Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery
Author(s): Partha Mitter
Source: The Art Bulletin , Dec., 2008, Vol. 90, No. 4 (Dec., 2008), pp. 531-548
Published by: CAA
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20619633
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20619633?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
CAA is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Interventions:
Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde
Art from the Periphery
Partha Mitter
With the collapse of earlier certainties, the last two decades
have witnessed serious soul-searching among art historians
about the future of the discipline. This is strikingly expressed
by Hans Belting in two of his theoretical works one with the
melancholy title The End of the History of Art? accepting the
demise of art history as a grand Hegelian narrative.1 There is,
he points out, a progressive disjunction between the aware
ness of the enormous diversity of art forms and practices and
the narrow focus of canonical art histories. However, his fear
that the canon looks increasingly vulnerable may be some
what premature. Take, for instance, Art since 1900, the mag
isterial volume on the avant-garde published in 2004. The
book raises immensely important questions that demand en
gagement. The four authors display intellectual sophistica
tion, an exemplary attention to detail, and a masterly grasp of
the broader picture of Western avant-garde art in the twen
tieth century.2 Because of its importance, the work has been
reviewed widely and its underlying arguments scrutinized and
dismantled, raising a great many urgent critical and historical
issues relevant to our times. I think we must recognize the
advances made by this work, which brings into question the
triumphalist discourse of modernism in the opening decades
of the twentieth century. It should further be acknowledged
that a wide-ranging text of this sort for a general readership
cannot hope to include everything.
Nonetheless, perhaps because my own work has dealt with
artists in the periphery, I would have liked to have seen the
authors filling more of the gaps in our knowledge of world
art. The book contains few references to notable artists living
outside Europe and the United States who have made signif
icant contributions to the global processes of modernity. It
would have been desirable to see even a brief mention of
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;
the savage, spiky images of the Mexican primitivist Wifredo
Lam (1902-1982, Fig. 1); the amoebic shapes of the Brazilian
avant-garde painter Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973); and,
more recently, Everlyn Nicodemus's profoundly moving rep
resentations of global genocide (Fig. 2) and the expansive
work of African artists shown at Africa Remix, a recent exhibi
tion at the Hayward Gallery, London.3
The Mexican muralists are discussed, but one could run
the danger of concluding from this volume that except for
this major movement, there has been no worthwhile art of
political resistance in the non-Western world, notwithstand
ing significant artistic expressions in Asia and Africa of cul
tural resistance to Western dominance. My latest book, The
Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922
1947, and my previous work, Art and Nationalism in Colonial
India, 1850-1922, for instance, chart the complex relation
between modernity, art, and cultural resistance in colonial
India.4 Art since 1900 touches on a few isolated samples of
postwar diaspora art and Asian avant-garde movements, but
these owe their presence more to what they mean to the West
than for their intrinsic worth. In consequence, they tend to
come off as bit players in the master narrative. Thus, despite
the above inclusions, the canon is not significantly enlarged.
Rather, the non-Western artists are brought in primarily on
account of their compatibility with the avant-garde discourse
in the West.
This is not to discount the book's very wide range of topics.
Among its considerable merits is that, within the parameters
of its own definition of modernism, it rigorously documents
the internal debates in the West on the predicament of
modernity, mapping successfully its complex, dialogic, oppo
sitional, and agonistic agenda, foregrounding its intellectual
wherewithal, such as psychoanalysis, social history of art, for
malism, structuralism, and posts true turalism. It will conse
quently remain a valuable document to the last century's
insider-outsider politics of modernism from the Euro-Amer
ican perspective. I point this out only because the authors in
fact distance themselves from the hollow universalism of the
colonial period, as expressed in Hal Foster's admirable at
tempts to negotiate "between diverse cultural space-times."5
However, since the authors aim to deal with "art" as a uni
versal category, readers will inevitably demand much of these
scholars who inspired a generation of students in exposing
the knowledge-power nexus of twentieth-century modern
ism.6 For this reason, none of the issues raised here would be
problematic if the title of the book were, for instance, Western
Avant-Garde Art since 1900 or Western Art since 1900.
The book's wider global ambitions nonetheless offer me a
starting point to situate its "universalist" canon within an
epistemological framework that goes back to the Enlighten
ment. The book follows a well-trodden path that equates
Western norms with global values, having the unintended
consequence of excluding the art of the periphery. Take the
example of a recent standard history of world photography:
not a single Chinese, Indian, or African photographer fea
tures in it, not, for instance, the stunning color photographs
of Raghubir Singh (Fig. 3), nor the elegant black-and-white
studio portraits of the African photographer Seydou Keita,
whose work could well compare with that of August Sander.7
Similarly, the work of the Indian-Hungarian Amrita Sher-Gil,
a highly original woman painter who worked in the context
of global modernism, is generally written out of world histo
ries of women artists (Fig. 4) ,8 Such faith in the universal is
not unique to art history, though it creates its own specific
inclusions. Take the world of fashion. We are led to believe
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
532 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 4
1 Wifredo Lam, untitled, 1946, ink on paper, 12V4 X W2 in.
(31 X 24 cm). Private collection (artwork Artists Rights
Society [ARS], New York; photograph Banque dTmages,
AD AGP, provided by Art Resource, New York)
that today it embraces with enthusiasm all ethnic groups in
an unprecedented expansion of the canon of beauty. Yet
what comes across is the fact that representations of multi
ethnic supermodels are homogenized within the prevailing
Western classical framework of beauty.9 Looking at econom
ics, we see that models of development, based on a Western
definition of well-being, are presented as a panacea to the
developing world irrespective of the values and needs of
specific regions. I use these analogies merely to demonstrate
the pervasive hold of "hegemonic" universality.10
Despite its serious intentions, the "universalist" project of
art history remains trapped within the constraints of Western
epistemology, which cannot be remedied simply by a cultur
ally determined self-reflexivity. The wide acceptance of the
Western modernist canon as self-evidently universal (even in
non-Western regions, I must add) does not give sufficient
weight to the role of convention in artistic production.11 In
the social sciences, this use of the universal for the specific is
described as an unmarked case. Modernism in this sense is an
"unmarked case" that implicitly stands for "Western" mod
ernism. By this token, a qualifying epithet becomes necessary
to speak of any other: East European modernism, Chinese
modernism, Indian modernism, and so on.12 It is perhaps no
accident that following Immanuel Kant's a priori view of
aesthetics, the concept "art" is often regarded as neutral and
disinterested, which systematically ignores the implications of
race, gender, sexual orientation, and even class (by the latter
I mean all forms of folk and popular art that are excluded
from the master narrative). The universal canon of art sub
sumes either the classical canon or the modernist canon that
supplanted it in the twentieth century.
The Shock of the New
The embedded hierarchy implied by the modernist canon
and its impact on contemporary art of regions regarded as
the cultural periphery can be understood only in historical
terms. In the late nineteenth century, the modernist revolu
tion began to alter European sensibilities, gradually spread
ing to other regions throughout the twentieth, shaping
global perceptions of contemporary art and literature, a
transformation that has left few societies untouched.13 Imag
ine the profound shock on first encountering Pablo Picasso's
Les demoiselles d'Avignon, or the frisson given by Marcel Du
champ's Fountain, a porcelain urinal signed R. Mutt. Even
from this distance in time, we can still sense the dislocation
and bewilderment with which the general public greeted
these radical assaults on their vision and sensibility. Nor is it
difficult to be impressed by the radical outlook of the early
Cubists, Expressionists, and Surrealists, who declared war on
bourgeois values and bourgeois artistic models, the porten
tous pompiers peintres of the Victorian era.
Adrian Stokes argues that The Bathers by Paul Cezanne,
which inspired Picasso's Demoiselles dAvignon, encouraged
artists to turn to African sculpture in repudiation of classical
taste. This prompts him to speculate "in the most far-fetched
manner whether one day it will be possible to claim for The
Bathers that it is among the first and perhaps the greatest
works of a deeply founded cosmopolitan art which was to
pre-figure the eventual evolution of a multi-racial society."14
Surrealism, with its distaste for colonial rule, enjoyed a mu
tually beneficial cross-fertilization with black cultural resis
tance, as suggested by the friendship between Andre Breton
and the Martinique poet and intellectual Aime Cesaire.15
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. Today the pre
eminence of modernist art is universally assured, as its con
trolling canon and market mechanism hold the so-called
peripheries in its thrall or in its grip, depending on one's
point of view. Even postmodern and postcolonial thinking,
which arose partly in revolt against the avant-garde in the
twilight years of the last century, was a child of this worldwide
movement, though a child in revolt against some of its fun
damental tenets. These enormous achievements of the heroic
age of the avant-garde cannot be gainsaid, as the modernist
technology of art, not to mention the formal language and
syntax of Cubism, allowed artists in far-flung regions to devise
new ways to image the visible world. One of the favorite
projects of the colonial powers in the nineteenth century was
to inculcate "good taste" in the subject nations through the
introduction of academic naturalism and classical stan
dards.16 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.
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
INTERVENTIONS: DECENTERING MODERNISM 533
2 Everlyn Nicodemus, Reference Scroll on Genocide, Massacres and Ethnic Cleansing, 2004, installation view, 198 Gallery, Brixton, U.K.,
2006 (artwork Everlyn Nicodemus; photograph by Isabelle Pateer)
Above all, modernism's experimental attitude that constantly
sought to push intellectual frontiers, its ideology of emanci
patory innovation, and its agonistic relation to tradition and
authority released new energies in artists raised in a more
traditional mode. In short, its revolutionary message fur
nished ammunition for cultural resistance to colonial em
pires, as each colonized nation deployed the language of
modernism to fight its own particular cultural corner. In the
Corner, Mumbai, color ^^^^^^^^^^^^^H^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
534 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 4
4 Amrita Sher-Gil, The Professional Model, 1933, oil on canvas,
39% X 28% in. (100 X 72 cm). National Gallery of Modern
Art, New Delhi (artwork in the public domain)
Indian Empire, for instance, the nationalist artists asserted
their own cultural identity against the colonial-capitalist com
plex.17
Non-Western nations were no less persuaded by the West
ern theorists' critical engagement within modernism that
kept it on its toes, so to speak, preventing it from becoming
complacent and formulaic in the aftermath of its public
acceptance. Marxists have taken the lead in interrogating the
troubled relation between modernity and tradition, between
the social usefulness of art and the avant-garde aesthetics of
autonomy, and between high art and the mass culture of
consumption in capitalist societies. Walter Benjamin's idea
of mechanical reproducibility helped undermine the "aura"
of originality in modernist innovations, while Carl Einstein's
primitivism sought to restore the symbolic dimension of col
lective life within the avant-garde. In 1939, in answer to the
Soviet critics' condemnation of bourgeois formalism, Clem
ent Greenberg deployed the very same Marxian critical ap
paratus to defend the modernist aesthetics of autonomy
against kitsch; he provided a fresh definition of the avant
garde as a historical agency that resisted the consumer cul
ture of capitalist society.18
The instrumentalist explanation of the social meaning of
art as a reflection of class-consciousness and ideology was
replaced by a new generation of critical historians of art led
by T. J. Clark (and indirectly inspired by Meyer Schapiro)
with a more nuanced "against the grain" interpretation of
artistic creation, which stressed the instability of ideologies
and the complex relation of artists to the totality of a histor
ical situation.19 Repudiating a simplistic polarity of high and
low art, Thomas Crow posits a dialogic relation between high
art and the leisure industry of market capitalism, in which
"advanced artists make unsettling equations between high
and low, which dislocate the apparently fixed terms of that
hierarchy into new and persuasive configurations. . . ."20 In
an essay, Rosalind Krauss explores Auguste Rodin's produc
tion of multiple copies to challenge the much-vaunted orig
inality of the modernists.21 Hal Foster offers us two influential
formulations of postmodernism one that is complicit with
capitalism and the other as a form of resistance to it, his own
work eloquently articulating the latter position.22
The Picasso Manque Syndrome
These critical interventions by Clark, Krauss, and others have
been of seminal importance in tempering the triumphalism
of the avant-garde, highlighting the fractures and contradic
tions of modernity and its complex relation with tradition, all
of which have, of course, inspired art practices not only in the
center but also in the periphery. However, as argued by David
Craven, critical interventions of major thinkers from the pe
riphery in art history are lacking, which by their absence
contribute to the erasure of nonmetropolitan art practices
within the "universalist" canon.23 The discipline of art history
has yet to change in any substantive manner the implicit
evaluation of non-Western modernism as derivative and de
void of originality. Two cases highlight, for instance, the
glaring difference in art historical assessments of the use of
material from a culture outside one's own. The first is the
exhibition "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal
and the Modern, held in New York in 1985, and the critical
interventions surrounding the exhibition; the second is what
I call the Picasso manque syndrome.
