New Book | Indian Cotton Textiles from the Karun Thkar Collection
From ACC Distribution:
John Guy, Indian Cotton Textiles: Chintz from the 14th to the Early 20th Centuries in Karun Thkar Collection (New York: ACC Art Books, 2015), 172 pages, ISBN: 978-1851498093, $70.
India has been at the heart of the global trade in textiles since ancient times, and cotton has been at the heart of the Subcontinent’s economy for millennia. Indian dyed and painted cottons were admired in and traded to the Far East and the Mediterranean world for many generations before European interest in chintz created a new market. The trade in Indian cloth flourished due to the ability of its craftsmen to create a multitude of detailed and expressive patterns with strong and fast colors. Such textiles gained high esteem among the elite at home and abroad, ultimately acquiring heirloom status.
Karun Thakar has been collecting textile art for more than 30 years, and has one of the world’s leading private collections from the Indian Subcontinent, with costume and fabrics from the 14th century through to the early 20th. Aspects of the Thakar Collection have been exhibited in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The Indian dyed and painted cotton cloths in the Thakar Collection are perhaps the best in private hands. Many have never previously been published. Dating from the 15th century onwards, the collection illustrates the trade in textiles across the Indian Ocean with the Malay-Indonesian world, with Sri Lanka, Armenia and Europe, as well as within the Indian domestic market.
John Guy is the Florence and Herbert Irving Curator of the Arts of South and Southeast Asia, Department of Asia Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London. His major publications include: Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East (1998), Indian Temple Sculpture (2007), Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India, 1100–1900, and Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia (2014).
2014 Dissertation Listings
From caa.reviews:
Dissertation Listings
PhD dissertation authors and titles in art history and visual studies from US and Canadian institutions are published each year in caa.reviews. Titles can be browsed by subject category or year.
Titles are submitted once a year by each institution granting the PhD in art history and/or visual studies. Submissions are not accepted from individuals, who should contact their department chair or secretary for more information. Department chairs: please consult our dissertation submission guidelines for instructions. The annual deadline is January 15 for titles from the preceding year.
In 2003, CAA revised the subject area categories of art history and visual studies used for all our listings, including dissertations. These categories are listed in the Dissertation Submission Guidelines.
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The index for 2014 lists eight eighteenth-century dissertations completed, including:
• Cannady, Lauren, “Owing to Nature and Art: The Garden Landscape and the Eighteenth-Century French Interior” (IFA/NYU, T. Crow)
• Fox, Abram, “The Great House of Benjamin West: Family, Workshop, and National Identity in Late Georgian England” (Maryland, College Park, W. Pressly)
• Francis, Razan, “Secrets of Enlightenment Spain’s Contested Islamic Craft Heritage” (MIT, D. Friedman)
• Marchand, Marie-Ève, “L’histoire de l’art mise en pièces. Analyse matérielle, spatiale et temporelle de la period room comme dispositif muséal” (Université de Montréal, J. Lamoureux)
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and forty-one dissertations in progress, including:
• Brosnan, Kelsey, “Seductive Surfaces: Anne Vallayer Coster and the Eighteenth-Century Still Life” (Rutgers, S. Sidlauskas)
• Cooper, John, “Imperial Balls: The Arts of Sex, War, and Dancing in India, England, and the Caribbean, 1780–1870” (Yale, T. Barringer, R. Thompson)
• DiSalvo, Lauren, “Micromosaics as Grand Tour Souvenirs in Europe from the Early Eighteenth Century to the Late Nineteenth Century” (Missouri, M. Yonan, K. W. Slane)
• Gratta, Eva, “‘Great Links of the Chain’: Maritime Imagery in North America, 1750–1850” (CUNY, K. Manthorne)
• Greenberg, Daniel, “A New Imperial Landscape: Ritual, Representation, and Foreign Relations in the Qianlong Court (1735–1796)” (Yale, Y. Kim)
• Mitchell, David, “Mimetic Heresies: Waxworks in Paris, 1661–1723” (McGill, A. Vanhaelen; R. Taws)
• Presutti, Kelly, “Terroir after the Terror: Landscape and Representation in Nineteenth-Century France” (MIT, K. Smentek)
• Rado, Mei, “Xiyang Textiles in the Eighteenth-Century Qing Imperial Court: Fabrication, Display, and Representation of the West” (Bard Graduate Center, F. Louis)
• Ridlen, Michael T., “Prud’hon and the Graceful Style” (Iowa, D. Johnson)
• Szalay, Gabriella, “Materializing the Past: The History of Art and Natural History in Germany, 1750–1800” (Columbia, K. Moxey)
• Von Preussen, Brigid, “The Antique Made New: Commercial Classicism in Late Georgian Britain” (Columbia, A. Higonnet)
• Wunsch, Oliver, “Painting Against Time: The Decaying Image in the French Enlightenment” (Harvard, E. Lajer-Burcharth)
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