Modern and Contemporary Indian Art Research Papers (original) (raw)

This paper will discuss the idea of modernism in territory as complex as India, with a focus on the city of Chandigarh. It will be examined how Chandigarh operates within the notion of national identity in India, and specifically, whether the new capital evokes Indianness or is another example of European hegemony, placed even after the era of colonialism, within postcolonial reality.

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- Modern Art, Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, British Empire
- by Naman P Ahuja
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- Modern and Contemporary Indian Art

“Drawing” has reinvented itself in contemporary art globally (Butler and de Zegher 2010). Its return in the age of technological dominance is riddled with irony. No longer merely an index of artist’s skill, drawing has expanded its fields of operation in numerous ways. The term “drawing” in its new avatar lends itself to wide ranging definitions from three dimensional form, wire assemblage, performance, photography, collage, print making, to conceptual line drawings. The latter in its classical function of figure‐ground demarcation, has shown its capacity to carry out most rigorous theoretical functions ‐ to reflect back on representation itself, and show its limits as well as to suggest unthought of possibilities. Drawing in this sense has powerfully informed the practice of many Indian artists recently and has acquired a critical edge‐ Shilpa Gupta, Tejal Shah, Praneet Soi, N. S. Harsha, Mithu Sen, Jitish Kallat, Atul Dodiya, Surendran Nair, to name a few. Each one of them has shown a strong inclination to conceptual art in varying degrees. In this paper, I will draw a connection between drawing and the turn to conceptual art in India with a focus on Shilpa Gupta’s work. In my interview with her, it is this conjunction of drawing with conceptual art that comes to the foreground.

- by Parul Dave-Mukherji
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- Contemporary Art, Drawing, Modern and Contemporary Indian Art

A profile of the eminent Indian-born artist, Zarina.

Adajania's essay on the contemporary Indian artist Ranbir Kaleka's new media practice analyses the multiple genealogies of painting and film that inform his inter-media works. Against the commonly held view that Kaleka's works are examples of 'expanded cinema', Adajania proposes that their lineage can be traced to the history of 'expanded painting' (Max Ernst, Rauschenberg etc). Among other things, she reads semiotically Kaleka's 'Cul-de-sac in Taxila' to draw on the forgotten etymology of the 'takshak', who as the historian D D Kosambi explains is a 'superior craftsman', an artisan, architect and magician. She sees Kaleka in the role of the artificer: "the Daedalus figure, the creator of labyrinths, of flying machines or floors so glossy that they look like surfaces of lakes."

- by Nancy Adajania
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- Art History, New Media, Contemporary Art, Video Art

Tracing the journey of artistic engagements with the Indian Modernist artist Benode Behari Mukherjee's works, starting from Satyajit Ray's 1982 documentary 'Inner Eye' to a 2020 exhibition 'After Sight' in London, this article reassesses scholarly and artistic encounters with Benode Behari's artistic consciousness in the light of international Modernist art movements and the artist's lifelong search for an ideal form. The role of nature in the development of his artistic uniqueness and ingenuity is discussed; as Benode Behari has often been erroneously imagined as a metropolis-centric Modernist artist, thereby also bringing to focus the broad subject of the significance of nature and the pastoral idyll in the development of Bengali Modernism and modern South Asian artistic consciousness. In this piece, a trajectory of the reception of his works is also drawn.

- by Archishman Sarker
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- Abstract Art, Visual perception, Modernism, Indian Art

A review of Arpita Singh's abstractions.

- by John Yau
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- Contemporary Art, Modernism (Art History), Women Artists, Indian Modernism (Art)

Arpana Caur is one of India's most eminent visual artists, whose paintings for decades have shaped national discourse and national consciousness about the lives of Sikhs and women, spirituality, and the environment. This article situates the artwork of Arpana Caur within national and global contexts through topics such as the nature of the aesthetic process for Caur, the relations among affect, activism, and politics in her life and work, and the ways in which Indian art can be supported and made more visible on the Indian and global scales. The article presents the artist's views--the longest and most in-depth she has given to date--on topics central to her work, including Sikhism, Buddhism, Kabir, feminism, human rights, environmentalism, and the nature of time. This piece explores how art can represent the timelessness of spirituality alongside the exigencies of contemporary issues and tragedies, such as communal violence. Central throughout this article is the concept of nation, exploring how an artist can represent nation both aesthetically and politically, and the ways in which nation can be both attractive and challenging.

