: £17.95
ISBN: 978 0 956682 40 6
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Accompanies an exhibition at Joost van den Bergh Ltd
This beautifully illustrated book accompanies an exquisite exhibition of 70 tantric, Jain and related objects, paintings, manuscripts and drawings.
In as far as the Indian term 'tantrism' is known in the West, it is generally linked with mystery and mysticism as well as with sex, magic and hocus-pocus. Indeed, tantrism is connected with all these and even more, as Jan van Alphen, chief curator of the BOZAR in Brussels, discusses in the introductory essay to the catalogue. Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Jainism, Vajrayana, Bönpo, Ayurveda and Shamanism are some of the philosophies, religions and sciences that were somehow influenced by tantrism.
A highlight of the exhibition is the beautiful 19th-century Rajasthani painting in gouache and gold pigment on cloth, Cosmic Manifestation of Vishnu (Vasudeva).
The exhibition, on view from 4 to 30 November 2010, is part of Asian Art in London.
Illuminator, painter, scribe, clerk, teacher, doctor of theology, restorer and binder, Mesrop was one of the greatest Armenian artists of his and following generations. He was prolific, working for at least forty-two years in Sos (New Julfa) from 1608 to 1651. This book will be the first serious study of the forty-six of his manuscripts that have survived. The focus of the book, however, is The Four Gospels, one of the few manuscripts painted entirely by Mesrop’s hand and one of the most extensively illuminated in his oeuvre. More