The Tenth Karmapa: Tibet's Greatest Artist, by Ulrich von Schroeder

The Tenth Karmapa – Tibet’s Greatest Artist – Select Sculptures and Paintings by Ulrich von Schroeder
The Tenth Karmapa Chöying Dorje (1704–1774) was the religious leader of the Tibetan bKa’ brgyud order and also a passionate artist. The Tenth Karma pa is more and more recognized as one of the most illustrious Tibetan artists, renowned for his sculptures and his paintings. Chöying Dorje’s career as a Tibetan artist is exceptional or even unique. There is not a single other Tibetan artist known, whose life and artistic oeuvre is documented by such an enormous number of written testimonies like biographies and other literary references. The enhanced status as famous religious leader provided the Tenth Karmapa with a certain sovereignty of making sculptures and paintings according to his personal impulses and unconstrained by established conventions regarding the visual appearance of deities. Since my publication of twenty sculptures associated with the Tenth Karma pa in Buddhist Sculptures in Tibet in 2001, more sculptures and paintings surfaced, with each of them adding further information regarding the spectrum of his oeuvre. Illustrated are seventy-nine sculptures and seventy-five paintings. Some thirty-four sculptures and twenty-five paintings are published for the first time as works by Chöying Dorje.