1st Edition
Nation, Region, Modernity The Art of K. Venkatappa
This volume explores the Indian artist, K. Venkatappa’s (1886–1965) life, 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 contextualizes Venkatappa’s work in the milieu of Calcutta and the Mysore state at the turn of the 20th century. Tracing both western and traditional Indian influences in his art, it historicises modern art and modernity in colonial India, at a time when boundaries, horizons and identities were shifting and going through great upheaval. 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 that represent the shifts in ideas and identities at the time. Through an in-depth reading of the diverse contexts that Venkatappa engaged with, the essays in this book examine the artist’s legacy and his relevance in contemporary artistic spaces in India.
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.
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
Biography
Deeptha Achar is a Professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat, India. Her publications include The Age of Adventure: Childhood, Reading and British Boys’ Fiction (2010) and she has co-edited Towards New Art History: Studies in Indian Art (2003).
Pushpamala N. is an internationally recognized independent artist, writer and curator and one of the pioneering conceptual artists in India. She is known for her strong feminist work, informed by cultural theory and social science. Her essays have been published internationally and she has presented papers at several major conferences on visual studies, cultural studies, contemporary art and art history in India and abroad.
‘K. Venkatappa was a major figure in what is known as the Bengal School of painting in the early decades of the twentieth century. A lone artist from the south of India in the largely Bengali fraternity of artists, he played a significant role in shaping the new indigenist idiom initiated by Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose. While his work remains within the artistic parameters of the new school, it is well worth arguing how he introduced a southern, or to be more specific, some aspects of the ethos and visual language from Mysore within the movement which has been regarded as the beginning of modern art in India. Whereas a considerable amount of material exists on several aspects of the Bengal school, the contribution of K. Venkatappa has remained understudied. This new publication not only throws light on the work of this lesser-known artist, but may also open a new chapter in the study of the initial years of contemporary Indian art.’
—Gulammohammed Sheikh, Former Professor of Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda, India
‘Through a retrospective reclaim of the artist, K.Venkatappa, both for his times and the present, this volume of essays opens out a broader art historical dialogue on the divergent and discordant nature of modernity in early twentieth century Indian art. Firstly, it shows how a lesser-known artist can be studied, less for his artistic merit, more for his complex subjectivities as both a court painter of a traditional chitragara lineage and as an autonomous modern artist, as he moves between the princely state of Mysore, the nationalist art world of Calcutta and the city of Bangalore. Secondly, by positioning themselves squarely in the social and cultural history of what would become the state of Karnataka, the editors and authors of this volume take up the contentious relationship between the nation and the region, and the politics of Venkatappa's after-life as the father of modern Kannada art. That much of the contemporary interest in the figure of Venkatappa emerged out a concerted civic campaign of local artists of Bangalore against the threatened private appropriation of the state-owned modern art gallery carrying his name and collection also makes this volume a critical intervention in the claims on the public and democratic place of art in today's India.’
—Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Art-historian and former Professor of History, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India
‘Bringing together a stellar group of scholars, this inter-disciplinary volume reminds us of the aesthetic importance for the study of both Indian modernity and the history of modern Indian art of K. Venkatappa as painter, sculptor, musician, art educationist, and much more. The first comprehensive and definitive analysis of this largely overlooked but significant Telugu-origin artist of Karnataka, Nation, Region, Modernity: The Art of K. Venkatappa deftly demonstrates how the nation lives in and through the region, but also, frequently, at the expense of the region. The volume also valuably offers a model of how to engage with the lives and legacies of pioneering figures of the past in a manner that is both a necessary corrective and a critical celebration.’
—Sumathi Ramaswamy, Duke University, USA
