THE SPIRIT OF FOLK ART [SOLD]

THE SPIRIT OF FOLK ART

The Girard Collection at the Museum of International Folk Art

By Henry Glassie

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, New York

in association with the Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe

First Edition, hardcover with slip jacket, 1989, 276 pages.  Beautifully presented with 345 illustrations, including 285 plates in full color.

From the Slip Jacket

“Distinguished folklorist Henry Glassie has selected three hundred objects from the Girard Collection at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, the world’s largest cross-cultural collection of folk art. Glassie’s purpose is ambitious: a confrontation with the very soul of his discipline. His text ranges wide and free, touching on aesthetics, literature, religion, art history, sociology, anthropology, in its always rigorous, sometimes lyrical, meditation on the wellsprings of folk art.  To keep us rooted in the peculiarly human character of all art making, the author provides fifty of his own field photographs from many cultures, showing the artists, their world, and their work. A fruitful dialogue thus ensures, in which words and photographs illuminate and enrich each other. Sharing in that dialogue, the reader comes to realize and to rejoice in the diversity and universality of the human creative impulse.

“The Girard Collection encompasses more than one hundred thousand works from one hundred different cultures worldwide.  Amassed in over fifty years of global travel by the noted architect and designer Alexander Girard, it was donated to the Museum in 1978.  Only a collection so rich in meaningful objects and so broad in scope could have afforded a selection vast enough to fulfill the noble purpose of The Spirit of Folk Art.”