About the Book
Through
conversations with 30 artists from four generations, Yashodhara
Dalmia maps the social, cultural, and historical
matrix of art and art creation in India spread over the last 60 years. Spanning
four generations of diverse art practices, the two volumes chronicle the
journey of Indian art-from the initial years of art creation as it took root in
a newly independent country, through the struggle of modern Indian art to
establish itself in the face of conservative Indian sensibilities, to the
digitization of art in recent times.
Accompanied by
more than 200 illustrations of art works, in these freewheeling interactions
spread over the last two decades-the artists talk about their ideas and
experiences, work processes, and their relationships with each other and with
society at large. As the artists dwell on critical issues to do with the social
perception of art, influences in Indian art, traditional versus modern
sensibilities, and dislocations and convergences, they open windows to the historic
perambulations of the layered journey of modern and contemporary Indian art.
Affording rare
glimpses into the creative world of artists who changed the course of modern
and contemporary Indian art, this two-volume set will be a collector's delight.
About the Author
Yashodhara
Dalmia is a well-known
art historian and independent curator based in New Delhi. She has written
extensively on art and culture and her publications include, among others, The Painted World of the Warlis
(1988),
The Making of Modern
Indian Art: The Progressives (OUP 2001), Amrita Sher-Gil: A
Life (2006),
and Memory, Metaphor,
Mutations: Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan (co-authored
with Salima Hashmi, OUP
2007). She has curated several exhibitions including The Modems: Progressive Artists and their
Associates, which inaugurated the National Gallery
of Modern Art, Mumbai in 1996, Volte-
Face, souza's Iconoclastic Vision in
New Delhi in 2010, and a show of contemporary Indian artists titled Indian (Sub) Way at the
Grosvenor Vadehra Gallery in London in September
2010. At present she is working on an in-depth project on contemporary Indian
art.
Introduction
The winding
course of art in India could be likened to the billowing waters, which now
cascading, now simmering, almost always impact the mind. Nothing could be more
apt than to draw comparison with the protagonist of Orhan
Pamuk's novel, The
Museum of Innocence, who when spending the summer with his bethrothed with whom he is no longer in love, would stay
awake in the nights. As the glow of the lantern on the passing boat would throw
shafts of light on his ceiling and the sound of the oars cutting through the
water wafted, the voices of the man fishing along with his son in the Bosphorus would float upstairs, old and wizened in one
case, youthful and enthusiastic in the boy's case, which would in the coal
black night, create silent ripples in his mind and then delve into deeper
recesses. The wise man and the innocent, conjoined and inextricable, now
touching consciousness, now the senses, leave an indelible mark of i:hose feverish Istanbul nights.
In the manner
of those strangely echoing voices in the waters, Indian art has analogically
marked syntax and text, claiming liminal yet
unoccupied spaces, and ignited a maze of trajectories. A whole century has
elapsed since Ravi Varma devolved expression, which
would befit the aspirations of a people struggling for nationhood. About five
decades of inspired work followed in the nationalist modern, and then the
modern and post-modern art of a newly emerged nation. Since the beginning of
the twenty-first century, we have energies harvested from the hi-tech
revolution and post-globalization modalities, which have interfaced with the
country and indeed with the world. It seems appropriate at this juncture to map
art practices within the nation and to conjecture the path which will now be
trodden. The 30 artists featured across the two volumes, among many others who
could not be included because of constraints of space, span four generations of
diverse art practices since Independence, representing the historic
perambulations of this layered journey.
