Introduction

Michael Mackenzie

It gives me great pleasure to introduce the catalog to the exhibition Paper Trails: Modern Indian Works on Paper from the Gaur Collection, curated by Dr. Tamara Sears. This is the second exhibition of works from the Gaur Collection of modern and contemporary Indian art to be held at the Grinnell College Museum of Art, the first being Many Visions, Many Versions: Art from Indigenous Communities in India, in 2017. That earlier exhibition focused on what are sometimes called the “non-canonical” arts of various tribal peoples in India. In this case, the works in the exhibition are fully “canonical,” in the sense that they are part of the mainstream of modern and contemporary developments in India since Independence in 1947. The Gaurs have built up a collection of great depth and completeness, an almost encyclopedic overview of the complexity and diversity of art in India over the seven decades since Independence. The connoisseurship which they have developed in their collecting practice has enabled them to focus on the materiality of the art object, especially works on paper, and to be attentive to the skill of the printing, the freshness of the plate, the quality of the paper support, as well as the immediacy of the artist’s touch, whether with burin, etching needle, or brush. An exhibition of such works, with their rich materiality and intimacy of scale, offers an American audience the opportunity to experience up close the diversity of the work of modern and contemporary Indian artists.

Although I myself am a specialist in European art, specifically German modernism in the 20th century, I have also been privileged to teach an undergraduate course on the history of Indian art for many years, most recently at Grinnell College. I was first smitten by the sensuous and expressive beauty of Indian art at a major exhibition of an important private collection of ancient and medieval sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997. After I saw that exhibition, I rushed back to the classroom to share these aesthetic pleasures with my students, forgetting in the first flush of discovery that my scholarly discipline, and the theoretical positions of modern and contemporary art, had taught me to treat such subjective judgments with suspicion, and to avoid them as unprofessional. And, after

all, my appreciation of premodern Buddhist and Hindu art was predicated on a certain Eurocentric, Orientalizing conception of Indian art as essentially static, its greatness located in an unrecoverable past. It had nothing to do with my primary work as a historian of modern art, and could not, so I presumed, trouble the categories in which I thought about that work. I was as yet unaware that there even was modern art from India. It was only after the appearance of Partha Mitter’s history of Indian art, in 2001, which included several chapters at the end on modern and contemporary art, that I followed Indian art into the modern era.1 And even still I persisted in thinking of it as some sort of secondary or provincial reflection of European modernism, peripheral to the main line of development. It took longer yet to begin to decenter or “provincialize” Europe and European modernism, to borrow a phrase from the post-colonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty.2 Today, I try to think with my students about how the work of South Asian artists, those who work in Asia and those who work in Europe and America, is central to the story of modern and contemporary art, not peripheral to it.3 What makes the Gaur Collection so important in the US, and what makes exhibitions like this one so important, is the opportunity to see and think about how Indian art is part of the story of modernism, to see Indian art that is not only beautiful but also aesthetically rigorous, powerfully expressive, and contextually complex.

Let us take up the thread of that story for a moment, if not at the starting point—for the question of starting points inevitably prevents the story from beginning—then at a crucial juncture. In 1919, two innovative art schools were founded, each with the goal of reforming not only art education, but the whole student and, eventually, the nation. One school was Kala Bhavana, the art school of Santiniketan University, outside the city of Calcutta (then the capital of the British Raj in India and now called Kolkata), founded by the writer and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The other was the Bauhaus in Germany, founded by architect Walter Gropius. The two schools had similar objectives: to slough off an ossified academic system imposed by a spiritually inert imperial patronage, in order to allow a more authentic individual and national cultural expression to emerge. Tagore gathered what technical and industrial innovations he could from Europe and America to reform the practice of agriculture in rural Bengal, aiming at a unity of craft, farming, and village life that was, however, open to and benefitted from the wider world—a “cosmopolitan local” development not dependent on British imperial patronage.4 At the Bauhaus, meanwhile, the idea of India was everywhere, especially in the early years. Students practiced meditation and breathing exercises, vegetarianism, and studied their chakras, hoping to harmonize industrial technology with spiritual practice. In preparing for his inaugural speech of the school, Walter Gropius made a note to himself to cite the Gothic cathedral and “India!” in the same breath.5 Both European and Indian modernism looked to village, peasant life, and the spiritual life of the medieval past as a source of “authentic” cultural expression, freed from the vocabulary of realism and materialism imposed by the imperial rulers.6 Each of the two art and design schools was fascinated by, and aspired to, their imagined perception

Topographic Engagements

Maqbool Fida Husain (1915–2011)

3 Yatra, ca. 1950 Lithograph 17 3/4 × 22 1/8 in

One of India’s most internationally revered artists, Maqbool Fida Husain was frequently hailed as a global nomad. He was born in the remote pilgrimage town of Pandharpur in Maharashtra but was raised primarily in Indore (Madhya Pradesh), which at the time was a vibrant city under the suzerainty of the royal Holkars. Having displayed a distinct talent for calligraphy and poetry at an early age, while staying with an uncle in a madrasa in Baroda (now Vadodara), in Gujarat, he taught himself to paint and took great joy in cycling around, finding new ways to represent the lush, rural landscape. Driven by his desire to become an artist, Husain set off in 1937 for Bombay (now Mumbai) where he supported himself as a painter for hire, designing cinema billboards and commercial toys. After garnering acclaim at the annual exhibition of the Bombay Art Society, in 1947, he joined forces with F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza, K. H. Ara, H. A. Gade, and S. K. Bakre to establish the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG). By the 1950s, he was widely recognized as one of India’s leading artists. Although frequently heralded for his empathetic understanding and embrace of South Asia’s manifold religious traditions, his nude depictions of Hindu deities drew outrage in the early 2000s, and, in 2006, he was charged with promoting obscenities and “hurting sentiments of people.” Fearing prosecution, he lived in self-imposed exile and in 2010 officially became a citizen of Qatar.

This lithograph exemplifies Husain’s early work, which focused on village life as a rumination on the complex, and sometimes contradictory, realities of modernity in India. Although untitled, it appears as a mirror image of a well-known oil painting titled Yatra, or “Pilgrimage,” dated

Maqbool Fida Husain, Yatra, 1955, Oil on canvas, 33½ × 42 7/8 in

to 1955, reproduced in obverse, with which it shares all but a few select details.5 The scene appears deceptively transparent: a village woman and her child are riding on a flatbed bullock cart, driven by a man standing in front and clad in a lungi, which is wrapped around his waist, forming a skirt around his legs. Just visible at the center of the vast and hilly landscape is a small town whose outskirts give way to a dense crop of forest. However, upon closer reflection the scene is anything but simple. Both the figures and the bullock cart draw upon Husain’s earlier life as a commercial artist by drawing upon the form of the stock toys massproduced, largely for urban audiences, by the company for which he worked in the 1940s.6 At the same time, the title imbues the work with an aura of religiosity, noted more precisely by Ebrahim Alkazi in his 1978 monograph on Husain. He notes the strong resemblance of the driver, who stands at the center of the composition with one hand raised with the palm facing upward, to the Hindu god Hanuman, who, in his quest to procure healing herbs for Lakshmana, the brother of the god Rama, raised aloft an entire hilltop village.7 This interweaving of rural and urban worlds—as well as present, historical, and mythic temporalities—is characteristic of Husain’s complex topographic engagements. [TS]

3 | Yatra