The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922-47 PDF
Preview The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922-47
The Triumph of Modernism India’s artists and the avant-garde 1922–1947 Partha Mitter the triumph of modernism The Triumph of Modernism India’s artists and the avant-garde, 1922–1947 Partha Mitter REAKTION BOOKS Tomyparents,truecosmopolitans PublishedbyReaktionBooksLtd 33GreatSuttonStreet Londonec1v0dx www.reaktionbooks.co.uk Firstpublished2007 Copyright©ParthaMitter2007 Allrightsreserved Nopartofthispublicationmaybereproduced,storedinaretrieval system,ortransmitted,inanyformorbyanymeans,electronic, mechanical,photocopying,recordingorotherwise,withouttheprior permissionofthepublishers. PublishedwiththeassistanceofTheGettyFoundation PrintedandboundinChina BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData Mitter,Partha Thetriumphofmodernism:India'sartistsandtheavante-garde,1922–1947 1.Art,Indic–20thcentury 2.Art,Indic–Europeaninfluences 3.Modernism(Art)–India 4.Nationalismandart–India–History– 20thcentury 5.Avant-garde(Aesthetics)–India–History–20thcentury I.Title 709.5'4'0904 isbn–13:9781861893185 isbn–10:1861893183 Contents Prologue 7 one The Formalist Prelude 15 two The Indian Discourse of Primitivism 29 i Two Pioneering Women Artists 36 ii RabindranathTagore’sVisionofArtandtheCommunity 65 iii Jamini Roy and Art for the Community 100 three Naturalists in the Age of Modernism 123 i The Regional Expressions of Academic Naturalism 125 ii From Orientalism to a New Naturalism: K. Venkatappa and Deviprosad Roy Chowdhury 163 four Contested Nationalism: The New Delhi and India House Murals 177 Epilogue 226 References 228 Bibliography 256 Acknowledgements 261 PhotoAcknowledgements 263 Index 264 Prologue the picasso manqué syndrome TheFrenchphilosopherJean-PaulSartreoncestatedthatSurrealismwas stolenfromtheEuropeansby‘aBlack[thepoetAiméCésaire]whoused itbrilliantlyasatoolofUniversalRevolution.’1Sartre’sadmiringandyet enigmatic comment encapsulates the problematic relationship between non-Westernartistsandtheinternationalavant-garde,whichisenmeshed in a complex discourse of authority, hierarchy and power. Even cultural subversion,assuggestedabove,promptsthecommonperceptionofnon- Westernmodernismasaderivativeone,aphenomenonthatIwouldlike to christen the ‘Picasso manqué’ syndrome. Let me elaborate with an example. The English art historian W. G. Archer wrote an influential account of Indian modernism. His analysis of the painting of GaganendranathTagore,oneofthefirstIndianmodernists,consistedalmost entirely of tracing Picasso’s putative influence on him. Unsurprisingly, ArcherdrewtheconclusionthatGaganendranathwasuncubistemanqué; inotherwords,hisderivativeworks,basedonaculturalmisunderstanding, were simply bad imitations of Picasso (see p. 18). Behind this seemingly innocentconclusionreststhewholeweightofWesternarthistory.Weneed tounpackitsramificationshere.2 Stylisticinfluence,asweareallaware,hasbeenthecornerstoneofart historicaldiscoursesincetheRenaissance.Nineteenth-centuryarthistory, in the age of Western domination, extended it to world art, ranking it accordingtothenotionofprogress,withWesternartatitsapex.Influence acquired an added resonance in colonial art history. For Archer, the use ofthesyntaxofCubism,aproductoftheWest,byanIndianartist,imme- diatelylockedhimintoadependentrelationship,thecolonizedmimick- ing the superior art of the colonizer. Indeed influence has been the key GaganendranathTagore, epistemic tool in studying the reception of Western art in the non- ACubistScene,c.1923, watercolouronpostcard. Westernworld:iftheproductistooclosetoitsoriginalsource,itreflects Gaganendranathandhis slavishmentality;ifontheotherhand,theimitationisimperfect,itrep- circleoftensentpostcards resents a failure. In terms of power relations, borrowing by artists from theypaintedthemselves tostudentsandfriends. theperipheriesbecomesabadgeofinferiority.Incontrast,theborrowings 7 of European artists are described approvingly either as ‘affinities’ or dismissed as inconsequential, as evident in the primitivism exhibition heldattheMuseumofModernArtinNewYorkin1985.Theverysub- title of the exhibition, ‘affinity of the tribal and the modern’, character- izes Picasso’s emulation of African sculpture as no more than a mere formal ‘affinity’ with the primitive.3 In short, Picasso’s integrity was in no waycompromisedbytheborrowing,incontrasttothecolonialartist Gaganendranath. Here,inthecontextofaffinityversusemulation,weneedtoexplore whetherinfluenceasananalyticaltoolhasoutliveditsusefulness.Icando no better than invoke Michael Baxandall’s magisterial interrogation of this obsession among art historians, or the ‘anxiety of influence’, to use Harold Bloom’s celebrated phrase. As Baxandall puts it succinctly, the artist responds to circumstance, making an intentional selection from a rangeofsources.4Thisisapurposefulratherthanpassiveactivity,which involvesmakingconsciouschoices.Therehavebeenotherarthistorians whohaveproposedamoreagonisticrelationshipbetweentheartistsand theirsourcesthanallowedforinmorestandardarthistories.Recently,the artist as an active conscious agent and the sovereignty of the art object havebeenreiteratedbyThomasCrowinhispenetratingdiscourseonThe IntelligenceofArt.5 Oneoftheproblemsbesettingthediscourseofmodernismhasbeen its Vasarian art historical foundations, which pursue a linear trajectory according to the dictates of a relentless teleology that does not allow for dissidence, difference and competition. John Clark has called Western modernism a ‘closed’ system of discourse, which cannot accommodate newdiscoursesthatmodernismsoutsidetheWestgiveriseto.6Andyet, whatismostexhilaratingaboutmodernismsacrosstheglobeistheirplur- ality, heterogeneity and difference, what one may describe as a ‘messy’ quality lacking symmetry which makes them all the more exciting and richwithpossibilities. No one can deny that the flexible revolutionary syntax of Cubism became synonymous with the global avant-garde. Nor would one dis- agreewithAdrianStokesthatCézanne’sBathers,whichinspiredPicasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, and turned the European artist’s attention to Africansculptureinrepudiationofclassicaltaste,openedupanewspace forcosmopolitanism.Norcanoneignoretheachievementsofthecritics ofmodernismfromWalterBenjaminandCarlEinsteinthroughClement Greenberg to post-war scholars of social history of art, postmodernists and proponents of visual culture. Here I am simply concerned with the art historical representations of non-metropolitan forms of modernism.7 Set against the originary discourse of the avant-garde, emanating from metropolitan centres such as Paris, other modernisms are dismissed as peripheral to its triumphal progress. Yet, the centre–periphery relation- ship is not one of geography but of power and authority that affects not 8
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