COMMUNITY
The Pre-Partition Indian Avant-Garde
Partha Mitter
Art historian Partha Mitter challenges the cultural purity predicated on nationalist myths: natural corollaries of the denial of both the existence of the avant-garde in colonial India. and the very real flow of politics and aesthetics that allowed for the emergence of global modernism. Indian avant-garde art was cosmopolitan, concentrated in Calcutta, Lahore, and Bombay, but it remains a challenge to art historiography nonetheless.
South Asian artists often deny the past of our own avant-garde. This is predicated on the nationalist myth of cultural purity fabricated in the 19th century. But if you deny history, you can't do anything.
RECOMMENDED: The Triumph of Modernism: India's Avant-Garde 1922-1947 by Partha Mitter (University of Chicago Press, 2007)
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Interview
Art History
Avant-Garde Origins
1922 Bauhaus Exhibition
Rabindranath Tagore
Colonialism
Modernism
Ernst Gombrich
Eric Hobsbawm
Primitivism
Edward Said
Ramkinkar Baij
Bombay Progressive Artists
Satyajit Ray
Intellectual History
Global History
Avant-Garde Beginnings in India
Avant-Garde Traditions
Amrita Sher-Gil
Academia
Art Activism
Avant-Garde Form
Art Practice
Bauhaus
Calc
Gender
Jamini Roy
Bidirectional Exchange
The Nature of Global History
Anti-Colonialism
Partition
Formalism
Geometry
Kunst
Nationalism
Internationalism
Vanguardism
Gaganendranath Tagore
Santiniketan School
Abstract
Orientalism
Art Nouveau
Kandinsky
Historicism
Cubism
Malevich
Surrealism
The Valorization of the Rural
Mukhopadhyaya
Nandalal Bose
Lahore
Bombay
K. G. Subramanyan
Baroda School
Hemendranath Mazumdar
Plurality of Avant-Gardes
Exchange
Picasso Manqué Syndrome
Cosmopolitanism
Hegelian Dialectic
Kalighat
Samuel Eyzee-Rahamin
PARTHA MITTER is an Emeritus Professor at Sussex University, a Member at Wolfson College, Oxford, and an Honorary Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He’s held fellowships from Churchill College and Clare Hall, Cambridge, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Getty Research Institute, and others. He was a Radhakrishnan Memorial Lecturer at All Souls College, Oxford. His books include Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922-1947, and others. He works with the Bauhaus Foundation in Berlin and Dessau.
