A documentation of art history

Edited by Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard, ‘The Books that Shaped Art History’ (Pages: 268; 54 illustrations; Price: £24.95) reanalyzes and takes a fresh look at Nikolaus Pevsner’s ‘Gospel of Modernism; ‘Pioneers of the Modern Movement’, E.H. Gombrich’s ‘Art and Illusion’; Alfred Barr’s ‘Legendary monograph on Matisse’; Clement Greenberg’s ‘Art and Culture’ that had a seismic effect when first published in 1961, apart from Rosalind Krauss’s ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde & Other Modernist Myths’ (it introduced structuralist/ poststructuralist line of thought into art historical study), among others.

An introductory note to the comprehensive compilation states: “With leading writers including Boris Groys, Susie Nash, Richard Verdi and John Elderfield, each chapter tries to analyze a single major book so as to set out its premises and argument as well as to map the intellectual development of its author. The chapter discusses a particular book’s position within the vast field of art history, considering its significance in the larger context both of its initial reception and its legacy.” Richard Shone, editor of ‘The Burlington Magazine’, has authored a number of books on both French and British art like ‘Bloomsbury Portraits’ and ‘The Post-Impressionists’.

He contributed to the exhibit catalogue for ‘Sensation’ at The Royal Academy, London. An art historian and former Contributing Editor of The Burlington Magazine, Stonard’s ‘Fault Lines: Art in Germany 1945–55’ was greatly appreciated. He has worked as a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and was a Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2010–11). He has published several titles on modern and contemporary German and British art.

The Guardian columnist Kathryn Hughes underlines the fact that the erudite essayists are all bound by connections in this enriching account of the 20th-century art history. Describing it as ‘a thought-provoking and meaningful reflection on nearly a century of Art Historical scholarship’ Daisy Dunn of the Telegraph UK points out: “Praising the masters even while accepting and assessing their errors, the volume sets the bar for the next generation. It heralds a bold approach.

Art historians find it difficult to dodge the lofty lineage of earlier scholarship. It hammers home that point with subtle force: Art History is little else than received wisdom. It’s as much about theorizing and re-theorizing other theorists’ theories about art, these days, as it is about looking at pictures. The books of Fry, Kenneth Clark, Bernard Berenson, and all the other famous historians discussed in this collection certainly shaped Art History today. However, one cannot help thinking that in doing so they might also have zapped it of its own voice.”

An overview of rich history of art

Released earlier this year, a major scholarly compilation provides a roadmap of the art & culture domain by reassessing the perceived impact of a wide gamut of significant written works such as these from historical, social and cultural perspective - from Alpers and Krauss to Gombrich and Greenberg. It’s an interesting account of important scholarly books, placing them within the broader disciplinary field, narrated through its important seminal texts.

Each chapter of ‘The Books that Shaped Art History’ - written by a known curator, art historian or one of today’s promising art scholars- revolves around a single theme- so as to individually and collectively present a varied and in-depth overview of the rich history of art. Stonard in an explanatory essay explores how art history has been cohesively forged by these significant contributions, as well as by the sustained dialogues and even ruptures between them. There is supplementary documentation to summarize each art historian’s achievements, a detailed publication history of their respective texts and suggestions for further reading.

For example, how strangely comforting and ironical, it is to grasp that Roger Fry's ‘Cézanne’ slipped into the world, literally, in far less than stellar circumstances. First published in 1926 in a French magazine sans any illustrations, all it yielded to the author were a few free copies. Virginia and Leonard Woolf, his close friends, did a version in English for their Hogarth Press. It still left much to be desired.

Yet these loopholes did not matter when seen against the backdrop of the writer’s monumental achievement with his thoughtful text. By scrutinizing the interrelations of form and color, he set down the framework for a proto formalism, which went on to become the dominant way of constructing art criticism for years to come.

In a point, Susie Nash puts particularly well in her essay on German scholar Erwin Panofsky, for 20th-century criticism to be great it didn’t necessarily have to be right, always. Many of his arguments were rather ill-conceived since he often was from accessing primary material. But Panofsky’s vibrant, big-guns approach to his discipline made his work so engaging.” In general, the art writers who have found a deserved place in this volume were invariably ‘ambitious and avid risk takers’.

Bringing the best out of creative minds amidst serene settings

The RPG Art Camp at Marve, Mumbai is hosted by Arts Trust’s Vickram Sethi and Harsh Goenka of The RPG Enterprises. Spelling out the purpose, the art aficionado had quipped in an interview: “The cross-section of artists is so different that I simply can’t wait to see the results. Personally, I am interested to see the self-portraits done by them. Artists like Ela Menon have stayed here many times and it’s a completely new side of theirs that’s revealed every year with these works of art”

The art-loving industrialist quips that setting of the beautiful bungalow by seaside acts as a perfect backdrop for creative minds. It lets them leave their imagination unfettered. He mentions that there’s a fine balance between art and recreation. According to him, the camp is an eclectic exchange of music, food and relaxation by the sea. "We’ve made arrangements for painting as well as the sharing of knowledge and skills between the resident artists,” he reveals.