"Primitivism" in 20th Century Art was an impressive exhibi
tion mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
(Fig. 5). Its goal was to highlight the formal similarities
between ethnographic art and Western modernism. The ex
hibition, which sought to overcome the "debased" notion of
causal influence by treating ethnographic objects as possess
ing aesthetic merit, described the "primitive" motifs in the
works of Picasso and other iconic modernists as a reflection
of the "affinities" between modern and "tribal" art that tran
scended time and space.24 Among its reviews, Foster's and
James Clifford's stand out for laying bare the contradictions
of this ambitious curatorial exercise. Foster focused on the
show's anodyne formalist juxtaposition of the tribal and the
modern and its attempts to assimilate tribal culture to En
lightenment values. Such an approach, he showed us, had the
effect of reducing primitivism's disruptive potentials, its raw
power as a fetishistic discourse, which the Surrealists had
exploited brilliantly.25 The anthropologist Clifford com
mented on the exhibition's erasure of colonial violence,
which had wrenched African and Oceanic objects from their
social contexts for display in European museums, by its pro
jection of a neutral formalist "allegory of affinities."26
For me it is quite telling that the organizers of "Primitivism"
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
INTERVENTIONS: DECENTERING MODERNISM 535
Century ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H
the the Modern, ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H
the Museum Modern ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Hl^^^^^^^^^^^fl
New ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^HHj^^^^^^^^^^^^H
The Museum ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H
Modern by SGALA, ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H
by Les ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H
Estate Pablo ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H
Society [ARS], ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H
in 20th Century Art wished to underline 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 eth
nographic art redeemed these fetishist objects for the mod
ern world and elevated them to the level of high art.27 Im
portandy, the New York exhibition was at pains to emphasize
that the selected pairings of modern and tribal objects dem
onstrated the common denominators of these arts that were
independent of direct influence.28
What is crucial to realize is that Picasso's borrowings from
"simple" ethnographic objects in no way compromised his
cultural integrity as an artist. A noted authority, writing a
decade later on Vladimir Tatlin's discovery of a tribal mask in
Picasso's studio, could thus exclaim that "it is one of the
wonders of our age that such a simple tribal artifact, which
could justifiably be called primitive, should have given birth
indirectiy to Russian Constructivism, one of the most techni
cally visionary of all twentieth-century art movements."29
As opposed to appropriations by the Western avant-garde,
let us now see what happens to the artist as a colonial subject
who responds to an intellectual product of the "dominant"
European culture.30 The widely held view that modern art
beyond Europe and the United States is at best a derivative
exercise reflects the implicit assertion of the "intellectual
property rights" of the West.31 In 1959, the English art histo
rian William George Archer published India and Modern Art,
which remains a classic example of colonialist art history.
Even though the work was written nearly half a century ago,
I believe its underlying assumptions about the lack of origi
nality of non-Western modernism continue to be symptom
atic of a widespread bias. Archer posed a pertinent question:
Can modern art be appropriated by Indians, and if so, in
what manner? In answer to this, he provided a succinct anal
ysis of the paintings made between 1921 and 1928 by the pio
neering Indian modernist Gaganendranath Tagore (1867
1938), who was among the first Indian painters to adapt the
revolutionary syntax of Cubism (Fig. 6). Archer claimed that
such appropriation must be "absorbed into the blood stream"
of that society to be a genuine item.' But as the next defining
passage makes clear, this had failed miserably in the case of
the Indian artist:
His style 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 Gogonen
dranath's pictures were actually no more than stylised
illustrations... weak 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.32
Elsewhere I have contended that Archer failed to compre
hend the Indian artist's achievement in deploying the flexi
ble syntax of Cubism in order to create miniature watercolors
of poetic intensity that were meaningful in the colonial
nationalist milieu of India.33 Let me explain. Analytic Cub
ism, which destroyed the conventions of illusionistic natural
ism, helped to restore the internal cohesion of a picture so
that it ceased to be a window on the external world.34 Artists
worldwide were drawn to Cubism's flexible nonfigurative
syntax, which could be put to different uses, but they were
not concerned with the formal revolution of Analytic Cubism
as such. To take an example pertinent to my argument, the
motivation behind the Western Expressionists Franz Marc
(Fig. 7), Lyonel Feininger, or Georg Grosz (Fig. 8) and the
Indian artist Gaganendranath was analogous: objects could
be distorted and fragmented to produce dazzling patterns.
Although they shared this formal language, the specific cul
tural contexts of the Central European artists and Gaganen
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
536 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 4
6 Gaganendranath Tagore, A Cubist Scene, ca. 1923, watercolor
on postcard, 4lA> X 3% in. (11.5 X 8.5 cm). Private collection
(artwork in the public domain)
8 George Grosz, The Funeral, Dedicated to Oskar Panizza (Der
Leichenzug, Widmung an Oskar Panizza), 1917-18, oil on canvas,
55 X 43% in. (140 X 110 cm). Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (artwork
Estate of George Grosz/licensed by VAGA, New York, NY;
photograph by Erich Lessing, provided by Art Resource, NY)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^m watercolor on
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H S2V4 X 561/4 X^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^B Hamburg
BHHHBBBBHiHBHHBBBBBB^^^^WBBHHBBBBi^^^^^^^^^^^^MI^ Resource, NY)
dranath were as different as their artistic aims, not to mention
their different artistic agendas.35 The German avant-garde
critic Max Osborn, reviewing an exhibition of modern Indian
art in Berlin in 1923, quite perceptively drew out the affinities
between Gaganendranath and Feininger in their indifference
to the formal implications of Analytic Cubism.36 The Indian
artist epitomizes the decontextualizing tendency of the age,
shared as much by artists in the center as in the periphery:
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
INTERVENTIONS: DECENTERING MODERNISM 537
styles past and present could be appropriated to generate
strikingly new meanings.
As his critique of Gaganendranath makes clear, Archer
follows Roger Fry's notion of "significant form" as the antith
esis to weak "feminine" anecdotal painting. In addition, the
word "power" in the passage expresses his primitivist longing
for the "masculine" formalism and virile geometry of Indian
tribal art.37 However, the overwhelming reason for Archer's
dismissive evaluation of Gaganendranath's "Cubist" works lay
in the Indian painter's use of the visual language of a culture
to which he did not belong. In other words, Gaganendranath
suffered a loss of self in becoming a colonial hybrid. We can
find interesting parallels in aPnmitivismn in 20th Century Art,
which while reifying tribal artifacts as timeless high art erased
Third World modernisms, denying the existence of contem
porary tribal artists in the name of authentic traditional art.
Interestingly, according to Shelley Errington, genuine living
"primitive" art ceased to exist in the twentieth century for
complex reasons, such objects becoming denizens of the
corridors of European ethnographic museums or objects of a
nationalist tourist industry.38
Unlike Picasso, whose use of African sources did not com
promise his integrity as a European artist, Gaganendranath's
use of Cubism resulted in the loss of self as an Indian. I have
called the complex discourse of power, authority, and hier
archy involved in the study of the non-Western avant-garde
the Picasso manque syndrome, as Archer's endeavor con
sisted almost entirely of tracing Picasso's putative influence.
Inevitably, he reached the conclusion that Gaganendranath
was a Cubist manque, and his derivative works, based on a
cultural misreading, were simply puerile imitations of the
Spanish master. In short, the use of Cubism, a product of
the dominant West, by an Indian artist who belonged to the
colonized world, immediately locked him into a dependent
relationship, the colonized mimicking the superior art of the
colonizer. Archer's analysis of modern art in India rests on
reductionist criteria employed by art historians to describe
the reception of Western art in the periphery: while success
ful imitation was a form of aping, imperfect imitation repre
sented a failure of learning.39
If it seems that there are no limits to what Western artists
can appropriate from the peripheries, let me turn to what the
Western canon suppresses. The relation of the early abstract
painters to Eastern thought arouses strong emotions. The
facts of the case are not so much in dispute as their implica
tion and significance for the rise of abstract art. In other
words, what importance can we attach to the role of these
ideas in the paintings of Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich,
and Wassily Kandinsky, the three iconic figures of modern
ism? The formalists dismiss such interest as at best inconse
quential and at worst an aberration; the transcendentalists
affirm the central role of Eastern thought in nonfigurative
art, sustained by Sixten Ringbom's painstaking research on
the connection between Theosophy and abstract art, along
with the contributions of other scholars. This interest culmi
nated in 1986 in the ambitious exhibition The Spiritual in Art:
Abstract Painting 1890-1985, held in Chicago, Los Angeles,
and finally the Hague.40
The extent to which the abstract painters absorbed Eastern
thought, discovered via Theosophy, is seen to be compro
mised because of that movement's dabbling in the occult. Yet
surely it is possible to separate the wheat from the chaff and
discern the genuine elements of Buddhist and Hindu philos
ophy in Theosophy that colored the intellectual makeup of
these artists. Piet Mondrian is known to have admired the
mystical poem Bhagavad Gita and the philosophy of the Upa
nishads, and he treasured the Indian mystic Jiddu Krish
namurti's "little book" until his death.41 In 1914 Mondrian
recorded in his notebook that he was developing the idea
that art belonged to a higher spiritual realm that transcended
the natural, a sentiment that owed as much to Neoplatonism
as to the Upanishads. Mondrian also believed that the ele
mentary forms were abstract, and they were the constituent
elements of nonobjective art. Nonfigurative art has been
described as an alliance of aesthetics and mysticism, "the
essential stages of Mondrian's move from representation to
pure abstraction."42 One of the striking concepts for Mon
drian as well as other pioneers of abstraction was the meta
physical idea of the absolute, which enabled them to break
with what they saw as the last vestiges of mimesis, proclaiming
the reality as belonging to the spiritual. Strikingly, the con
cept of nature was considered relative to the spiritual abso
lute, as the imperfect material world was to the perfection of
mathematics. The idea recalls the definition of mathematics
in ancient Indian thought, though the absolute is also a core
Hegelian notion ultimately going back to Plato. Again, in the
Upanishads, the Absolute (Brahman) is imagined as noncor
poreal, the very antithesis of materiality and impermanence,
ideas close to Mondrian's interpretation of the absolute, as
his denial of the self paralleled the dissolution of reality in
the Upanishads. Absolute purity, divested of all the material
associations, chief among them illusionism, could not be
achieved within empiricist foundations.43
John Golding is the most recent scholar to have recourse to
the aesthetics of autonomy in order to reiterate the essen
tially formalist foundations of abstract art. In his Mellon
Lecture of 1997, he argued that "at its best and most pro
found, abstract painting is heavily imbued with meaning, with
content, and that, in order to make this content palpable,
new formal pictorial innovations must be found to express
it."44 Rightly considering Mondrian's encounter with Cubism
as the turning point in his oeuvre, Golding then asserts that
the artist's purest and austere quest for ideal simplicity to be
uncontaminated by spiritual elements.45 Yet almost in the
same breath, as an aside, Golding remarks that Mondrian's
rejection of Renaissance materialism was predicated on equat
ing flatness with spirituality.46
The work of Cezanne, Cubism, and Futurism were well
documented formative influences for Kazimir Malevich.
