Buddhist Murals of Pagan Timeless Vistas of the Cosmos

Claudine Bautze-Picron studied at the Universities of Brussels, Lille, Jawaharlal Nehru in New Delhi and Aix-en-Provence. Since 1980, she has been research fellow at the National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris and since 1992, she has taught Indian art history at the Free University of Brussels. The main focus of her research for many years has been the art of eastern India, about which she published a large number of articles considering stylistic as well as iconographic issues. This research culminated in the publication of the catalogue of the collection of eastern Indian sculpture in the Museum of Indian Art, Berlin (Eastern Indian Sculpture in the Museum of Indian Art, Berlin, Berlin, 1998). She has also been interested in the artistic relations between eastern India and neighbouring regions such as Burma or Tibet. She has researched various aspects of Buddhist manuscript illuminations, and the iconography of the Buddha. In recent years, she has focussed on the symbolic ornamentation of Buddhist monuments, at, for instance, Ajanta, and on the iconology of Buddhist topics, such as the Enlightenment of the Buddha. These various interests led her to Pagan and to the wall-paintings of the site, which she has been researching for the last five years. Joachim Karl Bautze is an Indian art-historian trained at universities and museums in Berlin, Germany and Jaipur, India. He has conducted extensive research into, and has published a monograph and numerous articles on, 17th and 18th century wall-paintings of royal palaces in Rajasthan. He has contributed to a number of exhibitions in the United States, Switzerland and Germany (Lotosmond und Lowenritt, Stuttgart, 1991; Gods, Kings, and Tigers, The Art of Kotah, ed. Stuart Cary Welch, Munich-New York, 1997). He was the guest curator of an exhibition shown in San Francisco and many other American venues from 1998-1999 (Interaction of Cultures, Indian and Western Painting 1780-1910, The Ehrenfeld Collection, Alexandria, Virginia, 1998) and is presently writing a catalogue for a forthcoming exhibition in San Francisco in 2003, entitled The Ehrenfeld Collection of colonial photographs from India. He has also been teaching at the Free University of Berlin, and for the past 10 years at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg. He is presently guest professor at the Wako University, Japan.Bautze-Picron, Claudine is the author of 'Buddhist Murals of Pagan Timeless Vistas of the Cosmos' with ISBN 9780834805330 and ISBN 0834805332.