Volume 26, Number 4 · March 22, 1979
Indian Art and Its Illusions
By V.S. Naipaul
Much Maligned Monsters: The History of European Reactions to Indian Art
by Partha Mitter
Oxford University Press, 360 pp., $28.75
The Classical Tradition in Rajput Painting
by Pratapaditya Pal
Pierpont Morgan Library, 210 pp., $8.00 (paper)
Coomaraswamy Vol.3: His Life and Work
by Roger Lipsey. (Reviewed by Philip Rawson The New York Review, February 22, 1979)
Princeton University Press, 312 pp., $17.50
Imperial Mughal Painting
by Stuart Cary Welch
George Braziller, 120 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Indian Painting
by Toby Falk, by Robert Skelton
Colnaghi Gallery (London), 160 pp., £12.50 (paper)
Room for Wonder: Indian Painting During the British Period, 1760-1880
by Stuart Cary Welch
The American Federation of Arts, 191 pp., $8.00 (paper)
A Historical Atlas of South Asia
edited by Joseph E. Schwartzberg
University of Chicago Press, 352 pp., $150
Indian Medieval Sculpture
by Aschwin de Lippe
North Holland (Amsterdam), 411 pp., $63.25
The Mughal empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was splendid, the richest empire of its time, sucking in even the gold of Spanish America; and Mughal art had its admirers from the start. At the von Hirsch sale in London last year there was Rembrandt's copy of, or variation on, a Mughal portrait of Shah Jahan, the painter's contemporary (the turbaned head more European, less royal, the legs less pneumatic and formal). A modest tribute; but, until the work of the contemporary British painter Howard Hodgkin, no tribute like it was paid to the related art of the Hindu, Rajput principalities within the Mughal empire, particularly the miniature paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their Hindu motifs were too mysterious or simple; their flat patches of symbolic color—the world observed only to be reduced to pattern, the physical world more felt than contemplated—answered no European idea of high art until this century. This private art sank with the courts that produced it, and was forgotten.
Review, 5746 words
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