Among the
masters artists, J. Swaminathan, F.N. Souza, Tyeb Mehra, and Paritosh Sen are no longer with us and it was fortunate that their
views could be recorded before their passing away. The modernists here are of
particular interest as their trajectory covers the initial years of art-making
as it took root in a newly independent country, drawing inspiration variously
from the School of Paris, Mexican art, the Renaissance, and Japanese and
Chinese art as well as many indigenous aesthetic modes, which were already in
existence. The social history of the period is reflected in their artistic memory, particularly of the early years when engaging with
nationhood consisted of unseen pitfalls and triumphant successes. In the artistic graphs of many, we
note the resistance that modern art met with and its struggles to establish
itself. The Nehruvian years, as the 1950s and '60s
are known, were remarkable for the valiant, almost heroic thrusts of the
artists as well as the confusion and complexity of modern Indian art, indeed of
modernism itself in the country. We see that in Bollywood films, it took its
simplest and most obvious form, where modernity was equated with smoking,
drinking, and other 'bad Western habits'. But many ideas, which are taken for
granted now, were also looked upon with great suspicion by the layman. The
distortions and fracturing of form which critiqued naturalism were far removed
from the academia introduced into the country in colonial times. Modernism's
arsenal of nudity, distortions, and alienation was considered 'foreign', and
abhorred and opposed in a manner not dissimilar from that of warring tribes. It
is also interesting to note that the interventions of Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru in the early years redeemed many art situations interlocked with
bureaucratic tangles when unreasonable demands often brought processes to a
halt. The interventions of an enlightened prime minister, however, could not be
built into the art structure which has continued since. While institutionally
art practices were not fully understood and hence their several lineaments were
dysfunctional, the rise of the private sector and its presence in the art world
gained primacy only in the last few decades.
The rudimentary
structures of modernism were established by the 1950s and their divergent paths
were as multiple and plural as the country itself. The heated debates about
Indian art being imitative have now given way to the generally accepted belief
that Euro-American modernism is not pivotal and that art in different countries
established roots according toits own mores.
Exemplars abound but to cite instances nearer home, the Iranian group Saqqakhaneh, termed after a traditional
fountain installed for public drinking in old street corners, and formed in the
early 1960s, first tried to formulate their art as being inspired by votive
folk art like inscriptions, talismans, and the famous love stories of Iran. Its
modernist dimensions were acquired from the West and its nuanced contours were
locally inspired. The Nanyang Fine Arts College in
Singapore was established in the 1930s and was based on Western art education.
Its students imbibed the School of Paris methods and melded it with local
styles such as Chinese brush paintings. Its beginning was fortuitous when in
the early 1930s, a Japanese trained Chinese artist, Huang Suiheng,
stopped by Singapore on his way back from Paris. Finding it strategically
located and tropically attractive, he decided to set up an art institution and
invited a Chinese artist and teacher Lim Hak Tai to
establish the art school, and lessons commenced here from 1938. As it grew in
stature and shifted from an old two storey bungalow, it was evident that the
young artists would imbibe Western styles and inculcate them into Chinese and
traditional forms. Conversely, Japonism was born in Paris when the prints of
Hokusai, used as wrapping paper for ceramics and lacquerware,
were noticed by artists in the mid-nineteenth century. The fluid orchestration
of forms and the skilful positioning of objects in the works of Hokusai and Utamaro began to be incorporated as their prints became
widely circulated and influenced artists like Manet,
Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
The Ukiyo-e prints, with their elegance and eroticism, have
also inspired Indian artists from Souza and Sabavala
to Gulammohammed and Nilima
Sheikh, Nalini Malani, and Anju Dodiya.
The pluralistic
nature of the country retained its hybrid and multiple strain
in the different forms of modernism that took shape. Thus, there were the
Progressive Artists' Group and their associates, on the one hand, with artists
like Souza, Husain, Raza, Tyeb,
Akbar, Ram Kumar, and Krishen Khanna, who attempted a
modernism which took into account the School of Paris methods. Their efforts
were all the more pernicious as they were struggling on two fronts: the
academic school style taught in the British established art colleges and the
inclination to revive the country's past traditions. The veteran artist Jehangir Sabavala, who also
trained in Paris, created forms which were deeply structured and refracted his
own experiences while retaining a formal purity. The Kolkata artist Paritosh Sen, on the other hand,
was a member of Group 43, which was the earliest to sever its links with
academic practices. Satish Gujral
ploughed his lonely furrow with his sojourn to Mexico and encountered masters
like Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Frida Kahlo. On his return, he was to delve into
craft-based traditions, experiments with form and material, and architectural
constructs. The Santiniketan school
had evolved a contextual form of modernism linked to the environment and these
modes were further evolved by K.G. Subramanyan and
his polymorphic forms, which reflected the diverse situation of the
surroundings. The brilliantly conceived and magical forms of. Swaminathan, the earliest to be
interviewed, more than validated local, including tribal traditions, which were
yet contemporaneous and interfaced with the technocrat industrial basis of
development in the country. This is also highlighted by the additional material
attached to his interview truncated by his untimely death. Biren
De, popularly believed to have founded the neo- Tantric
group, vehemently refutes this and yet his powerful symbolic language of signs
and symbols had a great bearing on later artists. The narrative of V. Viswanadhan, one of the founding members of the Cholamandal group, unfolds with his early influences under Paniker and his later sojourn to Paris. One of the first
woman artists, Anjolie Ela Menon paved her own path, influenced by Romanesque and
early Christian art, the Russian and Byzantine icons, early moderns like Amrita
Sher-Gil, and even popular art to create her own liminal corridor of portraits and narrative forms.