- by Manav Ratti
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- Sikhism, Social Justice, Feminism, Postcolonial Feminism

While specific interpretations are often avoided by most critics, the significant point is that a work of art can have definite sources of influence and yet connect to its viewer regardless of their social, political or cultural conditioning. What is ultimately pertinent is the object of art itself, that is, the physical or intellectual embodiment of the artist’s vision and intent, and how it relates to the individual who engages with it. However, when it comes to art historical contextualisation of non-Western art gets complex. Anish Kapoor serves as a perfect example.

- by Meenakshi Thirukode
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- Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, South Asia, Intersectionality
- by Saloni Mathur
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- Art History, Postcolonial Studies, Contemporary Art, South Asian Studies

It is seldom that a great painter is a great poet. However, the interaction between the realm of painting and poetry is not unheard of. There have been raging debates across centuries between great poets, philosophers and artists over which artform of the two, is more important. But neither of the opposing sideshas been able to completely negate the value of the other. A perfect equipoise is to be found in Western Art, perhaps in, the sketches of William Blake for Songs of Innocence (1789), the drawings and notes of Leonardo da Vinci for The Deluge(1517) and the sonnets of D. G. Rossetti for The Girlhood of Virgin Mary (1848-9). But poet-painters and painter-poets are rare.
The tradition of bringing together poetry and painting is not uncommon in Indian art either. The Persian miniature painters created exquisite Persian paintings for the national Epic poem, The Shahnama, written by Abu’lQasim Firdausi. The traces of this tradition of unifying verse and brush on a singular medium can be found in the Mughal miniatures as well as the Jain and Rajput miniature paintings. The 17th century rangmala paintings illustrate poetry dealing with musical forms and instruct the musicians on the mood of the piece and the notes they should use to play it. Indian Modern Master, SayedHaiderRaza explains this bond between poetry, music and painting: “There is an important even essential dimension that is shared between painting and poetry and music. This invites participation from the viewer. In Indian poetics and theory, this is called rasadhvani. The ragamalas relate music to poetry and poetry to painting.”

- by Shruthi Issac
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- Aesthetics, Art History, Art Theory, Poetry
- by Susan S Bean
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- Indian Modernism (Art), Modern and Contemporary Indian Art
- by Adrienne Fast
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- Art History, Memoir and Autobiography, Visual Arts, Rabindranath Tagore

The paper attempts to elucidate on the ecological mysticism inherent in the abstract sculptural creations of Valsan Koorma Kolleri. Born near Thalessery in Malabar Kerala, a town historically famous for Kalari, Thaiyam, Ayurveda and circus, Valsan's work and lifestyle hearken to a lithic age of prehistoric nomads-in the guise of a contemporary traveller. Despite art-education in Madras and Baroda, Valsan's ingenuity makes it hard to bracket him within any movement. Valsan's expert handling of a wide range of materials from traditional stone and bronze to scrap, organic materials, laterite and copper wire makes his a formidable voice in extant critical discourses. Valsan's recent creations are in a conscious attempt to return to nature what humans have taken away by years of over-exploitation-the earth becomes a major signifier as he sculpts with organic materials in ode to nature. Art-education (1971-79) At the age of seventeen, Valsan arrived at the Madras School of Arts, located on a busy national highway, away from his quiet native village, Pattiam. The heavy noise of traffic would make him feel helpless at times as he would long for his mother's comforting touch. In the process of sculpting, equally cerebral and sensorial, Valsan could find the capacity to heal. Sculpture for him is like Kalari, the traditional martial arts from Kerala, or Thaiyam which integrates the mind and the body in one rigorous performative activity. His understanding of art, likewise reiterates the belief in the indigenous, the tradition of local crafts particular to regional affinities.

- by Pronoy Chakraborty
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- Modern and Contemporary Indian Art

The introduction sets out why form remains central to thinking about modernism despite caricatures of formalist-modernism as involving only art-for-art's sake escapism and a drive towards 'pure' abstract art. Introducing a broad notion of formalism bound up with contact and communication, I suggest that rethinking formalism in this way allows new historical insight into a range of issues such as connoisseurship, art criticism, art education, design theory, colonial and anti-colonial art theory, and the idea of ‘global modernism’.
[This is the uncorrected proof of the introduction.]