However, as he moved toward pure abstraction he began to
search for a philosophy that he felt most resonated with its
spirit. The celebrated Indian savant Swami Vivekananda's
Chicago lectures, published in 1904, introduced the Russian
painter to the Upanishads, which certainly made some, and I
would maintain substantial, contribution to his idea of pure
geometry, the absolute, and the illusory nature of the three
dimensional universe, the Upanishadic may a. He defined
Suprematism's "zero of form" as "objectlessness" rather than
abstraction as such, which is again reminiscent of the Upa
nishadic s nyat (state of nought) and notions of conscious
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
538 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 4
ness, infinity, and the self.47 I do not wish to labor the point,
except to mention that in ancient Indian sacred geometry,
unlike the restless circle, the square is the ultimate and ideal
form and the site of the absolute (Brahmasthana), because of
its essential stasis. One cannot help recall that the most
original creations of Malevich were based on the square, the
painting The Black Square being the ultimate expression.48
These metaphysical ideas were no less important than his
interest in Futurism and formalist theories.
The evidence that Kandinsky's spiritual progress from the
mystical Russian faith to Eastern philosophy, including yogic
meditation, paralleled the dissolution of corporeal form in
his art is even more persuasive.49 Although publicly reticent
about his debt to Eastern thought, Kandinsky was prepared to
express it in sympathetic company. When Michael Sadler, a
champion of modernist art in Britain, and his son visited the
artist in Germany in 1912, they were "so fascinated by [his]
mystical outlook that they missed the last train. . . ."50 Gold
ing, recognizing the unique importance of the modernist
text On the Spiritual in Art but unconvinced about ideas from
outside the discourse of modernism, is puzzled by what to
him seems an anomaly in the Russian's worldview.51 Art since
1900 simply dismisses the "unwelcome religious flavor" of
Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art.52
Both formalists and transcendentalists marshal strong ar
guments in support of their particular point of view. The
presence of the purely formalist Western aspects in abstract
painting, as part of the art historical continuum, and "exotic"
Eastern spiritual elements are viewed as essentially agonistic
and incompatible. The insistence on the truth of one to the
exclusion of the other rules out the possibility of the coexist
ence of contradictory elements in an individual's mental
makeup. In the pages of the avant-garde journal De Stijl, for
instance, idealist aesthetics, industrial mechanics, Utopian
politics, and rationalism intermingled with notions of spiri
tuality. The history of the avant-garde has contributed to the
disjunction between rationalism and irrationalism, writes
Nestor Garcia Canclini, who proposes that a theory of art that
transcends the antagonism between thought and intuition
would contribute to a reconfiguration of the dilemmas of the
late twentieth century.53
One argument in favor of the formalists is that Eastern
thought was filtered through the garbled preachings of Hel
ena Blavatsky, the cofounder, with Henry Steel Olcott, of
Theosophy. As a movement, Theosophy attracted contro
versy, and Mme Blavatsky was occasionally accused of charla
tanism. And yet its more philosophical aspects had influ
enced a number of leading late-nineteenth- and twentieth
century figures, among them the feminist Annie Besant.
However, even allowing for the limitations of Theosophy, it is
more to the point to explain the attraction these antimateri
alist doctrines held for these artists. If Eastern thought fired
the artists' imagination with the promise of an alternative
intellectual standpoint, why was there a need for such an
alternative in the first place? By the mid-nineteenth century,
the crisis of capitalism gave rise to a series of social thinkers
from John Ruskin, William Morris, Lev Tolstoy, and Karl
Marx to a whole range of Utopian critics of urban modernity.
Many artists rebelled as much against Victorian materialism
as against mimetic art; some sought to restore the integrated
Community that had been lost with the rise of urban moder
nity and had led to the alienation of individuals from soci
ety.54 To many, nonindustrial societies held out the promise
of social integration. Modernists, especially abstract painters,
who "felt" at home in this world, sought affinities with the
"decorative" art of the "primitive" and non-Western peoples
untouched by "materialistic" Renaissance naturalism. That is
when they turned to Eastern, particularly Indian, philosophy,
which is described by David Pan as "the intellectual context of
the abstract method."55 In light of creative needs that went
beyond mere fashion, they engaged critically with Eastern
philosophy rather than merely reproducing Eastern spiritual
concepts in their works. They found sustenance in a form of
syncretism that offered fresh existential and epistemological
possibilities. It is this vision of primitivism that served as an
alternative to Enlightenment rationality. These artists viewed
the distinction between the primitive and the modern as the
difference between the spiritual and the material dimensions
of human existence.56 Charles W. Haxthausen has explored
the writings of Wilhelm Hausenstein, one of the German
"expressionist" critics who longed for the restoration of an
integrated German culture to overcome the alienation be
tween artist and society. The goal of this avant-garde theory
"was an anonymous, collective art, integrated with the praxis
of life. . . ,"57 Kandinsky and Marc, editors of the journal
Blaue Reiter, were characterized by Haxthausen as "romantic
anti-capitalists" who saw avant-garde art as heralding a new
age of spirituality parallel to Eastern thought.
Colonial mentality deems cultural transmissions to be a
one-way process flowing from the Occident, but fascination
with the East has periodically surfaced in the West in differ
ent guises. In the eighteenth century, it gave rise to the
Oriental Renaissance, which was in many ways as influential
as the "first" Renaissance.58 The following passage in J. J.
Clarke may well apply to the controversy over abstract artists'
debt to the East.
[There is] a persistent reluctance to accept that the West
could ever have borrowed anything of significance from
the East, or to see the place of Eastern thought within the
Western tradition . . . [as] only a trivial part of a wider
reaction against the modern world. For some the Orient is
still associated with shady occultist flirtations, the uncon
scious rumblings of the repressed irrational urges of a
culture that has placed its faith in scientific rationalism.59
Art and the Pathology of Influence
The above debate seems to hinge on the question of influ
ence, and influence has been the key epistemic tool, implic
itly or explicitly, in the asymmetrical valuations of cultural
exchanges between Eastern and Western art. As an art his
torical category, though, influence ignores significant aspects
of cultural encounters, especially the enriching value of the
cross-fertilization of cultures that has nourished societies
since time immemorial. These exchanges of ideas and forms
need not necessarily be interpreted through ideas of domi
nation and dependence.60 Rudolf Wittkower, the great au
thority on the migration of symbols across ancient cultures,
traced the fascinating story of how the West received and
transformed images and motifs from the Orient in an inter
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
INTERVENTIONS: DECENTERING MODERNISM 53g
action that had no basis in political competition.61 In this
respect, we can learn useful lessons from historians of mate
rial culture, who seek to study in a less value-laden way the
global exchange of artifacts of material culture. They include
within their purview not only objects of high art but also
ceramics, glass, metalwork, textiles, and furnishings. Drawing
on the theoretical perspective of the knowledge economy,
they analyze the transmission of technical skills across bor
ders, setting them in a historical framework as an aspect of
global connection.62
The advent of modernism in Asia, Africa, and Latin Amer
ica could thus be studied as the transfer of technology, which
in other fields is accepted as part of the global process of
cross-fertilization. However, such a perception is already de
fined by a discourse of power, colored by assertions of West
ern superiority and consequent feelings of inferiority, resig
nation, denial, and resistance on the part of non-Western
nations. In the nineteenth century, this political dimension
was exacerbated during a period of the West's ascendancy,
when peoples were ranked within a global hierarchy of chain
of being, race, and evolution. Borrowing from outside the
West was inconceivable to the Victorians, who would concede
only the Greeks and the Romans as the twin classical giants
on whose shoulders European civilization stood. It was seen
in the field of science, which was in awe of classical empiri
cism as the mainspring of the experimental method. Yet it
was the union of empiricism with the Hindu place value
system of numbers that laid the foundations of the great
scientific revolution that came to fruition only in the eigh
teenth century. Nor should one ignore the enormous contri
butions of the Chinese to Western technology paper, print
ing press, distillery, gunpowder, and the compass, to name
the most obvious. It would be reasonable to accept that the
triumph of modern science was a product of a historical
situation in the eighteenth century that drew on different
traditions, including those that were extraneous to the West
but thoroughly internalized. But because of the part the
classical world played in European cultural formation (Bil
dung), the Greek heritage was increasingly taken to be the
sole contributor to European parthenogenesis.63
In the context of this pervasive ideology of progress, "bor
rowing" implied the dependence of the inferior culture on
the superior and dominant one, an idea nowhere more ubiq
uitous than in the field of art. It was as natural for the
colonized to imitate as it was inconceivable for the colonizer
to take part in this exercise. This may have something to do
with Johann Joachim Winckelmann's epithet "noble simplic
ity and quiet grandeur" for classical art, which swayed gener
ations, including seminal thinkers such as Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel and Marx.64 Notions of stylistic influence
acquired a special significance for colonial art historians, who
were obsessed with tracing the Western grammar of non
Western modernisms and ranking them within a universalist
world order. I can do no better than quote Michael Baxan
dall's powerful indictment here, describing the obsession
with stylistic influence as a curse, or remind ourselves of
Harold Bloom's celebrated phrase the "anxiety of influence."
Baxandall writes in Patterns of Intention that artistic influence
seems to reverse the active-passive relationship, "which the
historical actor experiences, and the inferential beholder will
wish to take into account." He further argues that responding
to circumstance, the artist makes an intentional selection
from a range of sources. This is a purposeful activity on the
artist's part, which involves making conscious choices.65
If we discard stylistic genealogy, what can we put in its
place? The overdetermined analysis based on the relation
ship of dependence between the borrower and his or her
source is slowly being undermined even by historians of
European art. In an absorbing account of Jacques-Louis Da
vid's workshop, Thomas Crow uses the term "emulation" to
illuminate the master-pupil relationship in which David paid
a moving tribute to his late pupil Jean-Germain Drouais as
not only his equal but also someone worthy of emulation.66
Elizabeth Cropper also deploys emulation to challenge influ
ence as a convenient analytic tool. Drawing on Thomas
Greene's reading of the Italian Humanists, who attempted to
set up an active dialogue with ancient classical authors, Crop
per explores the "intertextual" character of artistic styles,
which engages with past models in a dialectical and even
agonistic mode. Such conscious heuristic imitation advertises
its derivations, defining itself by asserting its distance from
these sources.67
Gaganendranath's relation with Cubism was similarly heu
ristic. He admired the movement yet felt distanced from it
culturally, making it perfectly clear that he was not seeking to
reproduce the French Cubists. He once explained to the
journalist Kanhaiyalal Vakil that "the new technique is really
wonderful as a stimulant."68 Nonetheless, the Indian paint
er's visual conventions continued within the bounds of Ori
ental art, not least the miniature scale of his works. The
visiting English painter William Rothenstein confirmed this
when he mentioned that Gaganendranath remained an Ori
ental "miniaturist with an eye for exquisite lapidary details."69
Equally, despite grumbles from the nationalists for abandon
ing his earlier "Orientalist" style, the artist insisted that Cub
ism had simply "enabled me to [express] better with my new
technique . . . than I used to do with my old methods."70
I propose here another explanatory tool for understanding
the generation of social and cultural meaning within the
context of colonial art. The concept of paradigm change,
postulated by Thomas Kuhn in the history of science, pro
vides a convincing argument for change through adoption.
As Kuhn seeks to demonstrate, knowledge develops in a
succession of tradition-bound periods, punctuated by revolu
tionary breaks or, in his term, paradigm shifts. These shifts
occur when a system breaks down, or when anomalies in one
paradigm force new paradigms to emerge. New paradigms
function by challenging the norms of a given practice that
now seems constricting and vulnerable to challenge. The new
paradigm in its turn marginalizes practices that no longer
conform to their criteria.71
The advent of academic naturalism during the colonial era
was the first great revolutionary break in India that pro
foundly transformed art institutions, practices, patronage,
genres, materials, as well as artistic style, moving from flat
two-dimensional pictures to illusionist naturalism. The para
digm change ushered in by colonial rule simply made the
earlier practice that tied artists to private patronage obsolete.
