Art of Tibet: A Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collection

Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1983. Hardcover. VG/VG- (book has previous owner's name plate on front page, all pages cleart and intact - dust jacket shows some wear on top, bottom and on spine, sticker residue on back cover). Red cloth boards with silver lettering on cover and spine, green dust jacket with color illustration and white lettering, 280 pp., bw and color illustrations. "In this catalogue raisonne of a collection that is clearly the finest in the United States and arguably the finest outside Tibet, Pratapaditya Pal begins with a book-length introduction placing the art in religious context. As remarkable for its clarity and style as for the breadth of its learning, this introduction shows how Indian, Nepalise, Mongol, Chinese, and pre-Buddhist indigenous influences fused in a culture of extraordinary vigor and originality. The catalogue itself is divded into three parts - painting, sculpture, and ritual objects - each with a generous art historical introduction of its own. Of the seven manuscript illuminations and book covers, forty-seven paintings and hanging, forty-three sculptures, and twenty-two ritual objects, ranging in date from the eleventh to the twentieth century, more than half are published here for the first time. Each entry is illustrated with either a full-view or a detail photograph in black and white. In each entry, Pal meticulously describes the work, identifying as necessary, scenes or personages depicted, and then reviews relevant published scholarship. The startling color of Tibetan art is illustrated in a forty-eight-plate color section." - dust jacket description.