Author: Ashit Paul
Publisher: Seagull Books
Year: 1983
Language: English
Pages: 128
ISBN/UPC (if available): N/A
Description
A collection of early Calcutta woodprints covering a wide range - mythological, social scenes, book illustrations and advertising - all from between 1816 and early years of the 20th century.
This volume contains four essays by scholars and artists on different aspects of this popular urban art tradition, short-lived but intensely vital and recording the evolution of a culture that was a mix of the Western and Eastern, These essays cover the social and technological history of printmaking by woodblock in Bengal, the traditions that these urban folk artists drew on, the aesthetic values that they created and left behind for their successors, and the iconography of the woodprints.
In the prints reproduced, the popular imagination of a growing city takes a wide area of human experience in its stride. They project an image of Calcutta never before revealed in such graphic candor and richness, with a whole history of manners, mores, traditional beliefs and conflicts, often with humor and invariably with a sense of down-to-earth realism.
Contents
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