Artists now emerged as independent professionals who de
pended more on public support and recognition. This phase
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
540 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 4
lasted from the 1850s to about the 1920s. In the 1920s, the
tensions between academic artists and the nationalist purvey
ors of a Pan-Asian nonnaturalist mode, known as oriental art,
forced a second revolutionary break. Artists such as Gaganen
dranath sought to emancipate themselves from the constric
tive and artificial polarity between the two modes of artistic
representation, namely, academic naturalism and "decora
tive" Orientalism. The language of modernism, signifying
changes in artistic imperatives in a rapidly globalizing world,
offered the Indian avant-garde a new visual means to chal
lenge the previous artistic paradigm centering on mimetic
representation.72
Archer had the whole weight of art history behind him in
his evaluation of Gaganendranath's paintings. The modernist
canon encompasses a great deal more than a simple matter of
influence, as its powerful teleology constructs a whole world
of belongings and exclusions, the epicenter and its outlying
regions. The linear interpretation of art history boasts a long
and distinguished tradition, going back to Giorgio Vasari,
whose Lives of the Most Eminent Architects, Painters and Sculptors
of Italy created the master narrative for Renaissance art, based
on the conquest of visual representation. Additionally, the
stylistic categories, drawn from classical norms, that moti
vated Vasari's notion of artistic progress automatically ex
cluded those art forms that did not conform to them.73 The
Vasarian master narrative defined Florence, Rome, and
Venice as centers of innovation, categorizing other regions in
Italy as sites of delayed growth and imitation. As it has been
argued in studies of Renaissance art inspired by Vasari, pe
riphery is not a matter of geography but of art history.74
Vasari did not just valorize the three centers within Italy, he
also displayed prejudice against the art of other nations. In
the late eighteenth century, Winckelmann, whose own pref
erence was for Greek art, reconfigured and reified these
prejudices by formulating climatic, national, and racial dif
ferences in art as objective facts.75 Vasarian teleology enjoyed
the added confidence of a positivist art history in the nine
teenth century, as evolutionary doctrines enabled art histori
ans to map world art from its putative "primitive" base to its
triumphal climax in Victorian history painting, with Oriental
art occupying the intervening space. By this token, Indian
miniature painting, a species of Oriental art, though charm
ing in itself, was assigned a respectable middle rank in world
art: The nationalist response to colonial art history in India
was to develop a decorative form of Oriental art in repudia
tion of academic naturalism.76
To be sure, the Western avant-garde was in the forefront of
challenging the hegemonic claims of academic art, and its
revolutionary message provided inspiration for the avant
garde in the colonized countries. But the implied hierarchy
in the relation between center and periphery could not be so
easily resolved. In the cultural economy of global modernity,
all artistic productions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America
became marginal to the preoccupations of the core, that is,
the art of Paris and later postwar London or New York. Set
against the originary discourse of the avant-garde, emanating
from these metropolitan centers, other modernisms were
silenced as derivative and suffering from a time lag because of
their geographic locations. Yet the significant point is that the
center-periphery relation is not only one of geography but
also of power and authority that implicates race, gender, and
sexual orientation. Viewed from this perspective, the concept
of the periphery assumes important theoretical significance.
Modernism created its own tacit exclusions and inclusions,
instances of which are scattered throughout Art since 1900.
A Counter Discourse of Modernism
With such a powerfully embedded ideology that privileges
certain definitions of art to the exclusion of others, how can
we shift the center of gravity of the modernist discourse? We
need to destabilize Vasarian concepts of artistic center and
periphery while loosening the linearity of art history, some
thing given unique authority in Hegel's theory of artistic
progress as the inevitable unfolding of the world spirit. First,
we must seek explanatory tools that adequately describe art
practices and their social and cultural milieus in the so-called
outlying areas, taking into account the peculiar contextual
needs and expressions of regional artistic productions and
consumptions, along with the local assertions of global con
cerns. I propose below some tentative strategies for recover
ing the counter discourse of modernism, largely drawn from
my own work on Indian modernism covering several decades,
which I hope will be of relevance to other "peripheral" re
gions, as well as help fashion more nuanced art histories
drawing on the richness of truly global experiences.
At the outset, I must acknowledge the efforts of recent
scholars to find strategies of empowerment through new
readings of the avant-garde in Asia, Africa, and Latin Amer
ica. Visual studies and postcolonial theory have made valu
able contributions toward destabilizing the modernist canon
and challenging hierarchy and value in art history, prising
open the narrow empirical connoisseurship-focused disci
pline of art history involving analysis of style, iconography,
and documentation. Its own practice owes debts to a post
Marxian discursive approach based on semiotics, poststruc
turalism, and psychoanalysis. The theorists of visual culture
seek to erase the distinction between the fine arts and a range
of material objects that had been excluded from the canon,
thereby seeking to destroy the exclusivity of the concept of
high "art."77 Keith Moxey makes a valuable point in support
of the inclusive concept of "visual culture" that is not re
stricted to what is generally defined as high art in the West,
which tends to perpetuate the global inequality in power
relations. His view is analogous to Pierre Bourdieu's perti
nent comment that modes of representations are essentially
expressions of political conflicts.78 John Clark, basing his view
on the semiotic theory expounded by Umberto Eco, de
scribes Western modernism as a "closed" system of discourse,
which cannot accommodate new modernist discourses to
which the regions beyond the West have given rise.79 And yet
the most exciting aspect of modernisms across the globe is
their plurality, heterogeneity, and difference, a "messy" asym
metrical quality that makes them all the more vital and
replete with possibilities.
Geeta Kapur seeks to restore the Indian artist's agency
through what she terms a radical restructuring of the inter
national avant-garde 80 Wifredo Lam, as an artist of multiple
heritage, is "a deft juggler of cultural modes, as a potent
symbol of the intermixing of cultures that will flower in our
increasingly 'multicultural' civilization," as described by Jason
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
INTERVENTIONS: DECENTERING MODERNISM 541
Edward Kaufman.81 The Tanzanian artist, writer, and activist
Everlyn Nicodemus develops the notion of "mutual appropri
ation," contending that "our urge for change and modern
ization is as universal as our sense of tradition."82
A most persuasive tool for unsettling the hegemonic canon
has been the concept of hybridity. Among Latin American
scholars, Nestor Garcia Canclini uses the concept to propose
"multi-temporal heterogeneities," while Gerardo Mosquera
sets forth the notion of decentralized international culture to
argue that the peripheries are ceasing to be defined entirely
by the notion of tradition. They are emerging as multiple
centers of international culture as well as strengthening local
developments in a constant process of cultural hybridiza
tion.83 Hybridity, a biological term, is theorized by Homi K.
Bhabha in order to empower the diaspora thrown up by
global migration that automatically generates situations of
inclusion and exclusion. "[An] interstitial passage between
fixed identifications," he writes, "opens up the possibility of a
cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an as
sumed or imposed hierarchy."84 The compelling nature of
his formulation for art history and its promise lie as much in
challenging the essentialism of cultural difference asserted
by the colonial order as in countering the monolithic dis
course of the avant-garde.85 Some concerns have been raised
about the theory regarding its limited ability to explain the
role of artistic agency and the transformation of material
culture through the integration of foreign elements. "Be
cause of its semantic associations and resonances," Andrew
Causey, for instance, cautions, " [hybridity] is a metaphor that
diffuses agency and unintentionally masks possible relations
of power."86
While the theory of hybridity undoubtedly offers empow
erment to the minorities of multiple heritage who are mar
ginalized by what are characterized as "insiders" rooted in a
culture, there are artists to whom the concept of hybridity can
hardly do justice. For these artists outside the West, national
identity has furnished a language of resistance to colonial art,
especially in a period when many Asian, African, and Latin
American countries were struggling to create a counternar
rative in answer to the dominant canon. A group of Latin
American art historians were unhappy with Art since 1900
precisely because it failed to recognize that in the countries
south of the United States, modernism, modernity, and mod
ernization have been intimately tied to the construction of
cultural identity or relate to the disjunction "where the
dreams and desires of modernity are fully developed but
modernization is not yet wholly established."87 However valu
able hybridity is, an unintended consequence of valorizing
it to the exclusion of other possibilities would be to consign
to oblivion artists such as Roy by the very fact of their not
resisting through an "interstitial" narrative. But they, too,
are major players in the global process of modernity. The
difficulties of studying contemporary art forms that do not
conform to a particular avant-garde discourse have led art
historians to propose alternative modernisms or regional
modernisms. One of the thoughtful recent contributions to
the enlarging of the canon has been a set of essays entitled
Cosmopolitan Modernisms, edited by Kobena Mercer, who com
ments on the unanticipated consequences of the global pro
cesses of modernity that create a two-way traffic between the
West and the rest.88
Cosmopolitan Primitivism
Modernism is generally presented as a hypostatic image,
beyond time and space. Yet the Western avant-garde, with all
its achievements, we may remind ourselves, has been histor
ically situated with its own set of conventions, even though its
experience can and has enriched other traditions. Therefore,
we may renounce Art History in the sense used by Hans
Belting but pay closer attention to particular art histories, the
contexts of their ideologies, contradictions, and fractures in
their engagement with modernity.89 To my mind, multiple
local possibilities illuminate the global processes of moder
nity more effectively than a grand globalizing narrative,
which is more likely than not to perpetuate a relationship of
power. My particular field, as I have indicated, is the rise of
the avant-garde in India in the 1920s, and I have tried to show
that its history can be meaningfully mapped within the con
text of nationalist resistance to the British Empire. It is pos
sible to formulate concepts that will address the particular
interactions between global modernity, artistic production,
and the construction of national identity not just in India but
also in regions that seek to resist the colonial-capitalist cul
tural dominance.
This inflected narrative of global modernity, I would argue,
clearly yields another possible way of restoring the artist's
agency in the context of colonial empires, and that is by
analyzing art practices and reception as a cultural document
that is historically situated. One serious criticism of influence
as an analytic tool is that it views artists as passive agents of
transmission rather than active agents with the ability to
exercise choice.90 A little while ago I raised the question of
center and periphery in connection with Vasarian categories.
But center-periphery also relates to the wider politics of the
colonial order. One of the powerful aspects of modern na
tionalism has been the interplay of the global and the local in
the urban space of colonial culture, led by the Western
educated intelligentsia, who acted as surrogates for the na
tion. Colonial expansion gave rise to the worldwide phenom
enon of the hybrid cosmopolis, often favoring port cities or
entrepots for the circulation of material goods mediated by
local merchants and middlemen. These cosmopolitan cities
emerged as flourishing centers of cultural exchange.91
I want to use the example of Calcutta as a hybrid metrop
olis here to explain the role of this urban center in the
growth of the first avant-garde tendency in India. As the
capital of British India, it became the locus of colonial en
counters, its Bengali inhabitants emerging as beneficiaries as
well as interlocutors of colonial culture. In the nineteenth
century, the Bengal renaissance pioneered Indian modernity,
a hybrid intellectual enterprise underpinned by a dialogic
relation between the colonial language, English, and the
modernized vernacular, Bengali.92 English as the colonial
medium of instruction gave Bengali elite access to the En
lightenment, opening up a window to the West, prompting
one of the finest flowerings of a modern literary tradition.
The great poet Rabindranath Tagore, possibly the best
known cultural figure in the interbellum years, was a product
of the Bengal renaissance.93
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
542 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 4
Modernity, which followed European expansion in India,
gave rise to a globally "imagined community" based on print
capitalism; its membership was as vast as it was anonymous,
no longer having the need for face-to-face communication
and yet sharing a corpus of ideas on modernity.94 The Ben
gali intelligentsia admirably demonstrates the negotiation of
the wider cosmopolitan modernity through the printed me
dium, since it had a limited acquaintance with expatriate
Europeans and even less so with distant Britain.95 To explain
this community's critical engagement with modern thought,
I put forward the notion of the "virtual cosmopolis" here.