If the furious
debates of the early years have lost their edge, modernism's contested
territories retain their contentious boundaries. The expressions of a newly
found nation took recourse to a multiplicity of forms, the fervour and energy
leading to a sense of C coming
home' in the 1970s and '80s. The swelling migrations from the countryside, the
imposition of the Emergency in the mid-1970s, increasing destitution and
failure of governance, language and communal riots, and the impoverishment and
marginalization of tribals, were all to take their
toll on the individual. The early optimism gave way to a grave quietude and a
strong critiquing of the establishment in imaginative and reflective ways.
Almost of its own volition, figurative art burgeoned in different parts of the
country as the mystique of existence gave way, and art became located and
personalized. In the works of the Mumbai artists like Gieve
Parel, Sudhir Parwardhan, and Nalini Malani, there is a quizzing of notions of family, city, and
indeed politicians and nations, where the tensile equation of the ordinary man
with his daily life becomes predominant. Rameshwar Broota, Arpita Singh, A.N.
Ramachandran, Jatin Das, and Arpana
Caur, situated in Delhi, focus on pavement dwellers,
the poor, and the marginalized, and also gaze at wider notions of myth and
history archived from memory. The Vadodara artist Nilima Sheikh finds expression in contemporary events of
death and disaster, liminally
relayed through the reflexive gaze of the miniatures, the thangka style among
other aesthetic modes. A younger artist like Ravinder Reddy, while deriving his
influences from international practices, retains the specificiry
of his surroundings. If it is embellished and iconic, it is, at the same time,
fractured, fragmented, and contemporary.
By the 1990s,
the buoyant economic situation, the greater presence of the international
corporate sector and their own tech-savvy, fast- changing society, rapid
urbanization, and seamlesss traversions
from one cultural mode to another had led the artists to incessant
inventiveness, and a cross-cultural fertilization, and at the same time, a
breaking of boundaries between different expressions. The prices of young
artists along with the masters began to soar and Indian artists began to have a
significant international presence. If modernism earlier could be located in
the 'interstices' of cultures, the defining moment now became the intersection
itself between high/low, art/life, national/international.
Atul Dodiya's works archive
art history, tradition, mediums, and his own locale to uniquely express the
existing situation. He has, for instance, converged on bustling bazaars to
paint shop shutters, which can be opened to reveal a diametrically opposite
reality inside. Anju Dodiya,
on the other hand, examines the fractured self by means of her own persona
intertwined within the social setting. Anita Dube has
assembled material from ceramic dyes used in temple icons to styrofoam wedges to instal the detritus of civilization. The site-specific
installations of Subodh Gupta consist of steel
objects of everyday use or trunks carried by migrant labourers, even thalis and katoris utilized in daily meals, and reconrextualize them to bring about a greater awareness of
migration, labour, cross-fertilization of cultures, and other shifts of
humanity in the present. The sculptor and painter Riyas
Komu, in recent years, has made portraits which are
culled from the deluge of mass media and included the dispossessed, the
homeless, the marginalized-from the migrant labourer to the footballer-who have
found shelter and evoked an intense scrutiny. If these are victims of
historical circumstances, they are also survivors of their predicament and are
shown in their dual identity as systematic citizens of an increasingly wider
world order.