In essence, RPG Art Camp is an informal art gathering that brings together some of the most prominent names on the contemporary art scene. No surprise, the art world always looks forward to the art camp each year. The event culminates in a beautiful brunch by the serene sea where art-loving people mingle with the artists and appreciate their work.

The artists, who come together for the camp, are from different backgrounds. They thus get to know each other through these events. It’s indeed a great mix of talented artists, comprising veterans and upcoming names. Paresh Maity Anjolie Ela Menon, and Bangladesh’s Shahabudin to some of the most promising and talented names including SN Sujith, Purnna Behera and Avishek Sen. The idea is to provide them all with an alternative space away from the confines of their studio.

A majority of them attend these informal meets, so to say, with an idea of imbibing new experiences. With no boundaries of set norms, time lines or themes at the artist commune, the work produced is spontaneous. The camp is like a platform for India's fresh talent to engage with the seniors, mingle with the very best in the field of art, get some insights and learn a few things from them.All this happens informally even as each participant creates his or her own masterpiece for a group show on concluding day of the event.

Grasping Huma Mulj’s art practice

Born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1970, Huma Mulji completed her Bachelors in Fine Art from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in 1995 and is currently an MFA candidate at the Transart Institute, Donau-Universität Krems, Austria.

She has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally. Mulji's participation in recent selected exhibitions include ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, The Saatchi Gallery, London in 2010, ‘Hanging Fire : Contemporary Art from Pakistan’, at Asia Society, NY, and Half Life, Zahoor-ul-Akhlaque Gallery, Lahore Pakistan in 2009.

In 2008 she participated in ‘Farewell to Post Colonialism’, Third Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, China; ‘Desperately Seeking Paradise’, Pakistan Pavilion, ART DUBAI, UAE and ‘Arabian Delight’, Rohtas Gallery, Lahore.

She has said of her works in a note, “Looking at the absurdities and conflicts of living in an urban society in transition, of 'living 200 years in the past and 30 years in the future’ simultaneously, my works broadly address the visual and cultural overlaps of language, image and taste that create the most fantastic collisions. Looking at this phenomenon with formal and conceptual irony and humor, the works are surreal juxtapositions of images. Rather than dwell on existing theoretical issues of living and working in a post-colonial country, the work for me is research into the realities of living in Pakistan.

The works also explore the possibilities of ‘making’ in Pakistan, of the conflicting availability of low-tech methods of fabrication, together with exquisite traditional crafts; materials and forms that come from another time, or those that are ‘imported’, ‘newly discovered’ or ‘re-appropriated’, often discovering stunning design solutions, for everyday design problems.

The artist living in Lahore teaches at the School of Visual Arts, Beaconhouse National University. Her mixed media & enamel paint on canvas ‘Memory of a Blue’, which portrays both the farcical and ironic juxtapositions of the gradual wearing down of glossy albeit false metropolitan glitter as well as spectacle, is on view at Frieze 2012.

(Image courtesy: Project 88)

Captivating life graph of a veteran practitioner

Krishen Khanna’s captivating life graph constitutes a passionate psychological engagement that also deftly documents the time and events of modern India. The residues of past remain submerged in his art, and the horror of the haunting past pulses beneath the outwardly calm surface.

Fathoming his art and life, critic-curator Ranjit Hoskote had mentioned: “Krishen Khanna was a witness to these cataclysmic events at first hand, and gradually embarked on the course that would establish him as a distinguished member of the first generation of postcolonial Indian artists. A connoisseur of extreme conditions: he invokes not only the desperate and the damned, but also the quixotic, and the sublimely mad.

"His portraits of dervish-like figures, and of saints with matted hair and rough garments exploring the wilderness, have a dual origin: if they owe much to the artist’s measured engagements with art history, they also spring from the quirkiness of his personal experience.”
Tracing this trajectory of exploration, he was also gripped by memories of India’s freedom struggle and the conquest of colonial rulers. In his drawings, he also dwelt on his favorite figures for decades: truckers in vehicles, resembling crumbled war chariots.

