Indian Modernism,

Interventions: Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,

by Partha Mitter

As a criticism to the Art since 1900 (published 2004) Mitter mentions that in his own work,

which dealt with peripheral work, he would have like to see more authors, which feel the

gaps of our knowledge in world Art. He wishes he saw artists such as Jamini Roy (1887-

1972) whose innovative formalism, based on a primitivist reimagining of the folk art of India

powerfully mediated between the global and the local. What Art since 1900 touches upon

regarding Asian avantguarde traditions, relates more to what these movements mean to West

and in connections to the West and not in their own, isolated context. In this case one must

think about the possible missing out on the avantguarde of the country, since it wasn’t big, or

important or rebellious enough, according to our forms. How many movements we missed,

and how many do we think we understand- intercultural?

Says that the Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) is also not recognized for what she was to India.

Even though she lived France, she was considered to be avantguarde even more so for India.

To achieve avantguard in Europe at the time was not the same envelope that needed to be

pushed as in India. The norms and standards of the envelope are different in the two

continents.

Says that the wide acceptance of the Western modernist canon as self-evidently universal

(even in non western regions) does not give sufficient weight to the role of convention in

artistic production. Thus despite the serious intentions of the “universalist” art history project

remains trapped within the constrains of Western epistemology. This is seeable in a way how

the canon and the western theory of knowledge of art come together in other countries as

well.
In the late 19th c. , the modernist revolution began to alter European sensibilities, gradually

spreading to other regions throughout the 20th c., shaping global perception of contemporary

art and literature, a transformation that has left few societies untouched. (impact of Picaso’s

les demoiselles d’Avignon-Picasso; M. Duchamp, Fountain; early cubist, expressionists, and

surrealists, who declared the war on bourgeois values, bourgeois artistic models the

portentous pompiers peinters of the Victorian era). However, the fact that the modernism as a

term indicates a Europe as a the first one to break down the bourgeois rules and values has

impacted the rest of the world. That is the effect that needs to be looked at. India in 1920’s

has many similar movements, which led to the final proclamation of the independence. The

modernism itself is therefore a movement that globalizes, because one of it’s aspects and

groundbreaking aspects in the Europe was showing (more than ever) interest in foreign

cultures. Cezane, Picaso and so on.

Adrian Stokes claims that the Bathers by Cezanne, which inspired the Picasos Demoiselles,

encouraged artists to turn to African sculpture in repudiation of classical taste.

Important: Surrealism with its distaste for colonial rule, enjoyed a mutually beneficial cross-

fertilization with black cultural resistance as suggested by the friendship between Andre

Breton and the Martinique poet and intellectual Aime Cesaire.

Indeed it is only in the liberal atmosphere of bohemian Paris that the creative genius of the

black chanteuse Josephine Baker could flourish, the Jazz age and negrophilia helping to

release Europe from its sterile exclusivity.

One of the favorite projects of the colonial powers in nineteenth century was to inculcate

“good taste” in the subject nations through the introduction of academic naturalism and

classical standards. As an example Mitter takes India, where such good taste was introduced

by means of art schools and art societies that mounted art exhibitions. Therefore, the revolt of

the Western avant-garde against academic naturalism and its attendant ideology was openly
welcomed by the subject nations, who were concerned with formulating their own resistance

to the colonial order.

Modernism’s experimental attitude that constantly sought to push intellectual frontiers, its

ideology of emancipatory innovation, and its agnostic relation to tradition and authority

released new energies in artists raised in a more traditional mode.

The intellectual frontiers are the understanding of the tradition itself. What is tradition? Does

it end- like many things it doesn’t have the life of its own; we decide what is traditional and

what not. Further more the traditional context brought in contemporary use- would it still me

considered to be traditional or modern? Is traditional considered to be old, or is it gegenteil

von modern. If one decides to incorporate it in modern; is it still traditional?