In these
interactions, which took place over the last two decades, there is a lively
interplay of ideas, which reveals the social, cultural, and historical matrix
of art and art-making as it has taken place with four generations of Indian
artists. As the artists gradually unwound layers of their experiences, their
work processes, their interface with each other and with the society at large, many unknown facets of art began to emerge. Apart from
providing a greater understanding, these constitute an archival record of the
art situation in India. The exchanges took place in the artists' studios and
other intimate places and sometimes seemed more in the nature of ruminations,
providing access to the inner recesses of their consciousness. The incidental,
the anecdotal, the accidental lead to the praxis of art and indeed of
creativity, and acquire significance in this context. The trajectories of their
lives reveal the early years of an independent nation, the travails of the
Partition, the setting-up of institutions, the bunglings
and successes which followed later, providing a distinctive social document of
the period. All this is published in some detail so that the reader can avail
of material otherwise inaccessible. These freewheeling conversations while
being reflective and informative are, at the same time, informal and candid so
that the scholar as well as the art aficionado can avail of them. Finally, the
kaleidoscopic tapestty that emerges from 60 years of
art practices, revealed in the artists' own words, can only be seen as a work
in progress, which while being critical, is open- ended and subject to further
conversations.
Contents Volume I
Introduction |
ix |
F.N. Souza |
3 |
M.F. Hussain |
25 |
S.H. Raza |
41 |
Krishen
Khanna |
63 |
Tyeb
Mehta |
85 |
Akbar Padamsee |
101 |
Ram Kumar |
119 |
J. Swaminathan |
135 |
Biren
Di |
151 |
Satish
Gujral |
169 |
Jehangir
Sabavala |
183 |
Anjolie
Ela Menon |
203 |
Paritosh
Sen |
223 |
K.G. Subramanyam |
235 |
A.N. Ramachandran |
259 |
Nilima
Sheikh |
277 |
Gieve
Patel |
295 |
Sudhir
Patwardhan |
311 |
Select Bibliography |
333 |
List of Illustrations |
339 |
Index |
345 |
Acknowledgements |
351 |
Contents Volume II
Introduction |
xi |
Nalini
Malani |
3 |
V. Viswanadhan |
23 |
Jatin
Das |
43 |
Arpita
Singh |
59 |
Rameshwar
Broota |
77 |
Arpana
Caur |
97 |
G. Ravinder Reddy |
115 |
Atul
Dodiya |
133 |
Anita Dube |
153 |
Subodh
Gupta |
167 |
Anju
Dodiya |
185 |
Riyas
Komu |
205 |
Select Bibliography |
219 |
List of Illustrations |
225 |
Index |
229 |
Acknowledgement |
233 |
About the Book
Through
conversations with 30 artists from four generations, Yashodhara
Dalmia maps the social, cultural, and historical
matrix of art and art creation in India spread over the last 60 years. Spanning
four generations of diverse art practices, the two volumes chronicle the
journey of Indian art-from the initial years of art creation as it took root in
a newly independent country, through the struggle of modern Indian art to
establish itself in the face of conservative Indian sensibilities, to the
digitization of art in recent times.
Accompanied by
more than 200 illustrations of art works, in these freewheeling interactions
spread over the last two decades-the artists talk about their ideas and
experiences, work processes, and their relationships with each other and with
society at large. As the artists dwell on critical issues to do with the social
perception of art, influences in Indian art, traditional versus modern
sensibilities, and dislocations and convergences, they open windows to the historic
perambulations of the layered journey of modern and contemporary Indian art.
Affording rare
glimpses into the creative world of artists who changed the course of modern
and contemporary Indian art, this two-volume set will be a collector's delight.
About the Author
Yashodhara
Dalmia is a well-known
art historian and independent curator based in New Delhi. She has written
extensively on art and culture and her publications include, among others, The Painted World of the Warlis
(1988),
The Making of Modern
Indian Art: The Progressives (OUP 2001), Amrita Sher-Gil: A
Life (2006),
and Memory, Metaphor,
Mutations: Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan (co-authored
with Salima Hashmi, OUP
2007). She has curated several exhibitions including The Modems: Progressive Artists and their
Associates, which inaugurated the National Gallery
of Modern Art, Mumbai in 1996, Volte-
Face, souza's Iconoclastic Vision in
New Delhi in 2010, and a show of contemporary Indian artists titled Indian (Sub) Way at the
Grosvenor Vadehra Gallery in London in September
2010. At present she is working on an in-depth project on contemporary Indian
art.