This was essentially a hybrid city of the imagination, which
engendered elective affinities between the elites of the center
and the periphery on the level of intellect and creativity.
Their shared outlook was possible not only through the
printed media but also through major hegemonic languages,
such as English in the case of the Bengalis in India, as well as
French and Spanish disseminated through colonial encoun
ters. In sum, the colonial intelligentsia negotiated their trans
actions with modernity essentially by means of virtual cosmo
politanism.
Cosmopolitanism is an inevitable consequence of global
technology transfers and communication and transport rev
olutions. Arjun Appadurai, who theorizes globalization,
draws our attention to the contradictory pulls of homogeni
zation and heterogenization, to which the colonial orders,
based in European capitals and spread throughout the non
Western world, gave rise.96 Mercer prefers the term "cosmo
politan," as a sharper conceptual tool in the study of world
wide interactions of artistic modernism, to the confusing
array of terms such as "global," "international," "cross-cul
tural," and "culturally diverse."97 In sympathy with Aristote
lian universals, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah views
cosmopolitan values as the thread that ties human beings
together. He rejects both the politics of difference and na
tionalist fabrications of exclusive claims to cultural patri
mony, reiterating everyone's right to share the common hu
man heritage. He has faith in the ability of the individual
to transcend parochialism, to demand to be a citizen of the
world 98 While the imaginary citizen may find this desirable,
he or she may not have the wherewithal to achieve such a
world affiliation. Power and authority confer visibility and
inclusion, in the historically uneven relation between center
and periphery, allegorized in the mutual relationship of Luis
Bunuel and Jorge Luis Borges. Borges once asserted, "I be
lieve . . . our patrimony is the universe; we should essay all
themes and we cannot limit ourselves to purely Argentinian
subjects in order to be Argentinian." In his autobiography,
My Last Sigh, the Spanish filmmaker found the Argentinian
guilty of self-absorption and pretension, inflicting the ulti
mate snub with the telling aside, "as we say in Spanish."99
In the context of the present global diaspora, recognizing
the outcome of forced migration, exile, and other border
crossings, James Clifford puts forward "discrepant cosmopol
itanism" as a notion of "cosmopolitanism-from-below" that
generates lived experiences of unfinished local and global
identities.100 This cosmopolitan mode of the powerless and
the disadvantaged refers essentially to globalization from be
low.101 Even though I am speaking of an elite in India who
are not physically dispossessed, my definition of virtual cos
mopolitanism is closer to Clifford's than to Appiah's because
of the uneven power relation between center and periphery,
and between the colonial powers and the subject nations in
my period of study. Of course, the cosmopolitan ideal can be
full of ambiguities, and being well versed in cosmopolitanism
often may connote imbibing the values of the hegemonic
center or of the colonial regime. However, the important
point I want to make here is that asymmetrical power rela
tions do not prevent the free flow and cross-fertilization of
ideas on the level of "virtuality," as has happened across the
globe in the age of knowledge and communications revolu
tion in the previous century.102
How does virtual cosmopolitanism enable the periphery,
whether formerly colonized or not, to contribute to the
project of modernity on an intellectual level? One of the most
creative ideas developed by Indian avant-garde artists in the
1920s in their exercise of virtual cosmopolitanism was to
develop an empowering concept of primitivism. It enabled
them to construct their resistance to urban industrial capital
ism and the ideology of progress, the cornerstone of colonial
empires. Jamini Roy, with whom I began, was one of the most
striking exponents of artistic primitivism in India, but the
tendency spawned other remarkable figures as well.103
Primitivism, we are aware, represents the romantic longing
of a complex society for the simplicity of premodern exis
tence. The crisis of the industrial age, which was traced back
to Enlightenment rationality, made nineteenth-century Uto
pians embrace primitivism with fervor. Though primitivism
helped temper the relentless progressivism of colonial-indus
trial modernity, one cannot ignore the inner tensions and
contradictions within the concept, described by Edward Said
as "the age-old antetype of Europe ... a fecund night out of
which European rationality developed."104 Primitivism stands
charged with complicity in sustaining colonial hegemony in
its representations of the non-West and in its consumption of
primitive art.105 It is characterized as a fetishistic discourse
that evokes simultaneous fear of and desire for the Other.106
Western artists have been both primitivism's beneficiaries, in
terms of an enlarged formal armory, and its unwitting victims,
because by "articulating their own fantasies about the mean
ing of the objects and about the peoples who created them,
artists have been party to the erasure of the self-representa
tions of colonized peoples in favour of Western representa
tions of their realities."107 Nonetheless, as Foster points out,
the avant-garde's identification with the primitive, "however
imaged as dark, feminine, and profligate, remained a ^iden
tification with white, patriarchal, bourgeois society."108 We
have already encountered some of the best-known cases of
primitivism inspiring the avant-garde, which declared its al
legiance to primitive art, children's art, and the art of the
mentally ill. The naivete of primitive art is a myth. African art,
for instance, is governed by strict aesthetic conventions, but
the potent myth helped emancipate Western artists from the
constraints of classical taste, bringing about a remarkable
paradigm shift. The other primitivism, we may remind our
selves, was the critical modernism of nonobjective art. For the
avant-garde, the artistic discourse of primitivism opened up
the possibility of aesthetic globalization as part of art histor
ical consciousness.109
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
INTERVENTIONS: DECENTERING MODERNISM 543
The very ambiguities, instabilities, and fractures within
primitivism provided the colonized a singular weapon with
which to interrogate the capitalist/colonial world of moder
nity, enabling them to produce a counter modern discourse
of resistance.110 In the West, the very flexibility of primitivism
offered endless possibilities, ranging from "going native" to a
radical questioning of Western positivism.111 What the pe
riphery did was to turn the outward "gaze" of Europe back to
the West itself, deploying the very same device of cultural
criticism to interrogate the urban-industrial values of the
colonial empires.112 In many ways, Mahatma Gandhi was the
most profound "primitivist" critic of the twentieth century. In
1909, his revolutionary booklet Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home
Rule set out his anticolonial resistance based on a critique of
Western civilization as a slave to the machine.113
Thus, primitivism as a critical form of modernity formed a
bridge between Eastern and Western critics of industrial
capitalism that affected the peripheries no less than the West.
Primitivists did not deny the importance of technology in
contemporary life; they simply refused to accept the teleolog
ical certainty of modernity.114 The politicized "ruralism" that
emerged in the 1920s in India was the particular Indian
expression of a global response to modernity, as the defini
tion of nationhood shifted from the pan-Indian to the local.
It inspired a whole generation of artists, among whom Jamini
Roy was the most original. One of Roy's initial concepts was
a series of moral contrasts he made between rural and.urban
values: rural honesty pitted against urban "decadence." His
aim was to restore through art the precolonial community
that had been severed from national life during British rule,
alienating the elite from its cultural roots. The intimate con
nection between the vitality of an artistic tradition and its
mythological richness became the central plank in his theory
of collective art.115 Through the folk idiom, Roy sought to
restore the link between art and society, thereby repudiating
artistic individualism and the "aura" of a work of art, the twin
hallmarks of colonial art.116
These were the structural affinities between Roy's primitiv
ism and the avant-garde critics of modernity in the West such
as Hausenstein, although they arrived at their respective cri
tiques of modernity through different routes.117 Another
feature shared by Roy and the Western primitivists was the
rejection of universals, whether from a unifying "capitalist" or
from a "nationalist" perspective. Roy argued that the mythol
ogy that nourished a community art had of necessity to be
local and timeless.118 Roy's belief in political heterogeneity,
his insistence on "locality" as the site of the nation, and his
preference for multiple aesthetic possibilities were uncannily
similar to the ideas of the German Expressionists. I call these
similarities structural affinities in a virtual global community,
since neither knew the existence of the other.
At the same time, one must recognize the important dif
ferences between the primitivism of the center and the pe
riphery. The Western primitivists were chiefly concerned with
the predicament of urban existence, whereas Indian artists
used primitivism as an effective weapon against colonial cul
ture.119 While Western primitivists aimed at merging art with
life in a disavowal of the aesthetics of autonomy, they never
ceased to believe in the unique quality of aesthetic experi
ence. Roy endeavored to erase it, deliberately seeking to
9 Jamini Roy, Mother and Child, ca. 1940s, gouache on board,
23% X l5Vs in. (59.5 X 38.5 cm). Bharat Kala Bhavan,
Benaras Hindu University (artwork Succession Jamini Roy)
subvert the distinction between individual and collaborative
contribution in a work of art.120 Roy's objective of making the
signature meaningless was his playful way of undercutting
what Walter Benjamin called the "aura" of a masterpiece. In
addition, he turned his studio into a workshop to reproduce
his works cheaply. What the cognoscenti simply failed to
grasp was Roy's emergence as a radical critic of colonialism
through his art. The Indian painter deliberately eschewed
artistic individualism and the notion of artistic progress, the
two "flagships" of colonial art.121 But this is not what neces
sarily made him the most remarkable painter of pre-indepen
dence India. Roy's search for the formal equivalent to his
primitivist ideology eventually led him to the Bengali village
scroll painting, the pat, which afforded an ideal synthesis of
formalist strength and political theory. Through intense con
centration and a ruthless ability to pare the inessential de
tails, Jamini Roy created an avant-garde art of a monumental
simplicity and deep social commitment (Fig. 9).
Toward a New Art History
I have attempted here to recuperate the importance of the
artistic modernisms of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Aus
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
544 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 4
tralia, which are regarded as derivative of the Western avant
garde. Communication and transport revolutions, massive
population displacements, and other global processes led to
the intense cross-fertilization of cultures and the growth of
cosmopolitan values, chief among them the emergence of
new art forms. In the West, avant-garde art, nourished by
ethnographic arts and Eastern thought, broke away from the
constraints of academic naturalism and classical taste. Mod
ernism spread worldwide because of the West's dominance,
and yet modernism's radical message inspired non-Western
regions to create their own art of resistance against the
colonial order.
Despite its radical agenda, the Western avant-garde failed
to take into account either the progressive heterogenization
of art or the richness and creativity of art practices in the
peripheries. Its limitations stem from the monolithic, linear
narrative of an art history that does not allow for difference,
in part a reflection of the unequal power relations between
center and periphery. My argument contributes to the recent
debates on the need to shift the center of gravity from the
originary discourse to a more heterogeneous definition of
global modernism, incorporating the changes that have
taken place in the twentieth century. It responds to the
challenge of transnational art, calling into question the "pu
rity" of the modernist canon and the consequent imputation
of the derivative character of the periphery.
The rich variety of contemporary art around the world and
its powerful advocates have, of course, helped to blunt the
self-assurance of the canon; my conviction remains that old
ideas will continue to seep out of the fault lines unless we
consciously interrogate old ideas and their colonial anteced
ents and seek to replace them with a more inclusive art
history. In the final analysis, the new art history will be
enriched through a contextually grounded study of non
Western modernism that engages with the socially con
structed meaning of artistic production. This will go a long
way toward contesting the commonplace that peripheral
modernisms are merely attempts to catch up with the origi
nary avant-garde discourse.
Partha Mitter, professor emeritus, University of Sussex, has held
fellowships at Cambridge, the Institute for Advanced Study, Prince
ton, the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, the Clark Art Institute,
Williamstown, Mass., and CASVA, the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D. C. His most recent work is The Triumph of Mod
ernism (2007) [16 Hawkswell Gardens, Oxford 0X2 7EX, U.K.,
parthamitter@btinternet. com].
