The Art Museum offers the museum experience without the boundaries of space and time. The unique structure of the book has been created by specialists in all fields of art, from institutions worldwide, who have collected together important and innovative works as they might be displayed in the ideal museum for the art lover.
As any great museum the book is divided into galleries, presenting the extraordinary variety of artistic output, from ancient Greece, to Australasia and Oceania, Byzantine art to that of the Pre-Columbian Americas, the Renaissance to twentieth-century art, with an emphasis on later western art. Rooms examine important aspects and movements within the gallery. Corridors between the rooms allow the reader to focus on seminal works of each period and culture, with the huge reproduction format allowing for detailed examination.
The rooms present the finest examples of human creativity, each piece labelled with key data (including dates, medium and dimensions) alongside a brief description, and the group of works explained by a curator. Painting, sculpture, metalwork, textiles and ceramics comprise the wide variety offered to the reader, as individual works are all contextualised with expert contributors detailing the works’ significance to the evolution of art history. With cross-references throughout, a comprehensive glossary and detailed location maps, The Art Museum is both fantastic to browse through and an indispensable guide to art throughout the ages.

The Art Museum

Arts & Photography

Phaidon Editors

Asher, Frederick M.

Beaven, Lisa

Becker, Marshall

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Phaidon Press

The art of Eastern India, 300-800

Sculpture

University of Minnesota Press

The Art of Eastern India, 300–800  was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Though scholars have extensive knowledge of the art that flourished during Pala rule in Eastern India (ca. 800-1200), little is known about Eastern Indian art during the preceding 500 years. This half-millennium includes the period of the Gupta dynasty and the two centuries that bridge Gupta and Pala rule, when no single dynasty long maintained control of Eastern India. In this study, Frederick M. Asher challenges arthistorical assumptions about Pala art — that it is a new school virtually without links to earlier art 00 by demonstrating that sculpture during the Gupta period and the subsequent three centuries evolved along lines that connect it with Pala art. In so doing, he draws attention to important sculptures, most of them never previously studied, that tell us not only about an unexplored period in Indian art but also about broader aspects of the cultural history and geography of Eastern India.Asher's work is based on field research in Bihar, West Bengal, and Bangladesh. There he gave special attention to the sites of once-flourishing Buddhist monasteries and to Hindu images still worshipped in village India. The author's photographs of the bronze, terra cotta, and stone sculptures, and his detailed text, provide a virtual catalogue raisonne  of the known works of the period.Asher's analyses of the images and his attributions of dates to them are based upon close attention to artistic style and iconography, and the study of dynastic and social history, contemporary travelers' reports, and religious history. Drawing together these diverse strands of information, he describes the evolution of art forms over a long period in which there was little apparent historic unity. John M. Rosenfield, professor of art history at Harvard University and author of The Art of the Kushans, says, of The Art of Eastern India,"The scholarship is scrupulously detailed and careful . . . [The book] is in the finest tradition of classical scholarship, and will be consulted or several generations."

The Art of Eastern India, 300-800 (Minnesota Archive Editions)

History & Criticism

Univ. of Minnesota Press

The first analytical history of Sarnath, the place where the Buddha preached his first sermon and established the Buddhist monastic order. Sarnath has long been regarded as the place where the Buddha preached his first sermon and established the Buddhist monastic order. Excavations at Sarnath have yielded the foundations of temples and monastic dwellings, two Buddhist reliquary mounds (stupas), and some of the most important sculptures in the history of Indian art. This volume offers the first critical examination of the historic site. Frederick M. Asher provides a longue durée (long-term) analysis of Sarnath—including the plunder, excavation, and display of antiquities and the Archaeological Survey of India’s presentation—and considers what lies beyond the fenced-in excavated area. His analytical history of Sarnath’s architectural and sculptural remains contains a significant study of the site’s sculptures, their uneven production, and their global distribution. Asher also examines modern Sarnath, which is a living establishment replete with new temples and monasteries that constitute a Buddhist presence on the outskirts of Varanasi, the most sacred Hindu city.

Sarnath: A Critical History of the Place Where Buddhism Began

Religious

Getty Research Institute

Since its inception in the 5th century CE, during Emperor Ashoka's reign, the ancient site of Nalanda has been a magnet for teachers, students and travelers from foreign lands, especially India s neighbors and lands further in Asia. The book will provide a history of Nalanda from ancient times to the present, examining the remains of the site's temples and monasteries as well as the stone and bronze sculptures excavated at Nalanda. In the course of presenting Nalanda, it will consider some of the myths associated with the monastery, for example, Ashoka's role in its establishment, the destruction of Nalanda by Bakhtiyar Khalji, the international character of the institution, and the modern conception of Nalanda as a university, one revived with the establishment of the Nava Nalanda Mahavihara and the new international Nalanda University.

Nalanda: Situating the Great Monastery

Architecture

Marg Foundation

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Books by Asher, Frederick M.