Introduction
The winding
course of art in India could be likened to the billowing waters, which now
cascading, now simmering, almost always impact the mind. Nothing could be more
apt than to draw comparison with the protagonist of Orhan
Pamuk's novel, The
Museum of Innocence, who when spending the summer with his bethrothed with whom he is no longer in love, would stay
awake in the nights. As the glow of the lantern on the passing boat would throw
shafts of light on his ceiling and the sound of the oars cutting through the
water wafted, the voices of the man fishing along with his son in the Bosphorus would float upstairs, old and wizened in one
case, youthful and enthusiastic in the boy's case, which would in the coal
black night, create silent ripples in his mind and then delve into deeper
recesses. The wise man and the innocent, conjoined and inextricable, now
touching consciousness, now the senses, leave an indelible mark of i:hose feverish Istanbul nights.
In the manner
of those strangely echoing voices in the waters, Indian art has analogically
marked syntax and text, claiming liminal yet
unoccupied spaces, and ignited a maze of trajectories. A whole century has
elapsed since Ravi Varma devolved expression, which
would befit the aspirations of a people struggling for nationhood. About five
decades of inspired work followed in the nationalist modern, and then the
modern and post-modern art of a newly emerged nation. Since the beginning of
the twenty-first century, we have energies harvested from the hi-tech
revolution and post-globalization modalities, which have interfaced with the
country and indeed with the world. It seems appropriate at this juncture to map
art practices within the nation and to conjecture the path which will now be
trodden. The 30 artists featured across the two volumes, among many others who
could not be included because of constraints of space, span four generations of
diverse art practices since Independence, representing the historic
perambulations of this layered journey.
Among the
masters artists, J. Swaminathan, F.N. Souza, Tyeb Mehra, and Paritosh Sen are no longer with us and it was fortunate that their
views could be recorded before their passing away. The modernists here are of
particular interest as their trajectory covers the initial years of art-making
as it took root in a newly independent country, drawing inspiration variously
from the School of Paris, Mexican art, the Renaissance, and Japanese and
Chinese art as well as many indigenous aesthetic modes, which were already in
existence. The social history of the period is reflected in their artistic memory, particularly of the early years when engaging with
nationhood consisted of unseen pitfalls and triumphant successes. In the artistic graphs of many, we
note the resistance that modern art met with and its struggles to establish
itself. The Nehruvian years, as the 1950s and '60s
are known, were remarkable for the valiant, almost heroic thrusts of the
artists as well as the confusion and complexity of modern Indian art, indeed of
modernism itself in the country. We see that in Bollywood films, it took its
simplest and most obvious form, where modernity was equated with smoking,
drinking, and other 'bad Western habits'. But many ideas, which are taken for
granted now, were also looked upon with great suspicion by the layman. The
distortions and fracturing of form which critiqued naturalism were far removed
from the academia introduced into the country in colonial times. Modernism's
arsenal of nudity, distortions, and alienation was considered 'foreign', and
abhorred and opposed in a manner not dissimilar from that of warring tribes. It
is also interesting to note that the interventions of Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru in the early years redeemed many art situations interlocked with
bureaucratic tangles when unreasonable demands often brought processes to a
halt. The interventions of an enlightened prime minister, however, could not be
built into the art structure which has continued since. While institutionally
art practices were not fully understood and hence their several lineaments were
dysfunctional, the rise of the private sector and its presence in the art world
gained primacy only in the last few decades.
The rudimentary
structures of modernism were established by the 1950s and their divergent paths
were as multiple and plural as the country itself. The heated debates about
Indian art being imitative have now given way to the generally accepted belief
that Euro-American modernism is not pivotal and that art in different countries
established roots according toits own mores.
Exemplars abound but to cite instances nearer home, the Iranian group Saqqakhaneh, termed after a traditional
fountain installed for public drinking in old street corners, and formed in the
early 1960s, first tried to formulate their art as being inspired by votive
folk art like inscriptions, talismans, and the famous love stories of Iran. Its
modernist dimensions were acquired from the West and its nuanced contours were
locally inspired. The Nanyang Fine Arts College in
Singapore was established in the 1930s and was based on Western art education.
