Court Arts of Indonesia

The Festival of Indonesia, a celebration launched this fall throughout the United States, includes several traveling art exhibitions, which have resulted in the publication of these two catalogs representing very different approaches to portraying Indonesian art. Fontein opens with three scholarly essays introducing Indonesian sculpture; the remaining two thirds of the book focuses on the exhibition's 116 works of art, providing text, picture, and bibliographic references for each. Both essays and descriptions reflect careful scholarship, and the book will long remain a standard reference title for Indonesian sculpture. Jessup devotes only 32 pages to the exhibition catalog, and since there are almost no illustrations in this part of her volume the reader is forced to refer constantly to the pictures in the narrative text. This portion never really defines what constitutes court arts in Indonesia, nor does it adequately cover their historical evolution and variation throughout the country; it is further marred by excessive use of terms in the various languages of Indonesia. While both works have sumptuous illustrations, libraries with limited budgets for art books may want to confine themselves to the Fontein volume.- Donald Clay Johnson, Univ. of Minnesota Lib., MinneapolisCopyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.