by Jon Lackman | 11 January 2008 | Asia, Contemporary, Modern
Partha Mitter, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex, has recently published The Triumph Of Modernism: India’s Artists And The Avant-garde, 1922-1947.
One interviewer notes that
He has earlier published Art And Nationalism In Colonial India, 1850-1922 (1994) and Much Maligned Monsters: A History Of European Reactions To Indian Art (1977). He shyly points out that Much Maligned Monsters raised the issue of ‘orientalism’, a year earlier than Edward Said did in a famous book by that name in 1978.
In another interview:
Do critics abroad pay any attention to contemporary Indian art?
Not a lot. European major critics hardly.Why is that? Is it not interesting, or are they not interested?
That’s not the point. The canon, the ideal modernism, is the focus of the centre; the peripheries always come a little later, they don’t have much to say – there is that thinking [among critics], and the market sustains it. I’m afraid this is why. My own work has been trying to erode that, challenge that, try and change it.
