Asian Art at the Norton Simon Museum v. 3; Art from Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia Pratapaditya Pal

This illustrated book completes a three-volume series cataloguing the Asian art collection at the Norton Simon Museum. The volume includes some 180 religious artworks from Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma and Laos, as well as Ban Chiang pottery and rain drums. Stone and metal sculptures from Cambodia and Thailand are an area of particular strength in this collection. A substantial introduction to the volume provides pertinent information about the cultural milieu that inspired the creation of these artworks. Each individual object is then illustrated - some with more than one image - and discussed in detail in the catalogue section of the book. While some of the masterpieces may be familiar to scholars, the vast majority of these outstanding works are published here for the first time.

'The descriptive catalogue entries are a well-balanced mixture of iconographic analysis and comparative discussion. ... The introduction to this catalogue is a clear, and often eloquent, presentation of the religious, iconographic and architectural context intrinsic to an understanding of the complex and heterogeneous art... Pal's catalogue with its fluidly written text accompanied by black-and-white and colour illustrations of every object in the collection is a welcome and significant contribution to the growing literature on the art of the Indian subcontinent.' - Rekha Morris, Burlington Magazine