Full Description
This volume explores the Indian artist, K. Venkatappa's life (1886-1965), his works and the political and cultural contexts that influenced and inspired his art. It looks at the artist's style and examines the question of modernity in Indian art through the interstices of the regional and the national.
This richly illustrated book contextualises Venkatappa's work in the milieu of Calcutta, princely Mysore and later Bangalore in the first half of the twentieth century, at a time when boundaries, horizons, and identities were in great flux. It complicates a unitary history of modern Indian art and, indeed, modernity in colonial India with its engagement with the question of region.
The volume discusses Venkatappa's engagements with Indian artistic nationalism, the Bengal Renaissance, asceticism, as well as western modernist art and highlights the ambivalences and contradictions in his work. Through an in-depth reading of these diverse contexts, the essays in this book examine the artist's legacy and his contemporary relevance, while showing how the trajectories of regional modernities can unsettle singular accounts of a nation's art. This volume, part of the Visual Media and Histories Series, will be of interest to students and researchers of history of art, history, modern Indian art, visual studies, and cultural studies.
Contents
List of illustrations
Series editor's preface
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
Deeptha Achar and Pushpamala N
Part I
Figuring the Artist: The Life and Times of K Venkatappa
2. Old Mysore: A Milieu for an Artist
Chandan Gowda
3. Venkatappa's Calcutta Interlude and His Career at Large
R Sivakumar
4. Life Writing and the Self-fashioning of the Artist
R H Kulkarni
Part II
Situating Venkatappa: International Contexts and National Concerns
4. The Creation of an Alternative Regional Avant-garde: Rabindranath Tagore, Okakura Tenshin and Pan-Asianism
Partha Mitter
5. Sadanga's Aesthetic Division of Labour: Abanindranath Tagore and Venkatappa's Shaping of a New National Self
Parul Dave Mukherji
7. "Mysore Modern" across the Arts
Ajay Sinha
Part III
Venkatappa, Colonial Modernity and the Question of Region
8. Actor of His Own Ideal: K. Venkatappa and the Consolidation of Artistic Persona
R. Nandakumar
9. The Language of Line: K. Venkatappa and K.K. Hebbar
Suresh Jayaram
10 Kannada Romanticism: Kuvempu and Venkatappa
Mamta Sagar
Part IV
Venkatappa and the Fashioning of a Modernist Idiom
11. Speculations and Provocations around Venkatappa's Bas-Reliefs
Pushpamala N
12. The Plant Studies of K Venkatappa: The Artist's Kinship with Nature, Truth, and Rationality
Srajana Kaikini
13 The Long Exposure: Painting and Photography in Early Twentieth Century Mysore
Shukla Sawant
Part V:
K. Venkatappa: Another Genre, Another World
14 A South-Easterly Approach to the Developing Cold Front (or the Creative and Business Explorations of a True Crinsepian)
Abhishek Hazra
15. Afterword: Venkatappa's Legacy for Our Times
Janaki Nair
Index
