In A Tibetan Artistic Genius and His Tradition, David Jackson's focus is the Khyenri style, the least known among the three major painting styles of Tibet, dating from the mid-fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. The painting of Khyentse Chenmo, founder of the Khyenri style who flourished in the 1450s-1490s, was significant for his radical rejection of the prevailing classic Indic (especially Nepalese-inspired) styles with formal red backgrounds, enthusiastically replacing them with the intense greens and blues of Chinese landscapes. Khyentse was famed for his fine and realistic looking work, both as a painter and sculptor. His painting style has often been overlooked or misunderstood by scholars, but is a missing link in the history of Tibetan painting as it has often been misidentified as early examples of the Karma Gardri style. The Khyenri style is now most closely linked with a small sub-school of the Sakya school, the Gongkarwa. The most important in-situ murals of the Khyenri style survive at the Gongkar Monastery in southern Tibet, south of Lhasa near the Gongkar airport. There we find murals by the hand of Khyentse Chenmo himself, many of them were covered by a layer of whitewash and thus escaped destruction during the Cultural Revolution. Dr. Jackson recently discovered several of Khyentse's paintings in museums outside Tibet, some of which had been unrecognized for over a century.

-A catalog to accompany the first museum exhibition devoted to the Indian influences in Francesco Clemente's work and relation to the artistic practices and traditions of various regions in India. Features approximately 20 works, including paintings from the last 30 years and four new sculptures created especially for the exhibition. In contrast to leading conceptual art practices of the 1970s, Clemente refocused attention on representation, narrative, and the figure, and explored traditional, artisanal materials, and modes of working. Since his first trip to India in the 1970s, Francesco Clemente immersed himself in the country's rich cultures as well as the everyday life and artistic practices of local people. Transforming ancient symbols, myths, and ideas, he has created a personal visual language of dreamlike landscapes, animals, and human figures drawn from recollections of his travels. Themes of sexuality, mythology, and spirituality, along with imaginary narratives of violence, intrigue, fragmentation, love, separation, and jealousy are seen throughout his oeuvre.---

The present book is a first attempt at exploring the sacred painting traditions of Tibet from the mid-15th through 20th centuries on the basis of both the surviving pictorial remains and the extensive written sources that survive in the Tibetan language. The study of this period of Tibetan art history has in effect been neglected in recent years in favor of the earliest periods. Yet the vast majority of extant masterpieces of Tibetan Buddhist painting belong to this more recent period, and the relevant written and pictorial resources now available, though they have never been fully utilized until now, are in fact quite rich. The present study attempts in the first place to identify the great founders of the main schools of Tibetan painting and to locate references to their surviving works of sacred art. Through recourse to the artists own writings, if available, to the biographies of their main patrons, and to other contemporaneous or nearly contemporaneous sources, it has been possible to clarify many of the circumstances of the careers of such famous Tibetan painters as sMan-bla-don-grub, mKhyen-brtse-chen-mo and Nam-mkha-bkra-shis, who were the founders of the sMan-ris, mKhyen-ris and Karma sgar-bris traditions, respectively. For the convenience of students and researchers, the book includes a survey of the main available Tibetan sources and studies, both traditional and modern, as well as a detailed summary of previous Western research on this subject. It also presents the texts and translations of the most important passages from the main traditional sources. This richly illustrated volume also includes detailed indices, and it will be an indispensable guide and reference work for anyone interested in Tibetan art.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York, Oct. 7, 2011-Feb. 27, 2012.

Romio Shrestha, Tibet's foremost traditional artist, uses the age-old technique of painting with rich minerals such as gold, lapis, and garnet to provide a beautiful re-creation of revered, 400-year-old, Tibetan "thangkas" on the art of healing--long considered lost. Tibetan scholar Ian Baker guides us through these exquisite paintings, unfolding their invaluable insights to remedies for a myriad of illnesses. Full color.