- by Sam Rose
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- Aesthetics, Art History, British History, Literary Theory

Orchha mural painting tradition is one of the important mural painting traditions of India because of its strong aesthetical and social content. This mural painting tradition has multi-directional point of view. Use of subject, composition and contemporary elements are a unique part of Orchha mural painting. In the seventeenth century Central Indian "Rajput Gharana (Schooling)" was based on two painting tradition of Malwa and Bundelkhand. Orchha mural painting belongs to Bundelkhand schooling. The mural paintings of Lakshminarayana temple are one of the finest examples of Bundelkhand schooling. Basically, these wall paintings have a strong influence of Rajput Miniature Painting. Linear quality, detailing, multiple perspectives, decoration, characteristic features and ornamentation are very similar to Rajput Miniature Painting. The wall paintings of this temple have a strong composition and space divisional value. Generally, we can see that the temple paintings are mostly related to the religious subject but here a major part is taken from local nature, kings, dynasty, contemporary fighting scenes and local characters. Some of the panels are very much theatrical because of its strong composition and characteristic approach.

- by Pradipta Biswas
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- Contemporary Arts, Fine Arts, Modern and Contemporary Indian Art

This article investigates the trend in Indian modern art focused on the search for national identity in Indian traditional art. The early work of the Delhi artist Jagdish Swaminathan (1928-1994) and its connection with Tantric visual culture, a tradition spread throughout Indian subcontinent together with the Vaishnava and Shiva directions of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism since the 5th century AD, is considered. The inseparable connection of this tradition with bodily practices (meditation and yoga) and special ideas about the human and divine body, common to Indian religious and philosophical thought, specify the concept of corporeality, making it possible to reveal the features of a Tantric body reflected on the structure of a sacral objectyantraas interpreted by Swaminathan. The paper considers the image of yantra, intrinsic to the theoretical and practical doctrines of salvation (tantras). J. Swaminathan's creative and theoretical program and its reflection in his early series "Color geometry of space" (1967) are analyzed. The research reveals how the artist reinterprets pictorial representation of European art, with the help of Tantra and its space and body concepts creating his own version of modernism, based on Indian artistic traditions and the specific symbolism of religious mysticism.

- by Lisaveta Kuzina
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- Art, Corporeality, Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, Atlantis
- by Amjad Majid
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- Modern and Contemporary Indian Art

An eminent and the 'most expensive' woman painter of India.

- by shikha bisht
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- Art History, Indian Art, Modern and Contemporary Indian Art
- by Michael W Meister
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- Modern and Contemporary Indian Art

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 59.165.151.3 on Thu, 17 Mar 2016 05:12:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions R. Siva Kumar Modern Indian Art: A Brief Overview In the West the history of modernism is primarily conceived as the history of the avant-garde. Such a conflation of the modern and the avant-garde, however, will not help us to understand the historical logic or dynamics of non-Western modernisms such as India's. For this we must develop an alternate perspective that does not see it as a linear, monolithic, and fundamentally Western phenomenon but as several distinct mutations occasioned and nurtured by a common set of cross-cultural encounters experienced differently from the two sides of the colonial divide. While the development of a new artistic language was for Western artists a means for undermining the post-Renaissance Western realist tradition, for Indian artists who were heir to several nonrealist traditions, the assimilation of Western modernism was double-edged. On the one hand, it presented Indian artists with a way for claiming a modernist identity for themselves and, on the other,

- by Raman Siva Kumar
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- Art History, Modern and Contemporary Indian Art

This includes a short biography and complete bibliography of Prof Ratan Parimoo as at 19 June 2021.

The experience of Partition in South Asia and its dysfunctional geopolitical result, the highly militarised northern borders of the Indian subcontinent, harbours all manner of tensions and contradictions around division and fusion, erasure and reinscription, fortification and permeation, enemy and friend. In the first instance, the cataclysmic separation of an integrated community with a shared civilisation and history, along exclusively religious lines, speaks to the nation itself as a cultural and ideological artefact -not a primordial form but rather an 'imagined' entity that achieves its shape through a logic of inclusion and exclusion and the fixing of horizons in the modern era. In the second instance, the massive displacement and unprecedented levels of violence connected to the population transfer that effected this rearrangement of identity presents significant challenges related to history, memory, recall and forgetting, and the recurrent sense of crisis and irresolution attached to a traumatic past. Moreover, these are not merely intellectual abstractions but a set of concerns that have serious social, economic, and personal permutations and ongoing geopolitical effects in the subcontinent.