Its students imbibed the School of Paris methods and melded it with local
styles such as Chinese brush paintings. Its beginning was fortuitous when in
the early 1930s, a Japanese trained Chinese artist, Huang Suiheng,
stopped by Singapore on his way back from Paris. Finding it strategically
located and tropically attractive, he decided to set up an art institution and
invited a Chinese artist and teacher Lim Hak Tai to
establish the art school, and lessons commenced here from 1938. As it grew in
stature and shifted from an old two storey bungalow, it was evident that the
young artists would imbibe Western styles and inculcate them into Chinese and
traditional forms. Conversely, Japonism was born in Paris when the prints of
Hokusai, used as wrapping paper for ceramics and lacquerware,
were noticed by artists in the mid-nineteenth century. The fluid orchestration
of forms and the skilful positioning of objects in the works of Hokusai and Utamaro began to be incorporated as their prints became
widely circulated and influenced artists like Manet,
Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
The Ukiyo-e prints, with their elegance and eroticism, have
also inspired Indian artists from Souza and Sabavala
to Gulammohammed and Nilima
Sheikh, Nalini Malani, and Anju Dodiya.
The pluralistic
nature of the country retained its hybrid and multiple strain
in the different forms of modernism that took shape. Thus, there were the
Progressive Artists' Group and their associates, on the one hand, with artists
like Souza, Husain, Raza, Tyeb,
Akbar, Ram Kumar, and Krishen Khanna, who attempted a
modernism which took into account the School of Paris methods. Their efforts
were all the more pernicious as they were struggling on two fronts: the
academic school style taught in the British established art colleges and the
inclination to revive the country's past traditions. The veteran artist Jehangir Sabavala, who also
trained in Paris, created forms which were deeply structured and refracted his
own experiences while retaining a formal purity. The Kolkata artist Paritosh Sen, on the other hand,
was a member of Group 43, which was the earliest to sever its links with
academic practices. Satish Gujral
ploughed his lonely furrow with his sojourn to Mexico and encountered masters
like Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Frida Kahlo. On his return, he was to delve into
craft-based traditions, experiments with form and material, and architectural
constructs. The Santiniketan school
had evolved a contextual form of modernism linked to the environment and these
modes were further evolved by K.G. Subramanyan and
his polymorphic forms, which reflected the diverse situation of the
surroundings. The brilliantly conceived and magical forms of. Swaminathan, the earliest to be
interviewed, more than validated local, including tribal traditions, which were
yet contemporaneous and interfaced with the technocrat industrial basis of
development in the country. This is also highlighted by the additional material
attached to his interview truncated by his untimely death. Biren
De, popularly believed to have founded the neo- Tantric
group, vehemently refutes this and yet his powerful symbolic language of signs
and symbols had a great bearing on later artists. The narrative of V. Viswanadhan, one of the founding members of the Cholamandal group, unfolds with his early influences under Paniker and his later sojourn to Paris. One of the first
woman artists, Anjolie Ela Menon paved her own path, influenced by Romanesque and
early Christian art, the Russian and Byzantine icons, early moderns like Amrita
Sher-Gil, and even popular art to create her own liminal corridor of portraits and narrative forms.
If the furious
debates of the early years have lost their edge, modernism's contested
territories retain their contentious boundaries. The expressions of a newly
found nation took recourse to a multiplicity of forms, the fervour and energy
leading to a sense of C coming
home' in the 1970s and '80s. The swelling migrations from the countryside, the
imposition of the Emergency in the mid-1970s, increasing destitution and
failure of governance, language and communal riots, and the impoverishment and
marginalization of tribals, were all to take their
toll on the individual. The early optimism gave way to a grave quietude and a
strong critiquing of the establishment in imaginative and reflective ways.
Almost of its own volition, figurative art burgeoned in different parts of the
country as the mystique of existence gave way, and art became located and
personalized. In the works of the Mumbai artists like Gieve
Parel, Sudhir Parwardhan, and Nalini Malani, there is a quizzing of notions of family, city, and
indeed politicians and nations, where the tensile equation of the ordinary man
with his daily life becomes predominant. Rameshwar Broota, Arpita Singh, A.N.
Ramachandran, Jatin Das, and Arpana
Caur, situated in Delhi, focus on pavement dwellers,
the poor, and the marginalized, and also gaze at wider notions of myth and
history archived from memory. The Vadodara artist Nilima Sheikh finds expression in contemporary events of
death and disaster, liminally
relayed through the reflexive gaze of the miniatures, the thangka style among
other aesthetic modes. A younger artist like Ravinder Reddy, while deriving his
influences from international practices, retains the specificiry
of his surroundings. If it is embellished and iconic, it is, at the same time,
fractured, fragmented, and contemporary.
