Following India's independence in 1947, Indian artists creating
modern works of art sought to maintain a local idiom, an
"Indianness" representative of their newly independent nation,
while connecting to modernism, an aesthetic then understood as both
universal and presumptively Western. These artists depicted India's
precolonial past while embracing aspects of modernism's pursuit of
the new, and they challenged the West's dismissal of non-Western
places and cultures as sources of primitivist imagery but not of
modernist artworks. In "Art for a Modern India," Rebecca M. Brown
explores the emergence of a self-conscious Indian modernism--in
painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, film, and
photography--in the years between independence and 1980, by which
time the Indian art scene had changed significantly and
postcolonial discourse had begun to complicate mid-century ideas of
nationalism.
Through close analyses of specific objects of art and design,
Brown describes how Indian artists engaged with questions of
authenticity, iconicity, narrative, urbanization, and science and
technology. She explains how the filmmaker Satyajit Ray presented
the rural Indian village as a socially complex space rather than as
the idealized site of "authentic India" in his acclaimed "Apu
Trilogy," how the painter Bhupen Khakhar reworked Indian folk
idioms and borrowed iconic images from calendar prints in his
paintings of urban dwellers, and how Indian architects developed a
revivalist style of bold architectural gestures anchored in India's
past as they planned the Ashok Hotel and the Vigyan Bhavan
Conference Center, both in New Delhi. Discussing these and other
works of art and design, Brown chronicles the mid-twentieth-century
trajectory of India's modern visual culture.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