- by Saloni Mathur
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- Art History, Art, Border Studies, Postcolonial Studies

This article examines a group of special edition books of artists' prints published in the early decades of the twentieth century by artists in and from Bengal. Usually privately commissioned from small printing houses in limited runs, and combining short texts with collections of black and white images in wood engraving, linocut, drypoint or other printmaking media, these artists' books emerged at a time when intense intellectual debates had been percolating for decades regarding the " correct " mode of modern Indian expression in the visual arts. Artists, nevertheless, still struggled with the daily realities of trying to earn a living through their art practices. In their circulation and distribution, these books were a means by which artists promoted themselves to new forms of urban patronage, and in their visual imagining of village Bengal, they intervened in the ambiguous relationship between the urban and the rural in the experience of Indian modernity. This article examines how artists, especially those associated with the Government School of Art in Calcutta, used these books as a tool in the establishment and furtherance of their professional artistic careers. ***** Forging a professional career as a modern Indian artist was not an easy undertaking in the early twentieth century. Focusing particularly on the city of Calcutta during the last few decades of British colonial rule, from approximately 1920 until Independence in 1947, this article seeks to shed light on how certain artists took advantage of the opportunities that were inherent in

- by Adrienne Fast
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- India, History of Printmaking, Modern and Contemporary Indian Art

The essay explains the urgency of the need to reconsider cognitive categories in the definition, classification and hierarchisation of arts; to rebuild the crumbling bridges between life and arts, culture and development; and, to read the... more

The development of Malayali artist K.P. Soman's more than three-decade long career is analysed by giving special reference to his recent shift to monumental public art. Soman's artistic development is overviewed in the first part of the paper, by highlighting its internal tensions and contradictions. In the second part, these aspects are historically and philosophically contextualised, by comparing Soman's interventions with that of the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association (a short-lived collective composed mainly of Malayali artists and formed in Baroda, 1987). The third and final part of the paper explains how Soman's turn to monumental aesthetic is an ingenious solution forged by the artist, confronted with the ideological closure of the twentieth century and its ideals. Such a revaluation of monumental aesthetic is crucial to understand the persisting ‘contemporaneity’ of Soman, in spite of the prevalent 'antimonumentalism' that characterises contemporary art and art discourses.

- by Sandip K Luis
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- Art History, Contemporary Art, Melancholy, Twentieth Century History and Culture
- by Neha Berlia
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- Modern and Contemporary Indian Art

—This article investigates the trend in Indian modern art focused on the search for national identity in Indian traditional art. The early work of the Delhi artist Jagdish Swaminathan (1928-1994) and its connection with Tantric visual culture, a tradition spread throughout Indian subcontinent together with the Vaishnava and Shiva directions of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism since the 5th century AD, is considered. The inseparable connection of this tradition with bodily practices (meditation and yoga) and special ideas about the human and divine body, common to Indian religious and philosophical thought, specify the concept of corporeality, making it possible to reveal the features of a Tantric body reflected on the structure of a sacral object – yantra – as interpreted by Swaminathan. The paper considers the image of yantra, intrinsic to the theoretical and practical doctrines of salvation (tantras). J. Swaminathan's creative and theoretical program and its reflection in his early series "Color geometry of space" (1967) are analyzed. The research reveals how the artist reinterprets pictorial representation of European art, with the help of Tantra and its space and body concepts creating his own version of modernism, based on Indian artistic traditions and the specific symbolism of religious mysticism.

Sharing an excerpt from my essay, ‘New Media Overtures Before New Media Practice in India’ -- first published in Marg, in 2009 and republished in Domus in Jan. 2015.
My formulation of a genealogy or ‘pre-history’ for India’s new media practices of the 1990s is based on a well-developed theoretical position that I have manifested over the last decade through my lectures and essays published in anthologies. I chart this ‘pre-history’ through the collaborative endeavours, experimental films and photographic experiments of Akbar Padamsee, Nalini Malani, Tyeb Mehta, M F Husain and Krishen Khanna during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Dashrath Patel’s transdisciplinary practice from the 1960s to the 1980s. This is part of my commitment to retrieving the lost histories of art, and to writing art history against the grain of received narratives. During the 1960s and 1970s, when these experiments were being conducted, the art world in India was fixated on painting as the premier form, so these were seen as aberrations if they were noticed at all. Art criticism was still obsessed with the questions of modernism, indigenism and authenticity, and had not expanded to be able to embrace such experiments. There was no critical framework or cultural context for them. That is why I have analysed the history of Indian new media art as a passage from ‘no-context media’ from the late sixties to ‘new-context media’ of the nineties.
*