A kaleidoscopic show of his iconic drawings and paintings was hosted a few years ago at the LKA, Delhi. The retrospective charted his creative journey spanning several decades and many milestones. The veteran artist rewound the clock back to his pre-partition life in Lahore. It was largely a recollection of events from his early childhood, when fight between Indian freedom fighters and the British rulers was at its peak. The large format oil compositions done in monochrome served as an extension of his memories in Lahore’s cosmopolitan settings.

The drawing is a form at which he excels. For him, it’s a continuous discipline about which the master practitioner quips, “I invite chance.” His line, wavy and scraggly by turns, gets spiky and unpredictable sometimes or generative of a precise geometry, at other times. Serving as the perfect probing device to satiate his artistic quest, it’s not predicated upon a semblance of conceptual closure and formal completeness, unlike the painting: it tends to initiate a conversation and leaves its interpretation to the viewer’s own imagination.

What made Somnath Hore’s art practice unique

The vivacious visual appeal of Somnath Hore’s practice was further enhanced by the rough surfaces, holes, slits, and exposed channels. Perhaps the most powerful and poignant statement made by the socially sensitive practitioner was ‘Wounds’, his critically acclaimed pulp print series. It was cataclysmic phase of the 1940’s onwards, the 1943 Bengal Famine in particular, which went on to shape his consciousness and vision as an artist. From 1974, he started working on bronze sculptures, also exuding the anguished human form, a trademark of his fascinating figuration.

Veteran artist K. G. Subramanyan had mentioned in an insightful essay in the catalogue published on the occasion of a significant exhibition courtesy the Kolkata-based Seagull Foundation: “On a summer morning the world glows with sunlight, the flowers load the trees, the breeze wafts around a heady kind of perfume—but in Somnath’s vision it is the spectacle of man’s suffering that steals the show. In his paintings and sculptures, in prints and drawings, it is invariably the same.

"This has been so since a long time. Since he saw the disastrous Bengal famine more than forty years ago; and behind it the panorama of rural poverty when still a youth. He goes over and over this obsessively. In everything he sees, he reads its gesture of tragedy. So in a crack in the earth, he sees a dire menace. In fissures in the wall, he recalls a gaping wound. Even his sensuous fantasies are sewn up in a skin of suffering.

"Lean bodies of men and women huddled in wan despair. With faces whose flesh sinks into the bone; whose chests cannot find enough skin to hide their hollow nakedness; whose eyes are sockets from which all light has been drained out; mouths whose only voice is that of rattling teeth. Then the skinny dogs and bony cows and goats that keep them languid company. They do not repel our eye; they draw us in.”

Milestones in a master artist’s career

Born in 1921in Baroma of Chittagong district, this internationally acclaimed sculptor-printmaker did a diploma in Fine Arts, Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata (1957). He taught at Indian Art College and Delhi Polytechnic before joining the Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan apart from serving as a Visiting Lecturer at M. S. University of Baroda.

He received several prestigious awards including the Lalit Kala Ratna Puraskar (2004); L. N. Gupta Memorial Award (1977); the National Award in Painting in 1960 at LKA, Delhi; the National Award in Graphics (1962, 1963); and the Rabindra Bharati University Award among others, apart from being awarded Padma Bhushan (posthumously).

Among his selected posthumous shows are 'Hunger', Seagull Foundation for the Arts, Kolkata (2013); 'Calcutta Chromosome', The Viewing Room, Mumbai (2012-13); 'Crossings: Time Unfolded, Part 2', Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2012); ‘Manifestations VI', Delhi Art Gallery (2011); 'Bodies That Matter......', Art Heritage, Delhi (2011); 'Somnath Hore: Prints, Drawings, Posters', The Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre, Kolkata (2011); 'A Retrospective of Prints', Project 88, Mumbai (2010); 'Vahana', Bombay Art Gallery, Mumbai (2010); 'Modern Continuous', Galerie 88, Kolkata (2009); 'Wound', Aicon Gallery, London (2009); and a major showcase of Indian art at Royal Cultural Centre, Amman, Jordan courtesy LKA, Delhi in collaboration with Embassy of India (2008).

More than five decades ago, solo exhibitions of his works were held across different art centers of India including Kolkata (1968, 1956, 1961-62), and New Delhi (1960) apart from participations at Warsaw Biennale of Graphic Arts, Poland in 1968; 1st Triennale of World Art, LKA, Delhi in the same year; International Association of Plastic Artists Exhibition, Tokyo and Kolkata (1966); Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil (1963); Venice Biennale (1962); and Lugano International Graphics Biennale, Switzerland (1960).

His recent noteworthy group exhibitions include ‘Manifestations II’, at Delhi Art Gallery and Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai (2004); Manifestations (2003) at World Trade Centre, Mumbai; Contemporary Indian Paintings from the Chester & Davida Hertwitz Collection Part II, USA (1996).