Notes
I would like to express my appreciation to Hollis Clayson, who had intitally
suggested that I write this essay for the "Interventions" series of the Art
Bulletin, and to the previous editor, Marc Gotlieb, and the current editor,
Richard Powell, for their helpful suggestions with regard to the essay. I am
indebted to various friends and colleagues for ideas and comments, especially
to Thomas Crow, Faya Causey, Debra Diamond, C. R. (Mark) Haxthausen,
Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey, and Katharine Wilson, as well as the
seminars at the Getty Research Institute (2000-2001), the Sterling and
Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass. (2003-4), and the Center
for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the National Gallery of Art, Washing
ton, D.C. (2005-6). My apologies if I have inadvertently failed to mention any
individuals who have enriched my thinking on these issues.
1. Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art} (Chicago: University of Chi
cago Press, 1987) and Art History after Modernism (Chicago: University
of Chicago, 2003). See also Jonathan Gilmore's review of the latter,
"Discipline Problem: Jonathan Gilmore on Hans Belting; Art History
after Modernism," Artforum, October 2003, http://www.artforum.com
(accessed June 10, 2008).
2. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh,
Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London:
Thames and Hudson, 2004).
3. My recent work, Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India's Art
ists and the Avant-Garde, 1922-1947 (London: Reaktion Books, 2007),
which charts the pioneering phase of Indian modernism as a form of
resistance to British colonial rule in India, attempts to place the In
dian artist in his historical context as well as to establish his global
importance. Interestingly, work by Jamini Roy was collected by Peggy
Guggenheim (Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict [London:
Andre Deutsch, 1979], 351-53), and it was shown at the National Gal
lery of Art in Washington, D.C, in 1956. Ann Landi, Schirmer Encyclo
pedia of Art: Comprehensive Survey of World Artists, Works and Genres (Gale
Group Thomson Learning, http://www.Schirmer+Encyclopedia+
of+Art and international@galegroup.com, also includes Roy in her
survey. On Tarsila, see Cultura (Rio de Janeiro), 2nd year, no. 5 (Jan
uary-March 1972), the commemorative edition for 1922-72. On Lam,
see Lowery Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde,
1923-1982 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). For the exhibi
tion at the Hayward Gallery, see Simon Njami et al., Africa Remix: Con
temporary Art of a Continent (London: Hayward Gallery, 2005). For the
work of Everlyn Nicodemus, who has exhibited internationally, see,
for instance, Jean Fisher, "Everlyn Nicodemus: Between Silence and
Laughter," in Displacements, exh. cat. (Alicante: University of Alicante,
1997), reprinted in Fisher, Vampire in the Text (London: Institute of
International Visual Arts, 2003).
4. Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism; and idem, Art and Nationalism in
Colonial India, 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1994).
5. Foster et al., Art since 1900, 618.
6. Rosalind Krauss's critique of modernism in The Originality of the Avant
Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985),
through her study of reproductions, demythologizes modernism's
claims to aesthetic purity, authenticity, originality, and freedom and
its assertions of breaking with the past; Hal Foster's The Anti-Aesthetic:
Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983)
takes a moral stand against the instant gratification of contemporary
culture; and Benjamin Buchloh persuaded the Dutch Kanaal Art
Foundation to fund Everlyn Nicodemus's account of the German co
lonial venture in Africa, "Carrying the Sun on Our Backs," in Andrea
Robbins and Max Becher, ed. M. Catherine de Zegher, exh. cat. (Kor
trijk, Belgium: Kanaal Art Foundation, 1994), 49ff. I understand that
this powerful critique of Nazi atrocity by Nicodemus was removed
from the version of the catalog produced for the show when it went
to Germany.
7. Reinhold Misselbeck et al., 20th Century Photography Museum Ludwig
Cologne (Cologne, 1996). Raghubir Singh's tragic death in his early
fifties brought to an abrupt end his brilliant career. See the book
based on his retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago with his
comments, River of Colour: The India of Raghubir Singh (London: Phai
don, 1998), and many of his other volumes. A recent exception is
Robin Lenman, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Photograph (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), in which he is listed. For Seydou
Keita, see Michael Rips, "The Ghosts of Seydou Keita," New York
Times, January 22, 2006, Arts and Leisure section, 30-33. The same
fate often overtakes critics of modernism from the periphery, as for
instance, C. L. R. James. David Craven, "C. L. R. James as a Critical
Theorist of Modernist Art," in Cosmopolitan Modernisms, ed. Kobena
Mercer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 146-67.
8. Honorable exceptions are Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2002); Delia Gaze and Marina Vaizey,
in Dictionary of Women Artists (Chicago: Fitzroy Deerborn, 1997), vol. 2,
126-68; and the Sher-Gil entry by Geeta Kapur in Dictionary of Art,
ed. Jane Turner (London: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 27,
593-94. I discuss Sher-Gil's importance in Mitter, The Triumph of Mod
ernism.
9. See the photograph for the campaign by People for the Ethical Treat
ment of Animals (PETA) against wearing animal fur with the caption,
"We'd rather go naked than wear fur," with Naomi Campbell and
four white supermodels, who have been homogenized despite their
differences in features, in Partha Mitter, "The Hottentot Venus and
Western Man: Reflections on the Constructions of Beauty in the
West," in Cultural Encounters, Representing Otherness, ed. Elizabeth Hal
lam and Brian V. Street (London: Routledge, 2000), 38, fig. 2.2. Such
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
INTERVENTIONS: DECENTERING MODERNISM 545
homogenization is mentioned in the field of music by the composer
Steve Reich, who writes with regret that "what is now called 'world
music,' I find that, to my ears, it is basically African pop and rock,
Indonesian pop and rock, South American pop and rock. .. . The tra
ditional indigenous music in Ghana, for example, seems to have
largely disappeared. . . ." ("Sound and Vision," Saturday Guardian Re
view, September 30, 2006, 14). Actually, a more exciting fusion can be
heard in not only the compositions of Reich himself, but also Ravi
Shankar's works, Tom Takemitsu's compositions on the traditional
Japanese instruments the sakuhachi and koto, the Chinese composer
Tan Dun's pieces, Olivier Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony, the work
of the minimalists Philip Glass and John Adams, the works of John
Faulds, Morton Feldman, John Cage, and the new jazz of Meredith
Monk.
10. The consequences of this prescription are charted by Joseph Stiglitz
in Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).
11. E. H. Gombrich's classic study Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon,
1954) established the importance of cultural conventions in art with
his radical work on artistic schemata and the critique of the "innocent
eye," based on the psychology of perception and Benjamin Lee
Whorf s linguistic theory.
12. Textbooks on world art until recently dealt almost exclusively with the
progress of Western art from the Greeks via the Renaissance to the
Victorians as the triumph of illusionist naturalism, and even now the
art of the mass of humanity from the non-Western world forms only a
small part of the narrative. The case of modernism within Europe is
more complex; the Hungarian "nationalist" Post-Impressionist paint
ers are excluded from the canon in contrast to the modernist artist
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, for instance.
13. Robrt Hughes, The Shock of the New (London: Thames and Hudson,
1981), the famous BBC series and a lively book on the impact of
modernism. One cannot be sure why music was not similarly affected.
In India, for instance, if anything, classical music has had a new lease
on life that owes nothing to the Western avant-garde, with the excep
tion of a few outstanding fusion composers.
14. Adrian Stokes, "Reflections on the Nude," in The Critical Writings of
Adrian Stokes (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 336-37. I am in
debted to Stephen Bann for this reference.
15. Robert Linsley, "Wifredo Lam: Painter of Negritude," Art History 11,
no. 4 (December 1988): 529-30.
16. In India, this was accomplished by means of art schools and art socie
ties that mounted art exhibitions. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colo
nial India, pt. 2; Nora Annesley Taylor, Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnogra
phy of Vietnamese Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004),
27-34; Apinan Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992); and John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Sydney,
1998).
17. See, for instance, Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India; and
more specifically on Bengal, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a
New "Indian" Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850
1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
18. Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Partisan Review 6, no.
5 (Fall 1939): 34-49.
19. T. J. Clark, "On the Social History of Art," in Image of the People:
Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London: University of Califor
nia Press, 1973), 9-20. See Meyer Schapiro, "The Social Bases of Art"
and "The Nature of Abstract Art," in Modern Art: The Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1977), 185-211.
20. Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1996), 33.
21. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde.
22. Hal Foster, Art in America, November 1982, 88-93, and a later version
in Art in Theory, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Black
well, 2003), 1037.
23. See John Haber's review of modernism as less final, less enlightened,
and less monolithic, "The Reusable Past: Rosalind E. Krauss; The Origi
nality of the Avant Garde" "New.York.Art.Crit.: John Haber's Art Re
views," jhaber@haberarts.com (accessed June 10, 2008). On the West
Indian critic's originality, see Craven, "C. L. R. James as a Critical
Theorist," 146-65.
24. See William Rubin, ed., "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the
Tribal and the Modern, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1984), x.
25. Hal Foster, "The 'Primitive' Unconscious of Modern Art," October 34
(Fall 1985): 45-69.
26. James Clifford, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," Art in Amer
ica, April 1986, 164-215. See also Thomas Mclvelley, "Doctor Lawyer
Indian Chief," Artforum, November 1984, 54-60.
27. "The disturbing aspect of Western modernism," Clifford added, "His
tories of the Tribal and the Modern," 166, "was its project of 'redeem
ing otherness,' in order to reconstitute non-Western art in its own
image."
28. Rubin, Primitivism in 20th Century Art.
29. John Golding, Paths to the Absolute (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000), 64.
30. It is important to point out that within the discourse of modernism
the originality of the avant-garde has been seriously challenged by the
introduction of the concept of repetition, reproduction, and copy,
particularly in the work of Sherrie Levine. However, my point in the
paper is about the dominant perception of the art of the periphery.
31. In Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, I have sought to revise much of
the influence-driven colonial art history. For early artists, Geeta Ka
pur's insightful account of Sher-Gil; K. G. Subramanyan's obiter dicta
on Rabindranath Tagore, "Rabindranath and Art: A Personal View,"
Nandan, nos. 1-2 (1977): 1-2; Ratan Parimoo's scholarly The Paintings
of the Three Tagores (Baroda, 1973); and R. Siva Kumar's Santiniketan:
The Making of a Contextual Modernism (New Delhi: National Gallery of
Modern Art, 1997) are relevant. Kapur, who is the foremost critic of
postindependence India, attempts to reconfigure the art of this later
period, in, for instance, her provocative book When Was Modernism:
Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika,
2000). For the late 1940s and 1950s, the useful documentation of
Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art (New Delhi: Ox
ford University Press, 2001), should be consulted.
32. William George Archer, India and Modern Art (London: George Allen
and Unwin, 1959), 43.
33. I discuss this in a long section in Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism,
18-27.
34. John Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907-1914 (London:
Faber and Faber, 1968), gives the best account of Cubism's formal
innovations.
35. Franz Marc and Lyonel Feininger created an imaginary world of ani
mals and architecture, respectively, while the left-wing revolutionary
Georg Grosz put fragmentations and a distorted perspective at the
disposal of a powerful political narrative. Their contents were more
revolutionary than those of the classic Cubists.
36. Max Osborn's review is cited in Rupam 15-16 (July-December 1923):
74. On Osborn, see Donald E. Gordon, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966): 371 n. 17.
37. W. G. Archer's The Vertical Man: A Study in Primitive Indian Sculpture
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1947) expresses Archer's longing
for formalist as well as cultural primitivism. These primitivist senti
ments, we know, were disseminated by Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and later
Herbert Read, the chief conduits for modernism in the colonies. On
his patronizing condescension for Indian nationalists as deracine, see
Archer, India and Modern Art, 34-37.
38. Clifford, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," 167. Shelley Err
ington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art (Berkeley: University of Cali
fornia Press, 1998), writes that concepts such as authenticity and
primitivism have "died" because of attacks by cultural critics. At the
same time, the penetration of nation-states, the tourist industry, and
transnational corporations into regions that formerly produced these
artifacts has severely reduced supplies of "primitive art," bringing
about a second "death." Interestingly, African artists in Zimbabwe
were inspired by the works of Western modernists to produce contem
porary sculptures in a reappropriation of primitivism. Herbert E.
