The Triumph of Modernism

India's Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922-47

Partha Mitter

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781861896360
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The tumultuous last decades of British colonialism in India were catalyzed by more than the work of Mahatma Gandhi and violent conflicts. The concurrent upheavals in Western art driven by the advent of modernism provided Indian artists in post-1920 India a powerful tool of colonial resistance. Distinguished art historian Partha Mitter now explores in this brilliantly illustrated studythis lesser known facet of Indian art and history.

Taking the 1922 Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta as the debut of European modernism in India, The Triumph of Modernism probes the intricate interplay of Western modernism and Indian nationalism in the evolution of colonial-era Indian art. Mitter casts his gaze across a myriad of issues, including the emergence of a feminine voice in Indian art, the decline of "oriental art, " and the rise of naturalism and modernism in the 1920s. Nationalist politics also played a large role, from the struggle of artists in reconciling Indian nationalism with imperial patronage of the arts to the relationship between primitivism and modernism in Indian art. An engagingly written study anchored by 150 lush reproductions, The Triumph of Modernism will be essential reading for scholars of art, British studies, and Indian history.

References

The Bengali calendar used here bears the following relationship to the Christian one, for instance 1352 = 1945AD.

Prologue

1 J.-P. Sartre, Black Orpheus, trans. S. W. Allen (Paris, 1951), p. 39, quoted in R. Linley, ‘Wifredo Lam: Painter of Negritude’, Art History, II/4 (December 1988), p. 533. See L. S. Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923–1982 (Austin, TX, 2002). Césaire was an iconic West Indian poet of Negritude.

2 W. G. Archer, India and Modern Art (London, 1959), may be taken as a classic example of the study of non-Western art essentially as a derivative enterprise. In an essay on ‘decentring modernism’, to be published in Art Bulletin (Intervention series), I develop the relationship of power and authority between the West and its others as expressed in histories of non-Western avant-garde art and possible ways of thinking beyond current practices.

3 W. Rubin, ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York, 1984). I do not need to rehearse here the arguments and rebuttals in this controversy except to add that Hal Foster, ‘The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art’, October, XXXIV (Fall 1985), pp. 45–70, and James Clifford, ‘Histories of the Tribal and the Modern’, Art in America (April 1985), pp. 164–215, offer trenchant critiques of the Western art historical canon. For my own work on Western representations of Indian art, see Much Maligned Monsters: History of Western Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford 1977), especially chap. VI. See also critique of Eurocentric discourses of modernism by Latin American critics, R. A. Greeley, ‘Modernism: What El Norte Can Learn from Latin America’, Art Journal (Winter 2005), pp. 82–93.

4 M. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (Berkeley, CA, 1985), pp. 85ff., on the passage: ‘influence is a curse of art criticism primarily because of wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient: it seems to reverse the active-passive relation which the historical actor [the artist] experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account’.

5 Thomas Crow, The Intelligence of Art (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1999). Elizabeth Cropper in The Domenichino Affair (New Haven, CT, 2006) persuades us of the limitations of applying Vasarian teleological concepts of mimesis and authorship.

6 J. Clark, ‘Open and Closed Discourses of Modernity in Asian Art’, in Modernity in Asian Art, ed. J. Clark (Sydney, NSW, 1993), pp. 1–17. Clark applies Umberto Eco’s theory of semiotics to the process of knowledge transfer, distinguishing between open and closed systems of discourses.

7 A. Stokes, ‘Reflections on the Nude’, The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes (London, 1978), pp. 336–7. I am indebted to Stephen Bann for the reference. Criticism of the avant-garde, particularly with an engagement with Marxism, is a vast field, going back to Walter Benjamin and Carl Einstein with Clement Greenberg’s influential defence of the aesthetics of autonomy in the 1930s providing the benchmark through the 1950s and ’60s. In the post-war era, the powerful and nuanced works of the October group of postmodern critics, Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster, social historians of art, namely T. J. Clark and Thomas Crow, and the theoreticians of visual culture have defined the field. I cannot do more than briefly acknowledge the importance of these works here.

8 For a revisionist discussion of this problem in Renaissance art, see Emilia e Marche nel Renascimento: L’Identita Visiva della ‘Periferia’, curated by Giancarla Periti (Azzano San Paolo, 2005), introduction by Pier Luigi De Vecchi and Giancarla Periti, pp. 7–11. Taking up Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginsberg’s essay, ‘Centre and Periphery’, in History of Italian Art, I, trans. C. Bianchini and C. Dorey, preface by P. Burke (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 29–112, Periti argues that the centre–periphery relationship in art is not spatial but art historical, which articulates hierarchical power relations.

9 Crow, The Intelligence of Art.

10 Keith Moxey, ‘Discipline of the Visual: Art History, Visual Studies and Globalization’, in Genre, 36 (2003), pp. 429–48. N. G. Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. C. Chiappari and S. Lopez (Minneapolis, MN, 1995). G. Kapur, ‘When was Modernism in Indian Art?’, in When Was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi, 2000), pp. 298–9. P. Bourdieu, ‘The Production of Belief: Contributions to an Economy of Symbolic Goods’, trans. R. Nice, in Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. R. Collins et al. (London, 1986), pp. 154–5. G. Mosquera, ‘Modernity and Africana: Wilfredo Lam on his Island’, in Fondació Joan Miró, cited in Sims, Wilfredo Lam, p. 174.

11 In ‘Border Lives: The Art of the Present’, in The Location of Culture (London, 1994), pp. 1–9, H. K. Bhabha, a proponent of the subversive function of hybridity, states: ‘[The] interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.’ See the critics of hybridity, Journal of American Folklore, Special Issue: Theorising the Hybrid, CXII/445 (Summer 1999), especially Andrew Causey’s thoughtful paper.

12 See the critical engagement with these issues in K. Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

13 T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL, 1962).

14 This is especially true of the Greeks, despised by the conquering Romans for their lack of valour, and yet revered by them for their art and intellect.

15 R. Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (Paris, 1950). On G. F. Hamann and the German rejection of Western Enlightenment, see F. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA, 1959).

16 Today it is intimately connected with post-modern and post-colonial thought. See J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought (London, 1997), who argues persuasively that any serious history of Western thought must take note of the impact of philosophical ideas from India, China and Japan on the West. See also W. Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (New York, 1988). On Heidegger and Eastern thought, see infra, p. 341.

17 J. Head and S. L. Cranston, Reincarnation, an East West Anthology (New York, 1961), on Tolstoy’s interest in Indian thought. See L. P. Sihare on Bergson and Worringer, p. 30.

18 E. Forgács, The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics, trans. J. Bátki (Budapest, 1995), p. 78.

19 P. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge, 1994). See also Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, ...