Epic Tales from Ancient India: Paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art.

• Author: Gulbransen, Krista
• Position: Book review

Epic Tales from Ancient India: Paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art. Edited by MARIKA SARDAR. San Diego: SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART, 2016. Pp. 164. $45. [Distr. by Yale Univ. Press.]

Edited by former curator Marika Sardar, Epic Tales from Ancient India: Paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art is a catalogue that accompanies a traveling exhibition of the same name. Following stints at the Princeton University Art Museum and the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, the show's final installation was in San Diego beginning March 2018. The catalogue is one in a series of San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) publications that highlight the bequest of Edwin Binney, 3rd, heir to the Crayola Crayon fortune. (1) Over a twenty-eight year period, Binney amassed a collection in excess of 1400 South Asian paintings. Binney was notorious for his desire to construct an encyclopedic collection that encompassed examples from every school of Indian painting, spanned centuries of artistic production, and reflected the cultural and religious diversity of the subcontinent. Though his primary goal was to assemble a comprehensive collection, Binney was also able to acquire many works of extremely high quality. (2) The San Diego Museum of Art received the majority of Binney's South Asian manuscript and album illustrations following his death, in a bequest of 1986. The selection of paintings catalogued in the newest SDMA catalogue is representative of the collection's breadth and depth: spanning the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, examples of Mughal, Rajasthani, Pahari, Deccani, and southern Indian painting are interspersed throughout the book.

Whereas many Indian painting catalogues group works in a way that would appeal to the connoisseur, ordering them chronologically and geographically in accordance with long-established art historical taxonomies, Sardar's organization of Epic Tales from Ancient India emphasizes narrative, an approach that is likely to have a broader appeal. Though all of the paintings discussed are single folios excerpted from their original manuscripts and painted series, Sardar explains that the catalogue's narrative emphasis was intended, in part, to help the reader and museum audience imagine each painting's original format and intimate viewing experience. The organization of the volume thus foregrounds the act of storytelling that was the initial intent of patrons and artists, as Sardar explains in her introductory essay, "Indian...