Roese, "Modern Sculptures from Zimbabwe," July 12, 2000, http://
web.onetel.net.uk/~herbertroese/africa4a.htm (accessed June 15,
2008). My thanks to Caroline Mustill for the information.
39. One implication of the concept of influence is the usual view that it
demonstrates the periphery's lack of originality, which misreads the
center (see the comments about Latin American artists in Sims,
Wifredo Lam, 237). A lack of originality is not explicitly stated but it
influences judgments in writing these artists out of history.
40. Sixten Ringbom, "Art in the Age of the Great Spiritual," Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966): 386-418. L. Sihare, "Orien
tal Influences on Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, 1909-1917"
(PhD diss., New York University, 1967). Kandinsky was called "un
prince mongol" by the influential critic Will Grohmann because of his
interest in Theosophy. (James J. Sweeney, "Piet Mondrian," Partisan
Review 11, no. 2 [1944]: 173-76; and Peter Fingensten, "Spirituality,
Mysticism, and Non-Objective Art," Art Journals [Fall 1961]: 2-6.)
Ringbom was a contributor to the major show organized by Maurice
Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (Los Ange
les: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: Abbeville Press,
1986). For a reiteration of the influence of the Upanishadic notions
of Brahman and Atman on Mondrian, see Robert Welsh, who finds
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
546 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 4
the Calvinist stress on logic in the painter as claimed by M. H. J.
Shoenmaekers unconvincing; Welsh, "Mondrian and Theosophy," in
Piet Mondrian 1872-1944, Centennial Exhibition (New York: S. R.
Guggenheim Museum, 1972), 35-51. Jacquelynn Baas, The Smile of the
Buddha (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), is the latest
popular work on the subject.
41. Sihare, "Oriental Influences," 31-36.
42. Hilton Kramer, "Mondrian & Mysticism: 'My Long Search Is Over,'"
New Criterion 14, no. 1 (September 1995), http://www.newcriterion.
com/archive/14/sept95/hilton.htm (accessed October 25, 2006).
Kramer produces impressive evidence in support of Mondrian's spiri
tuality. In these artists, the Absolute could represent both the Hege
lian Being and the Upanishadic Brahman, but it is unnecessary to ex
clude one for the other. The notion of the Absolute or Geist (Spirit)
in Hegel's dialectical system derives from Plato's notion of Being as
mediated by the Enlightenment, a period when God became secular
ized as pure Thought or Intellect. However, the existentialists from
S0ren Kierkegaard onward sought to reinscribe individual subjectivity.
What would interest the abstract painters about the Absolute or Brah
man in the Upanishads is the notion of a genderless and formless de
ity (as opposed to the Christian God) and the general unresolved
character of existence and human freedom, proposed in the Hindu
texts more as questions than as final answers.
43. Michael Leja, "Formalism Redivivus?" review of Painting as Model by
Yve-Alain Bois, Art in America, March 1992, 35-39. Mondrian's idea of
the female and male elements, nature and spirit, which find their
"pure expression, true unity, only in the abstract," is uncannily similar to
the dualistic Samkhya doctrine of purusha and prakriti. Arthur Danto,
review of Painting as Model, Art Journal 51 (1992): 95-97. Stephen
Melville, "Matter, Model and Modernism," Art History 15, no. 3 (Sep
tember 1992): 387-91; and Paul Overy, "'Here-I-Am-Again-Piet': A
Mondrian for the Nineties," Art History 18, no. 4 (December 1995):
584-605. Paul Deussen, The Philosophy of the Upanishads (New York:
Dover, 1966) is a useful text to consult regarding the Upanishads.
The modernist ideology of "purity" and its critique of representational
art were inspired by the Platonic distinction between truth and ap
pearance. Its extreme form was the notion of the absolute values of
abstract art. Mark A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialism and
the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 164.
44. Golding, Paths to the Absolute, 8.
45. Ibid., 20.
46. "Natural Reality and Abstract Reality: An Essay in Trialogue Form," De
Stijl, June 1919-July 1922, trans. H. Holtzman and M. B.James, in The
New Art the New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian (New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1995), quoted in Golding, Paths to the Absolute
14.
47. On Vivekananda's influence on Malevich, see Tuchman, The Spiritual
in Art, 37. See also the important discussion by David Pan, "Primitiv
ism and Abstraction," in The Primitive Renaissance (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2001), 102-20. The Upanishads take the term moha
to mean the delusion that accepts the natural world as real, whereas
the only reality is the Brahman (Absolute) and Atman (Self) relation
ship. Here are some of the parallel ideas: the Buddhist Heart Sutra,
for instance, mentions the five aggregates or substances (pancha
bhuta) as empty of inherent nature: form is empty, emptiness is form.
The void is a positive concept here rather than an absence, which in
ancient thought is imagined as sh nya (zero), a mathematical symbol
that arose in ancient India but is less easy to imagine within an empir
icist paradigm (the Heart Sutra is translated in "Ancient Sutra Offers
Guide to Ever-Changing Nature of Existence," San fose Mercury News,
May 19, 2001, Family and Religion, IF). The "Nothingness" of Martin
Heidegger and the neant of the existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre
do not directly acknowledge Eastern thought, but they are closer to
the Buddhist theory of nothingness or nonbeing as a positive entity
and of consciousness as being prior to material existence than any
Western philosophical system as such. Heidegger concedes the pri
macy of the West but questions its ability to engage in a dialogue with
Eastern thought (on Heidegger, see Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Eu
rope: An Essay in Understanding [Albany: State University of New York,
1988], 167-70 and passim). Sander H. Lee argues that Sartre's phe
nomenological existentialism and Buddhism have comparable theo
ries of consciousness, while also noting their major differences: a ma
terialistic, this-worldly orientation of the former as opposed to the
transcendent, otherworldly orientation of the latter (Lee, "Notions of
Selflessness in Sartrean Existentialism and Theravadin Buddhism,"
Keene State College, http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Reli/ReliLee.
htm (accessed June 15, 2008). Yet Sartre shares with Buddhism the
notion of the Self as illusion and of nihilism (Sartre, Letre et le neant
[Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1943]; and his 1945 lecture Existentialism
and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet [London: McEwen, 1948]).
48. Stella Kramrisch, "Square and Circle"; "The Square Mandala of the
Earth"; and "Symbolism of the Square," in The Hindu Temple (Cal
cutta: University of Calcutta, 1946), vol. 1, pt. 2, 19-43. Malevich's
painting White on White is of course universally known.
49. Pan, The Primitive Renaissance, esp. the section on Kandinsky, 102-20.
50. Tom Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club 1893-1923 (Aldershot:
Scolar Press, 1990), 180. Michael Sadler was a founding member of
the radical socialist Leeds Art Club. Kandinsky's aim of attaining the
transcendental by rational means has been described as rational irra
tionalism. Rainer K Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus (Stuttgart: Hatje
Cantz, 2000), 119-220).
51. Golding, Paths to the Absolute, 81.
52. Romy Golan, review of Art since 1900, Art Bulletin 88 (June 2006): 382.
The recent exhibition at the T te Modern on Kandinsky makes abun
dantly clear the influence of spiritual ideas on the Russian in his most
productive period before he began to respond to other nonobjective
painters, yet the contributors tend to skirt the issue. Hartwig Fischer
et al., eds., Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction (London: T te Publish
ing, 2006).
53. Nestor Garcia Canclini, "Remaking Passports: Visual Thought in the
Debate on Multiculturalism," in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthol
ogy, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),
498-99.
54. Ferdinand T nnies made the classic distinction between organic com
munities as opposed to modern self-willed societies in Gemeinscha
und Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1887).
55. Pan, The Primitive Renaissance, 112. Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Mod
ern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), provides an accessible
summary of neoprimitivism, a term coined by the Russian modernists.
56. Pan, The Primitive Renaissance, 100-101, is especially perceptive on this
issue. He questions the conventional formalist wisdom about primitiv
ism and nonrepresentational art that tends to underplay the former's
cultural importance.
57. Charles W. Haxthausen, "A Critical Illusion: 'Expressionism' in the
Writings of Wilhelm Hausenstein," in The Ideological Crisis of Expression
ism, ed. Rainer Rumold and O. IL Werckmeister (Columbia, S.C.:
Camden House, 1990), 169-91.
58. R. Schwab, La Renaissance Orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950). On the Ger
main Protestant philosopher Johann Georg Hamann and the German
rejection of Western enlightenment, see Frank Edward Manuel, The
Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni
versity Press, 1959).
59. J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1997), 5.
60. This is especially true of the Greeks, despised by the conquering Ro
mans for their lack of valor and yet revered by them for their art and
intellect. Margaret Miller, in Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century: A
Study in Cultural Receptivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), charts the reception of Persian culture in Greece and the way
meaning and function change as outside elements enter a culture. My
thanks to Sarah Morris for the reference.
61. Rudolf Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1977).
62. I am indebted for these ideas to the research project Global Arts: East
Meets West; Creativity and Cultural Interchange in the Early Modern
World, led by Professor Maxine Berg of Warwick University. I am not
suggesting that these exchanges can be value-neutral or that hege
monic relations do not impinge on the mutual perceptions of East
and West, but at least the main remit of the group is not to start with
an unequal perception of global exchange dominated by the canon.
63. E. H. Gombrich, "Nova Reperta" (unpublished paper kindly lent by
the late author). On the role of Indian mathematics, see George
Thibaut, Astronomie, Astrologie, und Mathematik (Strasbourg: K J. Tr b
ner, 1899); B. B. Datta and A. N. Singh, History of Hindu Mathematics,
vol. 1 (Lahore: Motilal Banerasidas, 1935); David Eugene Smith and
Louis Charles Karpinski, The Hindu-Arabic Numerals (Boston: Ginn,
1911). The great opus on Chinese science is Joseph Needham's mul
tivolume Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
versity Press, 1954-59) (with the assistance of Wang Ling and contin
ued after his death by the institute named after him). Martin Bernal,
in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (London:
Free Association Books, 1987), challenges the idea that Greek civiliza
tion was of purely European origin. Yet surprisingly, even as late as
the period of the Enlightenment, an influential circle of savants,
while acknowledging the great achievements of the Greeks, relegated
them to the category of nonmodern cultures, essentially different
from the modern West. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the
Gods.
64. This famous dictum of Winckelmann's is widely quoted; see, for in
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
INTERVENTIONS: DECENTERING MODERNISM 547
stance, John Fleming and Hugh Honour, A World History of Art (Lon
don: Macmillan, 1982), 476.
65. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1985), 58-62.
66. Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
67. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renais
sance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Greene, who
regarded the relations of the Humanists to antique sources as a dia
logue rather than a passive act, proposed "heuristic" or "dialectic" imi
tation, which advertises its derivations, then defines itself by distanc
ing itself from them. See Elizabeth Cropper on imitation, influence,
and invention in The Domenichino Affair (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2006), 99-127.
68. Gaganendranath Tagore, interview by Kanhaiyalal Vakil, Bombay
Chronicle, June 30, 1926.
69. William Rothenstein, Men and Memories (London: Chatto and Windus,
1934), vol. 1, 63.
70. Gaganendranath, interview by Vakil.
71. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univer
sity of Chicago Press, 1962). See Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory,
960-61, 964, for a succinct summary.
72. The profound changes in Indian art practice, organization, and out
look, as well as the nationalist construction of "oriental art" based on
a synthesis of Indian and Japanese traditions as part of Pan-Asian cul
tural solidarity in the early twentieth century, are treated in Mitter,
Art and Nationalism in Colonial India. I discuss Gaganendranath
Tagore's adoption of a new paradigm in Mitter, The Triumph of Mod
ernism, 18-27.
73. On the formation of classical taste and its influence on art history, see
E. H. Gombrich, "Norm and Form: The Stylistic Categories of Art His
tory and Their Origins in Renaissance Ideals," in Norm and Form: Stud
ies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), 81-98.
