Heritage of Thai Sculpture by Jean Boisselier

270 pages (1975 First edition)

Before posting, I will place the dustjacket in archival quality removable plastic, enhancing the look and feel of the book while protecting the jacket.

The sculpture of Thailand offers man a glimpse of godliness. Profoundly devotional in its inspiration and its practice, this compelling art captures in stone and other earthly materials not only a visual representation but also an intimate and direct experience of Buddhist religious truth. For each Thai sculptor throughout history, his work has transcended considerations of craft and artistry, becoming in itself an act of devotion. and piety.

Through its wealth of fine photographs. and its learned and sensitive text, this book introduces to the English-speaking world the profound spirituality and vigorous technical originality of an art whose genius the West has begun to discover only recently.

For more than fifteen centuries, sculpture in Thailand has been motivated and guided by two apparently contradictory tendencies that merge in what might be called, paradoxically, an art of unified diversity. A dazzling variety of sculptural styles, often flourishing contemporaneously, have been united constantly by the single religious sensibility that served to inspire all sculpture in Thailand. In its multiplicity of styles and schools, Thailand is unique in Southeast Asia, where other sculptural traditions have been characterized by a uniformity of iconography and style. The area that now comprises Thailand, located as it is at the crossroads of all cultural influences moving through Southeast Asia, has drawn its aesthetic ideals from a variety of sources. These were continually imitated, altered, naturalised, and transformed. At the same time, as the masterpieces illustrated in this book bear witness, the sculpture of Thailand, despite its rich diversity of style, exhibits always a strong "family likeness," a quality that sets it apart from neighbouring sculptural traditions and identifies it invariably as Thai.

The great schools of sculpture in Thailand were not always chronologically or geographically distinct; very different types of images were sometimes made contemporaneously and in fairly close proximity.