JAPAN — JAPANESE ART — GROUSSET - Lot 168

Lot 168
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JAPAN — JAPANESE ART — GROUSSET - Lot 168
JAPAN — JAPANESE ART — GROUSSET GROUSSET (René). — The Civilizations of the East. Volume IV: Japan. Paris, Les Éditions G. Crès & Cie, 1930. Large 8vo, paperback, cover lined with cream-colored paper, printed in black and red and adorned with the publisher’s mark, VIII-321 pp., untrimmed, 202 illustrations in the text and as inserts. First edition of this fourth and final volume of René Grousset’s monumental synthesis devoted to the civilizations and arts of the East. The series, published in 1929–1930, comprises *The Orient*, *India*, *China*, and *Japan*. A contemporary collation confirms that this final volume contains VIII–321 pages and 202 illustrations. Grousset conceived the series as a general introduction to the study of Asian arts, seeking to place artistic creations within their historical, religious, and cultural contexts, with particularly extensive use of photographic illustrations. This volume offers a comprehensive history of Japanese art and civilization, from the early developments of Japanese Buddhism and the great religious achievements of Nara and Kyoto through to the modern era. Grousset examines, in turn, sculpture, painting, architecture, and the decorative arts, linking them to the major political and spiritual transformations of the archipelago. Significant attention is given to Japanese schools of painting, lacquer art, and woodblock prints. The study extends notably to Hokusai and Hiroshige, who are extensively discussed and reproduced. The illustrations thus constitute a comprehensive iconographic record of Japanese art: Buddhist sculptures, murals, paintings, lacquerware, objets d’art, and prints, drawn primarily from the Guimet Museum and major European collections. René Grousset (1885–1952), one of the great French Orientalists of the first half of the 20th century, served as curator at the Guimet Museum and later at the Cernuschi Museum. This series remains one of his major overviews of the cultural and artistic history of Asia. Paperback copy, untrimmed, preserved in its original cloth-bound cover. The cover is uniformly browned with foxing and minor signs of wear; there is some foxing and browning inside, along with small, isolated areas of fragility in the quires visible in the photographs, but the copy is complete and has retained its original presentation.
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