Cover

Publisher's Note

First and foremost, a big 'thank you' for the overwhelming response to the three issues of Artetc. News & Views that dealt with Protest Art. As I had said before, despite being an enthusiast who has delved deep into the history and development of Protest......read more

Editorial

More than three decades ago, one of the pioneers of cultural studies, Fredric Jameson, in a seminal discourse, raised question about When was Modernism? (Our own art theorist, Geeta Kapur, in taking up the question for the title of her eponymous book missed the historicist underpinning of the question)......read more

Creative Impulse

Jogen Chowdhury: Maestro par Excellence

To comment on a huge body of work of five decades is challenging, but Jogen Chowdhury, the genius of lines and master of the intriguing pen and ink strokes accentuating the contours of the human anatomy complemented by his unique style of cross hatches impresses with ease. Jogen Chowdhury's works are socio-political comments making  statements in protest. The art historian R. Sivakumar states: “The pulse and rhythm of Jogen Chowdhury's art comes from a filial affinity to......read more

Feature
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Kalighat Pat, a Protomodern Art Tradition

Owing to the waning of the late medieval rural patronage system, resulting from the introduction of new land tenurial arrangement under the Permanent Settlement of 1793 and the Cornwallis Code, the rural crafts lost their demand in the rural areas of the then Bengal and the craftsmen were in disarray. At the same time, colonial trade was leading to the growth of port-centric urban metropolis like Calcutta, especially from the last decade of the eighteenth century. Needless to say, various kinds of compradors or native collaborators of colonial trade were the earliest wealth accumulating.....read more
 

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Gaganendranath Tagore's Satirical Drawings and Caricatures

In the theatre activities and stage performances of the Bichitra club, Gaganbabu had been fully active as an actor and stage designer. An interest in the 'comic' and 'comedy', as contents of a play and challenging assignments for an actor would have been immediate inspirational......read more

Ceative Impulse
Abanindranath as Teacher: Many Moods, Some Recollections

Abanindranath's role as a teacher overlapped in a number of spheres. In 1905 he was made Vice-principal of the Government Art School in Calcutta. He would work in his studio at the school and work on his paintings while his students would sit with him doing their own work....read more

Profile
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Atul Bose: A Short Evaluation

Atul Bose was an artist whose long artistic life was marked by various important moments of the history of a country that had long been colonized by a foreign power and was engaged in a constant struggle for independence. Thus it would be more appropriate to judge the artist against the socio-political contexts than to judge his formal achievements as an individual artist.....read more

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Defined by Absence: Hemen Majumdar's Women

It is an encounter with moments of privacy that we are drawn into, as we view a series of works by Hemen Majumdar. For the viewer, this journey also involves moving from the point of recognizing the familiar to the discovery of its altered countenance, because of the situating of the commonplace in a subtly (often subversively) rewritten reality. Women....read more

Report
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Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is exhibiting Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition based on various themes like Byzantium's Southern provinces, orthodox Christianity. Syriac Christianity, Coptic Christianity, Judaism, pilgrimage, iconoclasm, commerce, silks, dress, trade goods, palaces and princely life and Islamic religious works. The exhibition started on March 14 and will continue till July 8, 2012.....read more 

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The Dhaka Art Summit: Emergence of Experimental Art Forms

Poila Boisakh in Dhaka is a phenomenon of sheer joyful abandon. It was the penultimate day of the Dhaka Art Summit, and the roads looked like so many live installations, replete with colour, surging humanity and actual brushstrokes on the street. At Dhanmondi, where some of the major galleries are housed, we skirted past clusters of people armed with white and red paint, doing massive alpana motifs on the road.....read more