The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922-47

273 Pages·2007·4.34 MB·English

by  Partha Mitter

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
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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