From the Ocean of Painting: India's Popular Paintings, 1589 to the Present.

• Author: MCLEOD, W. H.
• Position: Review

From the Ocean of Painting: India's Popular Paintings, 1589 to the Present. By BARBARA ROSSI. New York and Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998. Pp. xiv + 295, 101 illustrations. $49.95.

Professor Rossi began her collection of the popular paintings of India as a limited work within the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From these small beginnings the collection grew into a much more complex presentation, with works drawn from public and private collections in both the United States and Great Britain. Eventually it was presented as an exhibition by the University of Iowa Museum of Art in 1994, and from there it traveled to Chicago and Santa Barbara. Much research had gone into its preparation, and both the fruits of the research and representations of the actual works are now handsomely presented in From the Ocean of Painting. In it Professor Rossi's work is accompanied by short introductory essays by Stuart Cary Welch and the late Roy C. Craven, Jr.

The contents of the exhibition and so of this book are exclusively those which Professor Rossi regards as popular art. They are, in other words, works which were prepared for what can be called the common people of India. Those which were produced for Indian courts or aristocratic patrons have been rigorously excluded. Following an introduction to India's popular paintings she presents the principal contents of her collection as three distinctive forms. These are paintings from popular ritual traditions, those from popular iconic traditions, and a group illustrating popular narrative traditions. These are followed by four shorter chapters in which she loosely gathers the remainder of her collection.

The paintings are commonly rudimentary in the extreme, the kind of thing those of us who have spent time in India (particularly in the villages) will normally have passed with barely a cursory glance. Professor Rossi makes it clear that such works tell us a great deal about the beliefs and conventions of the people who fashioned them, and she also demonstrates that from an artistic point of view we would do well to examine them with more than perfunctory notice. The overall result is impressive, both the illustrations themselves and the extensive research which has been applied to them. This must be our general opinion of the book and one which makes the book well worth studying.

There are, however, some criticisms which should be added. Perhaps it is necessary to acknowledge the reviewer's...