‘A brilliant compilation … Essential reading.’ — William Dalrymple
‘A string of gems’ — Maria Aurora Couto
‘Insightful, witty, uplifting’ — Eberhard Fischer
B.N. Goswamy, one of the most eminent art historians of our times, in this book opens a window to a wide range of subjects: all on or around the arts, which have immense potential to form aesthetic sensibility. From Ananda Coomaraswamy to the Art of Calligraphy, The Meaning of Silence to Farid-ud-din Attar’s great Sufi parable of the Conference of the Birds, among others, Goswamy invites the general, but generally interested and literate, readers to enter, through these pieces, the field of the arts and savour its pleasures: to take from them what they can, learn something fresh¾or view with freshness¾and expand their minds.
Definitive, engaging, and comprehensive, Conversations promises to be a truly accessible primer on art in India and South Asia.
B.N. Goswamy has taught at several universities in India and abroad, and cocurated major exhibitions of Indian art at the world’s leading museums, most recently the pathbreaking exhibition Masters of Indian Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2008.
