Full Title: "The Art of Wisdom and Compassion Revealed: Marylin M. Rhie’s Breakthrough Key Insight that Expanded the Appreciation of Tibet’s High Art and Culture"
Smith College’s eminent art historian, the late Professor Marylin M. Rhie, is well known in scholarly circles for her consummate expertise in tracing the development of Buddhist art, particularly the transformative vision of the Buddha and the great bodhisattvas, as the tradition traveled within India and beyond, through Central Asia and into China. Not so well known is her historical discovery and elucidation of the distinctive vision of the seers and artists of Tibet. As Buddhist civilization was transmitted into Tibet during the period from the 7th to the 14th centuries, the Tibetan seers and artists carefully absorbed the visionary and artistic traditions from the Post-Gupta empires from Bengal to Nepal and Kashmir, from Central Asia, and eventually from Buddhist China as well. With the Tibetan Renaissance of the 1400’s, they integrated these disparate traditions with their own, spiritual and material “high-altitude” sensibility and created unique styles and masterpieces that brought the Buddhist celestial imaginary of enlightened beings and pure lands down to earth, so to speak, evolving a visionary aesthetic style that Professor Rhie elucidated as what we called “surrealistic naturalism,” or just as validly, “naturalistic surrealism.” That is to say, she opened our eyes to enable us to see how the Tibetans made the inconceivably beautiful imagined celestial figures of buddhas and bodhisattvas and gods and goddesses seem at least subliminally credible as vividly alive and immediately present to the viewer, by depicting their supernormal bodies and environments with a precise realism of form and color. This illustrated lecture will draw on Professor Rhie’s seminal works in this area to highlight her remarkable insight, and its breakthrough contribution to the appreciation of Tibetan art and culture.