The Bengali calendar used here bears the following relationship to the Christian one, for instance 1352 = 1945AD.
Prologue
1 J.-P. Sartre, Black Orpheus, trans. S. W. Allen (Paris, 1951), p. 39, quoted in R. Linley, âWifredo Lam: Painter of Negritudeâ, Art History, II/4 (December 1988), p. 533. See L. S. Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923â1982 (Austin, TX, 2002). CĂ©saire was an iconic West Indian poet of Negritude.
2 W. G. Archer, India and Modern Art (London, 1959), may be taken as a classic example of the study of non-Western art essentially as a derivative enterprise. In an essay on âdecentring modernismâ, to be published in Art Bulletin (Intervention series), I develop the relationship of power and authority between the West and its others as expressed in histories of non-Western avant-garde art and possible ways of thinking beyond current practices.
3 W. Rubin, âPrimitivismâ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York, 1984). I do not need to rehearse here the arguments and rebuttals in this controversy except to add that Hal Foster, âThe âPrimitiveâ Unconscious of Modern Artâ, October, XXXIV (Fall 1985), pp. 45â70, and James Clifford, âHistories of the Tribal and the Modernâ, Art in America (April 1985), pp. 164â215, offer trenchant critiques of the Western art historical canon. For my own work on Western representations of Indian art, see Much Maligned Monsters: History of Western Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford 1977), especially chap. VI. See also critique of Eurocentric discourses of modernism by Latin American critics, R. A. Greeley, âModernism: What El Norte Can Learn from Latin Americaâ, Art Journal (Winter 2005), pp. 82â93.
4 M. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (Berkeley, CA, 1985), pp. 85ff., on the passage: âinfluence is a curse of art criticism primarily because of wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient: it seems to reverse the active-passive relation which the historical actor [the artist] experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into accountâ.
5 Thomas Crow, The Intelligence of Art (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1999). Elizabeth Cropper in The Domenichino Affair (New Haven, CT, 2006) persuades us of the limitations of applying Vasarian teleological concepts of mimesis and authorship.
6 J. Clark, âOpen and Closed Discourses of Modernity in Asian Artâ, in Modernity in Asian Art, ed. J. Clark (Sydney, NSW, 1993), pp. 1â17. Clark applies Umberto Ecoâs theory of semiotics to the process of knowledge transfer, distinguishing between open and closed systems of discourses.
7 A. Stokes, âReflections on the Nudeâ, The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes (London, 1978), pp. 336â7. I am indebted to Stephen Bann for the reference. Criticism of the avant-garde, particularly with an engagement with Marxism, is a vast field, going back to Walter Benjamin and Carl Einstein with Clement Greenbergâs influential defence of the aesthetics of autonomy in the 1930s providing the benchmark through the 1950s and â60s. In the post-war era, the powerful and nuanced works of the October group of postmodern critics, Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster, social historians of art, namely T. J. Clark and Thomas Crow, and the theoreticians of visual culture have defined the field. I cannot do more than briefly acknowledge the importance of these works here.
8 For a revisionist discussion of this problem in Renaissance art, see Emilia e Marche nel Renascimento: LâIdentita Visiva della âPeriferiaâ, curated by Giancarla Periti (Azzano San Paolo, 2005), introduction by Pier Luigi De Vecchi and Giancarla Periti, pp. 7â11. Taking up Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginsbergâs essay, âCentre and Peripheryâ, in History of Italian Art, I, trans. C. Bianchini and C. Dorey, preface by P. Burke (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 29â112, Periti argues that the centreâperiphery relationship in art is not spatial but art historical, which articulates hierarchical power relations.
9 Crow, The Intelligence of Art.
10 Keith Moxey, âDiscipline of the Visual: Art History, Visual Studies and Globalizationâ, in Genre, 36 (2003), pp. 429â48. N. G. Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. C. Chiappari and S. Lopez (Minneapolis, MN, 1995). G. Kapur, âWhen was Modernism in Indian Art?â, in When Was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi, 2000), pp. 298â9. P. Bourdieu, âThe Production of Belief: Contributions to an Economy of Symbolic Goodsâ, trans. R. Nice, in Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. R. Collins et al. (London, 1986), pp. 154â5. G. Mosquera, âModernity and Africana: Wilfredo Lam on his Islandâ, in FondaciĂł Joan MirĂł, cited in Sims, Wilfredo Lam, p. 174.
11 In âBorder Lives: The Art of the Presentâ, in The Location of Culture (London, 1994), pp. 1â9, H. K. Bhabha, a proponent of the subversive function of hybridity, states: â[The] interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.â See the critics of hybridity, Journal of American Folklore, Special Issue: Theorising the Hybrid, CXII/445 (Summer 1999), especially Andrew Causeyâs thoughtful paper.
12 See the critical engagement with these issues in K. Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, MA, 2005).
13 T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL, 1962).
14 This is especially true of the Greeks, despised by the conquering Romans for their lack of valour, and yet revered by them for their art and intellect.
15 R. Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (Paris, 1950). On G. F. Hamann and the German rejection of Western Enlightenment, see F. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA, 1959).
16 Today it is intimately connected with post-modern and post-colonial thought. See J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought (London, 1997), who argues persuasively that any serious history of Western thought must take note of the impact of philosophical ideas from India, China and Japan on the West. See also W. Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (New York, 1988). On Heidegger and Eastern thought, see infra, p. 341.
17 J. Head and S. L. Cranston, Reincarnation, an East West Anthology (New York, 1961), on Tolstoyâs interest in Indian thought. See L. P. Sihare on Bergson and Worringer, p. 30.
18 E. ForgĂĄcs, The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics, trans. J. BĂĄtki (Budapest, 1995), p. 78.
19 P. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850â1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge, 1994). See also Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New âIndianâ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, ...