- by Nancy Adajania
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- Modernism (Art History), Modernism, New Media Art, Visual Arts
- by Konstantin Wenzlaff
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- Modern and Contemporary Indian Art

This edited volume provides a multidimensional overview of Akbar Padamseeʹs career of over 54 years, and features numerous works which have appeared only in exhibition catalogues till now. Not
only does this first volume of its kind describe the life and works of a pathbreaking artist, it also seeks to relocate Padamseeʹs work in the present context, separating it from the large body of works collectively termed ʺmodernistʺ. The contributors include art historians, artists, critics, and collectors.

- by Annapurna Garimella
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- Modern and Contemporary Indian Art

An exhibition and catalogue showcasing the artistic journey of portraits from miniature to modern art. It starts with the miniature paintings done by different schools like Pahadi, Rajasthani, Central Province, Deccan, Company period, Bengal, Colonial Influence and goes all the way up to modern art. The catalogue has 37 portraits which were exhibited in October 2010 in Ahmedabad.

A Review for Post III, Mater Dei Institute

- by Chris E . Murray
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- Modern and Contemporary Indian Art

Сборник подготовлен к юбилею известного российского ученого: индолога (этнографа и филолога), религиоведа, музееведа и талантливого литератора – популяризатора науки Маргариты Федоровны Альбедиль. В силу ограничений, наложенных объемом сборника, в нем смогла опубликовать свои статьи лишь часть тех исследователей, с которыми Маргарита Федоровна сотрудничает в различных областях своей обширной сферы деятельности. Среди них можно назвать дравидологию, изучение протоиндийской цивилизации, индуизма и буддизма, этнографию Индии и Непала, историю науки, музееведение и т.д. Многие из авторов сборника были в свое время вовлечены в различные широкомасштабные научные проекты, организатором и координатором которых выступала Маргарита Федоровна. Все мы испытываем к ней чувство искренней глубокой признательности. Тамильское название сборника – Naṭpu aḷikkum āram соответствует русскому «Венок (из) даров дружбы» или санскритскому Maitrīdānamālā.

- by Yaroslav Vassilkov and +1
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- Buddhist Studies, Indian studies, Sri Lanka, Himalayan Civilization-Nepal

Gulammohammed Sheikh is one of the most important contemporary Indian painters. He is also an acclaimed writer, an art historian and critic, and a poet in Gujarati (Athwa). In this conversation, which took place on August 13 and November 3, 2015, he discusses the centrality of Bombay for writers and artists of his generation, and his own connection with the city. He also reflects on the influence of poetry and translation, and on the transactions between poetry and painting which are both emblematic of his own work and of little magazines like Vrishchik, which he started in 1969. Retracing the history of Vrishchik and of " Group 1890 " , he recalls his formative years at the Baroda Faculty of Fine Arts, and his lifelong engagement with the bhakti tradition, especially with the figure of Kabir. He also discusses the way modernity was reinvented in India, and the extraordinary cosmopolitanism of his generation of modernist artists, and of the Bombay they inhabited.

Through a close study of the artworks and representations of tribal communities in central India, in particular the Pardhans and Gonds, this essay explores the changing nature of their lifeworlds and ties with ecology. With a focus on the celebrated Pardhan artist Jangarh Singh Shyam, the author delves into the complex factors that led to his “discovery” by J. Swaminathan, his training at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, and his association with a modern folk style that came to be recognized as “Gond art”. Looking at how this style has been carried forward by other artists from the region, she raises larger questions about the perception, preservation, institutionalization and consumption of this kind of art that has come to define the community, despite its disconnect from their roots. She also throws light onthe misleading representations of these indigenous peoples within Madhya Pradesh’s tribal museums, and the need to rethink these depictions and forms of engagement.

- by Susan S Bean
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- Indian Modernism (Art), Modern and Contemporary Indian Art