India's Great Mughals includes 200 sumptuous objects—intricate paintings and manuscripts, lavish textiles, architectural elements, metalwork, furniture, arms and armor, dazzling precious stones, and more. Opulent works of art—many made in the imperial workshops—convey the power and tastes of the three most celebrated Mughal emperors: Akbar (r. 1556–1605), Jahangir (r. 1605–27), and Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58). From the tiniest jeweled objects to the monumental wonder of the Taj Mahal, this highly sophisticated and globally connected empire produced treasures of unparalleled splendor and magnificence.
Discover the extraordinary beauty and unique history of paintings made for Hindu kings in India’s Pahari (hill) region between the 1620s and 1830s. Pahari artists worked in radically different styles ranging from lyrical and naturalistic to boldly colored and abstracted. Of the Hills: Pahari Paintings from India’s Himalayan Kingdoms illuminates new scholarship on the collaborative artist communities in which most painters worked. Learn about the political, cultural, and religious contexts of these forty-eight exquisite works, and look closely to enter a world of fine detail that delights and astounds.
Forty paintings are reunited from a widely dispersed pictorial series that presents the story of the Hindu divine hero Rama. The timeless tale, more than 2,000 years old, remains a cultural force across southern Asia. Potent themes of righteousness, vengeance, and loyalty are explored through dramatic episodes in which demons are vanquished, lovers are separated, and monkeys, bears, and a man-eagle save the day. Magic abounds, and emotions fly with warriors’ arrows.
Created with blazing colors for a royal collection around 1700, the “Shangri” Ramayana has been a beloved and enigmatic series among scholars and collectors for the past century. New evidence from previously unpublished paintings reveals many more artistic styles and triple the number of total folios than have been previously recognized. It argues in favor of a collaborative model of production involving artists from across the alpine region of Pahari India, which straddles the present-day state of Himachal Pradesh and that of Jammu and Kashmir.
Edited by Sonya Rhie Mace, Sarang Sharma and Vijay Sharma
Contributions by Catherine Glynn Benkaim, Ainsley M. Cameron, Debra Diamond and Vrinda Agrawal
An in-depth study of the innovation and range of Pahari painting that draws from one of the greatest collections ever assembled.
In the far north of India, the Himalayan mountain ranges rise abruptly from the Punjab plains to form the alpine region known as Pahari, defined by a shared language (Pahari) and script (Takri). From the 1600s to 1900s, the Hindu nobility of the Pahari kingdoms commissioned paintings for their royal collections. Known as “Pahari paintings,” they were made by painters who were born into hereditary artist communities located in villages throughout the region. By the end of the 1900s, many descendants of royal families dispersed them, and they became some of the most popular and widely collected genres of Indian painting in the world. This installation celebrates the CMA’s 2018 acquisition and 2026 publication of the Pahari paintings from the renowned Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Ralph Benkaim Collection.
Since its debut in 2015, the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room has been one of the Rubin Museum’s most popular installations, providing an immersive experience inspired by a traditional shrine. Now the Shrine Room travels to Brooklyn, where it will be on view for six years in the Brooklyn Museum’s Arts of Asia galleries as part of a multiyear collaboration.
Beautifully presented in two volumes, Taklung Painting: A Study in Chronology, establishes a reliable foundation for assigning dates to nearly one hundred paintings associated with Taklung Monastery in Central Tibet and its sister monatery, Riwoche, in eastern Tibet. Using vsual images (the succession of teachers represented in the top, side, and, occasionally, the bottom registers of paintings), inscriptions, narrative scenes (in which principal structures in the Taklung monastery compound may be linked to specific dates), and style analysis, the author identifies fundamental parameters that help create firm chronological designations for these c. twelfth to mid-sixteenth century paintings. The essential two-volume set includes more than 800 images, illustrating Taklung paintings in vivid detail, pointing out key visual comparisons and deciphering their many inscriptions.