By the 1990s,
the buoyant economic situation, the greater presence of the international
corporate sector and their own tech-savvy, fast- changing society, rapid
urbanization, and seamlesss traversions
from one cultural mode to another had led the artists to incessant
inventiveness, and a cross-cultural fertilization, and at the same time, a
breaking of boundaries between different expressions. The prices of young
artists along with the masters began to soar and Indian artists began to have a
significant international presence. If modernism earlier could be located in
the 'interstices' of cultures, the defining moment now became the intersection
itself between high/low, art/life, national/international.
Atul Dodiya's works archive
art history, tradition, mediums, and his own locale to uniquely express the
existing situation. He has, for instance, converged on bustling bazaars to
paint shop shutters, which can be opened to reveal a diametrically opposite
reality inside. Anju Dodiya,
on the other hand, examines the fractured self by means of her own persona
intertwined within the social setting. Anita Dube has
assembled material from ceramic dyes used in temple icons to styrofoam wedges to instal the detritus of civilization. The site-specific
installations of Subodh Gupta consist of steel
objects of everyday use or trunks carried by migrant labourers, even thalis and katoris utilized in daily meals, and reconrextualize them to bring about a greater awareness of
migration, labour, cross-fertilization of cultures, and other shifts of
humanity in the present. The sculptor and painter Riyas
Komu, in recent years, has made portraits which are
culled from the deluge of mass media and included the dispossessed, the
homeless, the marginalized-from the migrant labourer to the footballer-who have
found shelter and evoked an intense scrutiny. If these are victims of
historical circumstances, they are also survivors of their predicament and are
shown in their dual identity as systematic citizens of an increasingly wider
world order.
In these
interactions, which took place over the last two decades, there is a lively
interplay of ideas, which reveals the social, cultural, and historical matrix
of art and art-making as it has taken place with four generations of Indian
artists. As the artists gradually unwound layers of their experiences, their
work processes, their interface with each other and with the society at large, many unknown facets of art began to emerge. Apart from
providing a greater understanding, these constitute an archival record of the
art situation in India. The exchanges took place in the artists' studios and
other intimate places and sometimes seemed more in the nature of ruminations,
providing access to the inner recesses of their consciousness. The incidental,
the anecdotal, the accidental lead to the praxis of art and indeed of
creativity, and acquire significance in this context. The trajectories of their
lives reveal the early years of an independent nation, the travails of the
Partition, the setting-up of institutions, the bunglings
and successes which followed later, providing a distinctive social document of
the period. All this is published in some detail so that the reader can avail
of material otherwise inaccessible. These freewheeling conversations while
being reflective and informative are, at the same time, informal and candid so
that the scholar as well as the art aficionado can avail of them. Finally, the
kaleidoscopic tapestty that emerges from 60 years of
art practices, revealed in the artists' own words, can only be seen as a work
in progress, which while being critical, is open- ended and subject to further
conversations.
Contents Volume I
Introduction |
ix |
F.N. Souza |
3 |
M.F. Hussain |
25 |
S.H. Raza |
41 |
Krishen
Khanna |
63 |
Tyeb
Mehta |
85 |
Akbar Padamsee |
101 |
Ram Kumar |
119 |
J. Swaminathan |
135 |
Biren
Di |
151 |
Satish
Gujral |
169 |
Jehangir
Sabavala |
183 |
Anjolie
Ela Menon |
203 |
Paritosh
Sen |
223 |
K.G. Subramanyam |
235 |
A.N. Ramachandran |
259 |
Nilima
Sheikh |
277 |
Gieve
Patel |
295 |
Sudhir
Patwardhan |
311 |
Select Bibliography |
333 |
List of Illustrations |
339 |
Index |
345 |
Acknowledgements |
351 |
Contents Volume II
Introduction |
xi |
Nalini
Malani |
3 |
V. Viswanadhan |
23 |
Jatin
Das |
43 |
Arpita
Singh |
59 |
Rameshwar
Broota |
77 |
Arpana
Caur |
97 |
G. Ravinder Reddy |
115 |
Atul
Dodiya |
133 |
Anita Dube |
153 |
Subodh
Gupta |
167 |
Anju
Dodiya |
185 |
Riyas
Komu |
205 |
Select Bibliography |
219 |
List of Illustrations |
225 |
Index |
229 |
Acknowledgement |
233 |