Talk: Saints and Sinners: Tibetan Painting 1934

Tickets available November 8.

It is sometimes assumed that masterpieces of Buddhist painting were not being produced in the decades leading up to the Tibetan diaspora. This lecture will dispel that misconception. In 1934, the year that Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, and Dali were producing masterpieces in Europe, two Tibetan painters were making their own remarkable works. The first was a still unidentified monk in Eastern Tibet, who produced paintings of each of the renowned eighty-four tantric masters called the mahāsiddhas. The second was Gendun Chopel, considered Tibet’s first modern artist, who in 1934 began creating paintings unlike anything ever seen before in Tibet.

Donald Lopez is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the award-winning author of numerous books, ranging from translations of Tibetan Buddhist scriptures, to histories of the Western encounter with Buddhism, to widely used anthologies of Buddhist texts, to standard reference works for the field of Buddhist Studies. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000, at the time, the first scholar of Buddhism to be so honored in eighty-three years. In 2019, he was one of two keynote speakers (together with His Holiness the Dalai Lama) at the commemoration of the six hundredth anniversary of the Tibetan saint Tsong-kha-pa held at Ganden Monastery. His most recent book, published just this month by Yale University Press, is entitled Buddhism: A Journey Through History.

Mia exclusive: Order Lopez’s new book here before its release to the public in January. Lopez will host a book signing following the lecture; you may pick up your book on-site.