The Picaso Manque Syndrome

The ideas of Clark and Kraus, intervened in the triumphalism of avant-garde, highlighting the

fractures and contradictions of modernity and its complex relationship with tradition, all of

which inspired art practices not only in the center but also in the periphery. As David Craven

argues, critical interventions of major thinkers from the periphery are lacking, which by their

absence contribute to the erasure of nonmetropolitan art practices within the “universalists

canon”.

Primitivism in 20th century Art was an importance exhibition mounted in MOMA in NYC. Its

goal was to highlight the formal similarities between the ethnographic art and Western

modernism. The exhibition sought to overcome the “debased” notion of causal influence by

treating ethnographic objects as possessing aesthetic merit, described the “primitive” motifs

in the works of Picasso and other iconic modernists as a reflections of the similarities

(affinities) between modern and tribal art that transcended time and space. The anthropologist

Clifford commented on the exhibition’s erasure of colonial violence, which had wrenched
African and Oceanic objects from their social context for display in European museums by its

projection of a neutral formalist “allegory of affinities”.

Mitter thinks that the exhibit “Primitivism in 20 c Art” and its organizers wanted to underline

the the fact that the artistic “borrowings” of Picasso and other modernists from simple

“primitive” cultures did not amount to a debt to these societies. On the contrary, the European

“discovery” of ethnographic art redeemed these fetishist objects for the modern world and

elevated them to the level of high art. What is CRUCIAL to realize is that Picaso’s

borrowings from “simple” ethnographic objects in no way compromised his cultural integrity

as an artist.

As opposed to appropriations by the Wesern avant-garde, how does it look when an artist as a

colonial subject responds to an intellectual product of the dominant European culture. The

widely held view that the modern art beyond Europe and US is at best derivative exercise

reflects assertion of the “ intellectual property rights” of the West. In 1959 the English art

historian William George Archer published India and Modern art, which remains a classic

example of colonialist art history. Even though this book was written half century ago, its

assumptions about the lack of originality of non-Western modernism.

Archers questions:

Con modern art be appropriated by Indians and if so in what manner?

As an example Archer took to answer this question was analysis of the paintings made

between 1921-28 by the pioneering Indian modernist Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938),

who was among the first Indian painters to adapt the revolutionary syntax of Cubism. This is

what he says:

His style (G.T.) was, at first sight, not unlike the early followers of Braque and Picasso… Yet

apart from their very evident lack of power- a power which in some mysterious way was

present in the work of Braque and Picasso- G.T pictures were actually no more than stylized
illustrations … week as art, but what was more important they were un-Indian… As a result,

his pictures, despite their modernistic manner, had an air of trivial irrelevance.1

According to Mitter Archer failed to realize, that Indian artist’s achievement in deploying the

flexible syntax of Cubism in order to create miniature watercolors of poetic intensity that

were meaningful in the colonial-nationalist milleu of India (from the triumph of modernism,

pg 18-27).

Mitter also argues that Indian artist embraced analytical cubism, as opposed to the

illusionistic naturalism (which was destroyed by the cubism) and so the internal cohesion of

the picture ceased to be a window on the external world. But they were not concerned with

the formal revolution of analytical cubism as such.

A an example Mitter uses examples of the two Central European artists (Western

Expresionism-Franz Marc, Georg Grosz) and one of an Indian Artist (G.Tagore).

He argues that they share the formal language in that that the objects could be distorted and

fragmented to produce dazzling patterns. However, the cultural context of the central

European artists and Gaganendranath were as different as their artistic aims and artistic

agendas. What this is argues Mitter is sharing the decontextualization of the age, shared as

much by artists in the center as in the periphery (probably meaning the periphery being

India).

Another notion of Archer was that he claimed that Tagore by using the means of the west in

his paintings, he lost himself as an Indian. There he argues that the us of “primitive” art in

Europe (Picasso) for example, did not result in him being less europian or true to himself.

(See Moma catalogue “Primitivism in 20 c. Art). This is Hypocritical.

1
William George Archer, Indian and Modern Art (London: 1959), 43.