74. The center-periphery bias has contributed to the devaluation of the
originality of an artist like Correggio, who hailed from Parma, consid
ered a mere province compared with Florence, Rome, and Venice,
Vasari's three centers of art. Correggio's work has until now been as
sessed in terms of "catching up" with the styles of Michelangelo or
Raphael, rather than as an independent achievement. See Pier Luigi
De Vecchi and Giancarla Periti, introduction to Emilia e Marche n Re
nascimento: L 'identit visiva della "periferia," ed. Periti (Azzano San Pa
olo: Bolis, 2005), 7-11. See also Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Gins
berg, "Centro e periferia," in Storia delV arte italiana, ed. Giovanni
Previtali (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), vol. 1, 285-354.
75. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, "National Stereotypes, Prejudice, and
Aesthetic Judgments in the Historiography of Art," in Art History, Aes
thetics, Visual Studies, ed. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (Wil
liamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002),
73-79, gives a scholarly account of national prejudices of art histori
ans and attempts to circumvent them.
76. See Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to In
dian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pi. 94, for a painting by
J. M. Gandy depicting the universal progress of the arts. On the con
struction of the art of anticolonial resistance in India, see idem, Art
and Nationalism in Colonial India, and on Bengal, see Guha-Thakurta,
The Making of a New "Indian" Art. Vincent Smith (quoted in Mitter, Art
and Nationalism in Colonial India, 311) described Indian art as follows:
while it deserved a respectable place among arts of the world, it was
not of the first rank, "except for its eminent suitability to its country
and people."
77. The literature on visual culture and poststructuralist cultural theory is
vast, so I will cite here several important works that give a succinct
account of the scope and importance of visual culture and its chal
lenge offered to the canon. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and
Keith Moxey, eds., Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (Hanover,
N.H.: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press,
1994); Moxey, The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics,
and Art History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); and
Holly and Moxey, Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies.
78. Keith Moxey kindly gave me access to his unpublished paper "Disci
pline of the Visual: Art History, Visual Studies, and Globalization,"
based on talks given at a course organized at the Universidad Com
plutense of Madrid and at various conferences. It came out in Genre
36 (2003): 429-48. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Production of Belief: Con
tributions to an Economy of Symbolic Goods," trans. Richard Nice, in
Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Collins et al.
(London: Sage, 1986), 154-55.
79. See John Clark, "Open and Closed Discourses of Modernity in Asian
Art," in Modernity in Asian Art (Sydney: Wild Peony Press, 1993), 1-17.
Clark applies Umberto Eco's theory of semiotics to the process of
knowledge transfer, distinguishing between open and closed systems
of discourses. In his later work Modern Asian Art, he expands on his
initial ideas, proposing to study contemporary art in Asia as indepen
dent entities not tied to the concept of modernism and East-West po
larity.
80. Geeta Kapur, "When Was Modernism in Indian Art?" in When Was
Modernism? 298-99.
81. Jason Edward Kaufman, quoted in Sims, Wifredo Lam, 219. On the im
portance of artists of the periphery for Abstract Expressionism, see
David Craven, "Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post
Colonial Approach to 'American' Art," Oxford Art Journal 121, no. 1
(1990): 44-65.
82. Everlyn Nicodemus, "Text-Textile-Lingua Franca," in MUissages
(Ghent: MIAT, 2005), 89.
83. Nestor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leav
ing Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); and Gerardo
Mosquera, "Modernity and Africana: Wifredo Lam on His Island," in
Wifredo Lam, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte,
Reina Sofia, Ministerio de Cultura, 1992), cited in Sims, Wifredo Lam,
236.
84. Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994),
excerpted in Harrison and Wood, Art and Theory, 1112; for this propo
nent of the subversive function of colonial hybridity and his critics,
see "Theorising the Hybrid" special issue, Journal of American Folklore
112, no. 445 (Summer 1999).
85. Deborah A. Kapchan and Pauline Turner Strong, "Theorizing the Hy
brid," Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (Summer 1999): 239
53. I am grateful to Faya Causey for the reference.
86. Andrew Causey, "The Singa Singa Table Lamp and the Toba Batak
Art of Conflation," Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (Summer
1999): 424-36, where he proposes the alternative word "conflation."
87. Robin Adele Greeley, "Modernism: What El Norte Can Learn from
Latin America," Art Journal 64 (Winter 2005): 82-83.
88. I cite here Michael Leja's pertinent complaint about studying mod
ernism with the definitions of conceptual categories developed in
connection with the French avant-garde art from the 1850s (Leja, ab
stract, the 28th Annual Conference of the Association of Art Histori
ans [AAH]), "Culture, Capital, Colony," Liverpool, April 4-7, 2002).
See also Mercer, introduction to Cosmopolitan Modernisms.
89. See n. 1 above.
90. In a powerfully suggestive volume of essays, Thomas Crow seeks to
restore the artist as an active political agent as well as the importance
of an art object whose complex meaning may elude verbal articula
tion. Crow, The Intelligence of Art (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1999).
91. Ackbar Abbas, "Cosmopolitan De-scriptions: Shanghai and Hong
Kong," Public Culture 12, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 775. Cosmopolitanism is
now seen to be a global phenomenon. See its critiques in the same
issue.
92. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, Colonial and Postcolo
nial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), speaks of
two spaces, the inner spiritual space and the outer secular one preva
lent in colonial Bengal. On the sociocultural phenomenon of the
Bengali Bhadralok and their role in creating an autonomous culture
in Calcutta, see Sukanta Chaudhuri, Calcutta: The Living City, vol. 1,
The Past (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990).
93. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Asia's first Nobel laureate, poet,
composer, playwright, essayist, political thinker, and renaissance per
sonality, inspired a wide and diverse range of people in East and
West, including the European composers Leos Jan cek and Alexander
von Zemlinsky, the poet Wilfred Owen, and the novelist Andre Gide,
among others. See Krishna Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore (New York:
Grove Press, 1962); as well as Ramananda Chatterjee, ed., The Golden
Book of Tagore (Calcutta: Golden Book Committee, 1931). The latter
assembles a range of contributors for his seventieth birthday volume.
94. Benedict Anderson had proposed the concept of the imagined com
munity of print capitalism as a component of modern nationalism; I
extend the notion of print culture to the global scene to explain cos
mopolitanism. The members of this community will never know most
of their fellow members. Anderson, Imagined Communities:. Reflections on
the Origins of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
95. The exception was Rabindranath Tagore who was widely traveled. The
other cosmopolitan was the polyglot essayist Nirad C. Chaudhuri
(1897-1999), whose intellectual development took place in a remote
town in colonial Bengal. One of the sites of such negotiations of mo
dernity was the adda, which was a cross between leisurely intellectual
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
548 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 4
conversation and local gossip among close friends in tea shops, cafes,
and other meeting places, similar in spirit to the French cafe culture.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Adda: A History of Sociality," in Provincialising
Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 180, speaks of the practice "as a struggle to be
at home in modernity." I would add that the addas were the sites in
Calcutta and other parts of colonial Bengal where virtual cosmopo
lites flourished in an atmosphere that enabled them to sharpen their
intellect.
96. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in Global Cultural
Economy," in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed.
Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (London: Harvester Wheat
sheaf, 1993), 324-39.
97. Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, 9.
98. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism (New York: W. W. Norton,
2006), xv.
99. Abbas, "Cosmopolitan De-scriptions," 770, quotes both authors. See
Luis Bunuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel (New York: Vintage
Books, 1984), 221; and Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, ed. Donald A.
Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 184.
100. James Clifford, "Mixed Feelings," in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling
beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 362-65, quoted in Mercer, Cos
mopolitan Modernisms, 11.
101. Arjun Appadurai, "Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagi
nation (Globalization from Below)," Public Culture 12, no. 1 (Winter
2000): 15-18, speaks the role of nongovernmental organizations in
the process, but this could also be a useful way to think of the colo
nial intelligentsia.
102. Sheldon Pollock observes that "if we conceive of the practice of cos
mopolitanism in literary communication that travels far, indeed, with
out any obstruction from any boundaries at all, and, more important,
that thinks of itself as unbounded, unobstructed, unlocated . . . the
world of writers and readers that Sanskrit produced, on the one hand,
and Latin, on the other, are remarkably similar." What is interesting
about his comment is that this cosmopolitanism in the ancient world
was a product of sharing a common language, though admittedly
these were languages of powerful cultures. Pollock, "Cosmopolitan
and Vernacular in History," Public Culture 12, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 599.
103. Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, traces the work and achievements of
these pioneering Indian artists who introduced modernism to India.
104. Edward W. Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered," in Reflections on Exile and
Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 203.
Lucien Levy-Bruhl, La mentalite primitive (Paris: PUF, 1922), proposed
the notion of the "primitive mind" as the prerational stage of the
modern mind, which was also Sigmund Freud's belief.
105. See Susan Hiller, ed., The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art (Lon
don: Routledge, 1991), esp. Hiller's excellent introduction and per
suasive chapters by Daniel Miller and Rasheed Araeen. This penetrat
ing work lays bare the hegemonic aspects of colonial primitivism.
106. Homi K. Bhabha, "The Other Question," Screen 24, no. 6 (November
December 1983): 18-36.
107. This is movingly and candidly expressed by Hiller, The Myth of Primitiv
ism, 2. See also Michael Leja's trenchant critique of the failings of Eu
ropean primitivism including Andre Breton's admission of the West's
ultimate failure to integrate the Other, in Reframing Abstract Expression
ism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993).
108. Foster, "Primitive Scenes," Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (Autumn 1993):
71-72.
109. F. Pellizzi, "Anthropology and Primitivism," Res 44 (Autumn 2003):
8-9. Much work has been done in tracing the complex role of primi
tivism in modern European art. See the pioneering work by Robert
Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Painting (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1938); Rubin, "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art, and Rhodes,
Primitivism and Modern Art. For a useful summary, see Partha Mitter,
"Primitivism," in Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, ed. David Levin
son and Melvin Ember (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), vol. 3, 1029
32. On its impact on art, see Gill Perry et al., Primitivism, Cubism and
Abstraction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
110. On the paradox of primitivism inspiring African American modern
ism, see Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the
Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998).
111. Zhang Xianglong, "Heidegger's View of Language and the Lao
Zhuang Fao-Language," trans. S. C. Angle, in Chinese Philosophy in an
Era of Globalization, ed. Robin R. Wang (New York: State University of
New York Press, 2004). See Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language
(New York, 1982). I am in Joel Kupperman's debt for the reference.
112. The primitivist critique of civilization went back to the ancient Greeks
and Romans but returned with added force in the colonial period.
George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages (Balti
more, 1948); and Arthur O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Re
lated Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1997).
113. Mahatma Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (Ahmedabad: Navajwan, 1938). One of
the influences on his primitivism was John Ruskin, a great critic of
Western industrial capitalism. Unlike Gandhi, Marx did not question
the teleological foundations of Western ideology in his critique of
capitalism.
114. Pan, The Primitive Renaissance, on whose excellent work my arguments
are based here.
115. The section on Roy in Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, which seeks
to establish this artist's importance, discusses this.
116. On the rise of artistic individualism in India, see Mitter, Art and Na
tionalism in Colonial India, 79-119, 179-218.
117. On Hausenstein, see above at n. 57.
118. Pan, The Primitive Renaissance, 5. Pan's analysis of the German primitiv
ists shows clear parallels between them and Roy, even though they
were ignorant of one another.
119. Indian artists were by no means the only ones to valorize primitivism.
Wifredo Lam, the Cuban artist of Chinese, African, and Spanish an
cestry who "nationalized" primitivism, offered a critique of colonialism
by combining Western primitivist aesthetics with contemporary Afri
can elements. His Afro-Cuban themes were a form of political asser
tion. Sims, Wifredo Lam. On African American modernism, see Lemke,
Primitivist Modernism.
120. Lemke, Primitivist Modernism, 5, 16.
121. See Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, chaps. 1,2.
This content downloaded from
154.59.125.182 on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:28:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms