Contemporary Art

   THE rapid changes and developments in polity, economy and society, and in science and technology, which have characterized contemporary history, have their parallel in arts. No other period in human history has seen such a “profusion of discoveries and provocative ideas” in art as the period since about the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The ceaseless experiments with new styles, forms and expressions have created an art which stands apart from all previous arts. In the process, all the past standards have been discarded. However, all art, of every period, expresses the spirit, hopes and values of its time. The various ‘modem’ art movements first arose in Europe, which had been transformed by capitalism and the Industrial Revolution and was undergoing further rapid changes. Subsequently, it influenced the development of art in North America. In other parts of the world, particularly those under direct or indirect colonial domination, developments in art reflected the specific situation in each society. In many countries, art gave expression to their national awakening and growing sense of national identity. The traditional forms were revived, revitalized, and given a new content. The artists in these countries also searched for new modes of expression and in this they drew on various sources, including the Western ‘modern’ art movements. The new art in these countries also became radically different from the art of the past.

MODERN EUROPEAN ART

  One invariable and recognizable future of modern art in Europe is its total rejection of the art practices and artistic values of the preceding periods. It was different even when it borrowed from the African art traditions of the past as did the Cubists; it was different even when post Impressionists like Paul Gauguin borrowed horn ancient Egyptian or old Polynesian art traditions.
   There are reasons why modern art movements started in Europe. By the end of the nineteenth century, fast industrialization had taken place in Europe. Industrialization and a glowing number of vast urban centers profoundly affected the European artists and poets-the most sensitive section of the European societies. Electricity, telegraphy, photography, newspapers and, later, radio and cinema, and fast modes of transportation like railways, motor-cars and aeroplanes deeply affected the life of the people. Rapid advances in technology particularly before and during the First World War, and the enormous number of dead, injured and homeless people caused by the war, completely changed the European society, its beliefs, its sensibilities, and, therefore, its artistic expressions. For centuries, the artists there were an exploited lot, lost in anonymity and dependent for their livelihood on kings and feudal lords, popes, and priests. From about the Renaissance period artists could display their individuality and flaunt their names. Modem art took the artists on a fresh wave of independence. It liberated the artists from classicism, which valued the restraint of classical Greek art practices and themes, and all the subsequent styles. The very word, ‘individuality’, meant artists’ individual perceptions, visions and reactions to reality and society. This is the basic unifying factor of all modern art movements.
   The liberation of artists from the thralldom was signified by the celebrated ‘Salon des Refuses’-the exhibition of rejected paintings-held in 1863. What had happened was that the official French Academic had rejected a large number of paintings as unfit for the regular exhibition and as “an affront against decency and taste”. There was an outcry against the rigid academic conventions and practices. However the Academic arranged separate exhibition of the rejected paintings. Among them were the paintings of some of the founders of the impressionist movement-Cezanne, Pissarro, Monet, and the painter Whistler.

Impressionism

  The modernist movement may be said to have started with impressionism. Its birth has been pinpointed as the year 1872, when Claude Monet, a Parisian painter, exhibited a painting, entitled ‘Impression Sunrise’. It was painted with oil colours squeezed straight out of the tubes and directly applied on the canvas without any preliminary drawings, or mixing them on the palette. To traditional painters it looked ‘unfinished’. It showed the effect of light at dawn. It was different from the paintings seen till then. It is said that a bewildered journalist, Louis Leroy, contemptuously referred to it as an ‘Impressionist painting. Thus a new term was coined for a new movement in painting. Two years later, the first Impressionist exhibition was held. Monet and his friends, Auguste Renoir, Alred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Eugene Boudin, and Berthe Morisot one of the two women painters in the movement and others exhibited their painting. It was a loose association of friends. They did not issue any manifesto as the painters of the twentieth century did. Subsequently, there were eight other Impressionist exhibitions right up to 1886.
   All these painters had one thing in common-love of Nature and their researches in the effect of light on different objects. Their paintings mostly were of landscapes and seascapes. Most of them took their easels out of their homes and painted in the open air. They were-deft with their brushes in catching continuously shifting light on objects. They intuitively understood the physics of colour. They dispensed with the traditional outlines of objects. All this was something new and differed radically from the prevailing style of paintings mostly based on historical and mythological themes, portraits, clearly defined townscapes with buildings in proper perspective. The Impressionists’ technique of painting and their researches in the changing nature of light were foreshadowed in the works of English painters, Turner and Constable, of the preceding period. What impressionism achieved was a new way of looking at the world around where light and colours become the main ‘subject matter’ of painting. The new perception was different from that of the preceding was different from that of the preceding centuries, because it stressed the continuously changing nature of reality. Impressionism led to Neo-Impressionism in which the experiments with colour and light became yet another fixed consideration. There was no liveliness and no new thinking. Post-Impressions was Georges Seurat, the ‘Pointillist’. With dots of colour, he built mosaics of forms on canvas.
   Cezanne himself drifted towards Post-Impressionism. His later landscapes and still-life studies of flowers and vases began to acquire solidity. The forms began to “discover squares, circles and cones in nature”, the elementary forms of all objects in nature. (Much later Cubists derived inspiration from this observation of Cezanne.) The modern painters’ perception shifted from light and colour to solid volumes and their geometrical arrangements within frames.

Post-Impressionism

  ‘Post-Impressionism’ is generally used to describe the works of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, both of whom were friends and had lived colourful lives and left the impressions of their emotionally turbulent lives on their richly colourful paintings.
   Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848, but had spent his childhood in Peru. In his twenties he became a stock-broker. Starting as a Sunday painter, he got interested in the early Impressionists and sometimes exhibited with them. He began to hate the smug middle-class life and its values. He became a friend of van Gogh. Later, he went away to Tahiti, where among the Polynesians he produced his most impressive paintings with wide flat areas of glowing colours, showing exotic women in unspoilt nature. His emotional involvement with his subjects, his passions, his extraordinary vitality, and his contempt for “decadent” Europe endowed his paintings with rare pictorial values.
   Vincent van Gogh’s life was in utter contrast to that of Gauguin’s. From his early life van Gogh, son of a pastor, was a restless person drifting from place to place and job to job. He had a childlike simple mind. He was very attached to his brother. Theo, who was working with an art dealer, to whom he wrote long letters regularly. Through his brother, he got acquainted with the works of Impressionists, several of whom he met and made friends with. He worked as a preacher among Belgian miners. Van Gogh took to painting late in life. There was variety in his paintings-landscapes, interiors, flowers, portraits etc. But all of them had bright colours with powerful brush-strokes and heavy layers of paint. He infused into the paintings his emotions, especially when he had occasional attacks of what was then considered epilepsy. His life had a tragic end-he shot himself. He never sold a single painting in his lifetime. And now art collectors are buying up his work for millions of dollars.
   Henri Rousseau, more well known as the Douanier (customs official) Rousseau, is yet another important painter of the period. He started life as a regimental bandsman and he had fought in the Franco-Prussian War. He had an instinctive feel for colours, and his compositions are 'mystifying.
   Henri Marie Raymond dc Toulouse-Lautrec was well known for his posters for dance halls. Tragedy struck him in his childhood when both his legs were broken, resulting in his stunted growth. With inner dynamism, he overcame the circumstances and became a celebrated painter of life in dancing halls, cafes and Parisian night life. His style was an offshoot of Post-Impressionism, but in muted colours. Later in life, he took to heavy drinking and died in his thirties. An interesting aspect of the Impressionists and their successors must be noted here. The Japanese woodblock prints of eighteenth-nineteenth centuries had a great impact on many of them, especially on Monet, Gauguin, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. They were avid collectors of the prints of the Japanese artists Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utamaro, and their contemporaries.
   Hollywood popularized the lives of Gauguin, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec in feature films-The Moon and Six Pence, based on the novel of Somerset Maugham, Lust for Life, based on the best-selling novel of Irving Stone, and Moulin Rouge on Toulouse-Lautrec, also based on a novel.

Rodin

  In the history of modern art, Auguste Rodin stands out as a unique sculptor, who expressed the spirit of the times he lived through. He was almost a Renaissance artist, who triumphed over circumstances. Starting his life as a mason and a decorator, he was very much influenced by Michelangelo, whose works he studied in museums. Deeply affected by the monumental Renaissance sculpture, he was an experimentalist and a modernist. Rich in ideas and concepts, he had the talent to do excellent models from which he got superb sculptures. His celebrated sculptures ‘Homage to Honore de Balzac’, ‘The Kiss’, ‘The Thinker’, and ‘The Burghers of Calais’, are known throughout the world.

Expressionism

  Expressionism, for which Gauguin and van Gogh had prepared the way, ultimately became a strong reaction against Impressionism and Naturalism of the earlier centuries. The Expressionist movement was initially based in Germany and Scandinavia and gathered momentum before, during and after the First World War. For the sake of expressing emotional turmoil, the outlines of objects and figures got distorted and the colours were imbued with emotions. Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter, conveyed the psychic disorder within him through his paintings and lithographs. Honor, pain and anguish could be read in them.
   Other painters of this movement were members of two groups-The Bridge and The Blue Rider groups (Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter). Among them were Max Beckman, James Ensor, Edvard Munch, Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka, Georges Rouault and Chaim Soutine.
   Max Beckman, a German expressionist, painted the horrors of war and tyranny, and his works foreshadowed the fascist terror. Ensor, a Belgian, did paintings associated with death and decay. Edvard Munch was a powerful artist in the movement. Nolde, a German expressionist, borrowed expressive elements from primitive art to express the disquiet of his times. Kokoschka, an Austrian, used vivid colours for his paintings of high emotional content. Rouault, famous for his stained-glass windows for churches and etchings, concentrated on Biblical themes and later turned to social themes against vice and cruelty. Soutine, a Russian, did a whole series on slaughter houses.
   In a way, the Expressionists reflected a long period, from the last decade of the nineteenth century, through the First World War, and the rise of fascism in Europe till the Second World War. They were representative of a period of social and psychological disquiet, despair, wax, and terrors of tyranny.
   Henri Matisse was also an Expressionist, who belonged to the Fauves - (The Wild Beasts), so called by the press, because they totally rejected the conventions of academic naturalism, and painted distorted and flat Figures in bright contrasting colours without any perspective drawing. The Fauves simplified forms to their elementary components. Matisse was very much influenced by the arts of Asia and Africa. He was also an illustrator of books and decorator of churches.
   The greatest of all the Expressionism was a simple, modest woman of ‘gigantic stature’ Kathe Kollwitz. She and her doctor husband chose to live in a working class area. Her drawings, woodcuts, etchings, and lithographs were all devoted to the poor, the downtrodden and the victims of war.

Cubism

  Cubism is one of the most important art movements of the early twentieth century that has had an impact on several subsequent movements. The starting-point was with Cezanne, who was not satisfied with surface appearance of objects that the Impressionists painted to catch the fleeting light on objects. He had studied the elementary structures of objects, their depths and varying planes. It was left to Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris to explore the possibilities of depicting the three-dimensional nature of objects viewed from different angles, simultaneously on a two-dimensional canvas.
   Picasso (born in 1881), a Spaniard and a son of an art teacher, was a prodigy. He had migrated to Paris early in life. In this ‘Art Capital of the World’, he became a ‘Creator par excellence’ and the most celebrated painter of this century. Intellectually brilliant and professionally adept in all mediums and techniques, he contributed much to the modern art movement. He died in 1973, leaving a rich legacy of his work, including the famous ‘Guernica’, the name of a town in Spain. This was a large-size painting on the atrocities committed by the Nazis and the fascists against the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. They had bombed Guernica into heaps of rubble.
   Georges Braque was a product of the celebrated School of Paris (Ecole des Beaux-Arts). He and Picasso became great friends but later in life they went in their own ways. Later, yet another Spaniard, Juan Gris joined them.
   Picasso‘s inspiration came from several sources-Gothic sculpture in Spain, paintings of Velasquez, Goya, etc., and the so-far unknown aesthetics of African sculpture. Picasso made h is own amalgam of various achievements and created the historic painting, ‘The Women of Avignon’. In this painting, he painted nude women; It was one of the earliest Cubist views of human figures. This launched the Cubist movement. The Inter-War Period sources—Gothic sculpture in Spain, paintings of Velasquez, Goya, etc., and the so-far unkown aesthetics of African sculpture. Picasso made his own amalgam of various achievements and created the historic painting, ‘The Women of Avignon’. In this painting, he painted nude women. It was one of the earliest Cubist views of human figures. This launched the Cubist movement.

The Inter-War Period

  The period between the First and Second World Wars was one of artistic ferment in Europe. Artists, sensitive in reacting to the violence and cruelties of the First World War, gave vent to their anger and contempt for the ruling classes of European powers through the means available to them-paintings and graphics. Within about a quarter century were born many an movements and styles. Some of them are Automatism, Constructivism, Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Suprematism.
   European artists formed small groups and discussed art matters. Sometimes they issued manifestoes. Often they exhibited together. Their main purpose was to shock the bourgeoisie and the elite. Most of them barely managed to make a living out of their art works, but they had self-esteem and arrogance as well as contempt for the an patrons, be they individuals or institutions.
   The painters in Paris and elsewhere were all preoccupied with experiments in styles and techniques, in the use of various materials, and in portraying not only the exterior surfaces but also the interior world of the mind---the Unconscious and the dreams. The works of Sigmund Freud, particularly his analysis of dreams, profoundly influenced a large section of artists.

Dadaism

  Dadaism was, perhaps, the most shocking ‘anti-art’ movement. It was started in 1915, in a restaurant in Zurich, Switzerland, by a group of disillusioned and disgruntled painters and poets.
   The word ‘Dada’ meant perhaps hobby-horse, or many other things in various languages. But this word was utterly meaningless to name a modernist movement. Tristan Tzara, the founder of the movement chose it to pinpoint the pointlessness of any art movement in the context of the First World War Europe. He rejected and ridiculed all art theories and objects that preceded his times. It was provocative and shocking. It found adherents in many cities and it were the precursor of the Surrealist movement. Tzara, an aggressive propagandist of Dada movement, issued manifestoes in the Dada journal. It was such a powerful movement that nearly half a century later Op artists claimed to be its descendants.

Abstract Art

  The Abstract art of the 1920s was anticipated by no less a person than Plato centuries ago. The philosopher had pointed out that beauty does not he only in the shapes of living forms. Beauty also lies in the “straight lines and curves and the surfaces or solid forms produced by lathes and rulers and squares”. These words did not exactly inspire the artists of Abstract art and Op art but they did justify them. Abstract art is based on the belief that artistic values are inherent in all types of forms and colours, not necessarily recognizable objects. European artists, too numerous to be mentioned, at some stage or the other created abstract art. Painters like Kandinsky, Arp, Miro, Leger, Klee, and sculptors like Brancusi, Pevsner, and Gabo created remarkable pioneering works of art, which have not lost their inherent ‘beauty’ of abstract forms even now.

Surrealism

  Andre Breton, the French poet and theoretician of this post-First World War movement, wanted artists to be free from “the exercise of reason, and every aesthetic and moral preoccupation”. Sigmund Freud, with his psycho analysis, was a great source of inspiration. The dream world and sub-conscious thoughts and desires were given importance by the Surrealist artists, poets and film-makers.
   One type of Surrealist art was created with ‘Found Objects’ in which the artists made art objects, for instance, out of a bicycle wheel or a bird cage. For that matter, anything served the purpose of Surrealists. The use of such objects in unexpected contexts achieved ‘shocking effects’. The second group took ordinary objects, distorted them, and made them into fantastic collages or assemblages. For instance, Salvador Dali, yet another Spaniard painted ‘melting watches’ in his ‘Perseverance of Memory’. Georgio de Chirico painted cityscapes with uninhabited buildings to suggest loneliness and memories, and many inexplicable things in man’s mind.
   Salvador Dali made a fortune out of his paintings and became a legend in his lifetime. Hans Richter and Louis Bunuel made sensational films. Max Ernst, Joan Miro and Hans Arp were leading Surrealist artists.
   Soviet Russia, after the Bolshevik Revaluation, made ‘Socialist Realism’ as the only officially approved art. This meant that the toiling Workers and peasants were made the fittest subjects for art. Royalty, the rich, and the elite had to be painted derisively. Some pioneering modernist artists like Malevich, Rodchenko, Pevsner and his brother Naum Gabe wanted to express the aspirations of a highly industrialized society, in view of the fast political changes in the prerevolutionary Russia. They started short-lived movements like Constructivism and Suprematism, which were not accepted by the new credo of Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union after the Revolution.
   Because of the new ‘ideology’ of art, Russian modernists like Kandinsky and others left their country. Kandinsky became a father-figure among the early European Expressionists. Soviet Russia’s ‘Socialist Realism’ profoundly influenced the renowned painters of Mexico like Diego Rivera, his friend Jose Orozco, and Alfredo sequieros, who had their grounding in Paris. With government patronage, the three of them painted the walls of public buildings. They did large murals and frescoes in terms of hundreds of square yards. They portrayed ancient history of the Mayas and the Aztecs, the conquest of their land by the Spaniards, the oppression and cruelties of colonialism, and the struggle of their people’s liberation.

Important English Artists

  In this survey of art movements which dominated the art of the twentieth century, some important artists who did not belong to any school or movement should not be forgotten.
   Among the English artists, mention must be made of Augustus John, a distinguished portraitist, who was influenced by the Post-Impressionists though he belonged to the Grand Tradition of the earlier period; Graham Sutherland, an Expressionist portraitist with individual style of expression and technique; and Francis Bacon, who in his paintings achieved a horror effect by showing human figures in the process of painful disintegration. David Hockney, an innovative painter with strong elements of social satire and shockingly naive figuration was an important artist of his period. Sir Jacob Epstein was an outstanding sculptor whose monumental work always created controversy. Ben Nicholson, the sculptor and painter, veered towards abstract art and created elegant abstractions. Barbara Hepworth, a woman sculptor of distinction, created memorable forms in high tension. And finally, Henry Moore, who through his ‘family’ groups, created hollowed-out figures, reclining women, mostly done on a monumental scale. He became the Rodin of this century.

ART IN THE USA

  The United States of America is, perhaps, the youngest of Western nations as far as modem art is/concerned. It took a long time for modern art movements of Europe to reach New York and other cities.
   In this section, tribute must be paid to the pioneers of modern art in the late nineteenth century. One was James Abbot McNeill Whistler who, after a study of art in Paris, settled down in London. And, the other is John Singer Sargent, who also went to Paris, and finally settled down in London. They breathed the air of Paris-the freedom of artists which was ‘greater than that in their own country. They had done fine paintings, which were imbued with the essence of Impressionists.
   Audobon was a lover of birds and he painted them meticulosuly, leaving a rich heritage of scientific observation and faithful naturalism behind him. Thomas Eakins, George Bingham, and Winslow Homer were all recorders of American history and the life of the people. The twentieth century America first experienced the European modern art at the Armory Show of modem masters in 1913. That shook the American artists from their hangover of the nineteenth century all-American art theories and practices.
   During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the American art scene was dominated by Alfred Stieglitz, the doyen of American photography. His ‘Gallery 291’ was the epicenter of the modern movement. He photographed modern paintings and introduced Matisse’s work to the USA.
   There were several competent painters like John Marin. Maurice Predergast, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, Thomas Benton and Stuart Davis, who were all ‘Painters of the American Scene’, to mention a few.
   Among them were also Edward Hopper, who portrayed the sadness and loneliness in a big city like New York, and Ben Shahn, the best of them all who had compassion for the deprived and the forlorn. Georgia O’Keefe was a woman painter, who had great tenderness for nature and humanity. Grant Wood was a remarkable artist, who shared his life with others in every manner possible and painted ‘primitivist’ paintings of his country and its people. Andrew Wyeth was a ‘fantastic’ realist, and he painted every blade of grass with fidelity. His paintings of open air landscapes and interiors are memorable for composition, handling of colour, and their emotional content.

Second World War-and After

  The Second World War was a watershed in the history of mankind. Death and destruction were inevitable in all wars, but the extent to which they were unleashed in the Second World War was unprecedented.
   A new height in destruction was reached on 6 August 1945, when the first Atom Bomb was dropped over Hiroshima. Instantaneously 7580,000 people were killed and thousands more, affected by radiation, suffered a painful death. Almost the whole city was razed to the ground. And this was repeated at Nagasaki two days later. The Second World War came to an end with the surrender of Japan.
   In Europe, the war had ended a few months earlier. When the Allies went through combing what was left of Nazi Germany, to their horror they discovered concentration camps with gas chambers and railway compartments in which Jews, communists and others considered undesirable by the Nazis were exterminated. Evidence of unimaginable cruelties by Nazi storm troopers was also found.
   This brief recapitulation of the brutali7atlon of man by man is necessary to understand the milieu of death, suffering and despair in which the artists lived and worked. And, the art they produced during the period after the Second World War carried the deep impressions of their loss of faith in human values and in the norms of civilization.
   In passing, it must also be mentioned that when “the lights of civilization” were being extinguished in Europe, painters, sculptors and writers began to disperse. Many migrated to the United States of America where the American artists interacted with them. After the fall of Paris during the war, New York became the new art capital of the world.

Abstract Expressionism

  American painters found in Abstract Art and Expressionism of the Parisian artists of the interwar period possibilities of a new visual language which would express the agonies and turmoil of the post-war period. This was Abstract Expressionism.
   It may be recalled here that artists like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and many others had come to a point where depiction of recognizable forms would not express the complex human situation and the world view of the post-war scientists. Excited by colours and shapes decided on the spur of the moment, supposedly by the Unconscious, they created Abstract Art. Leger and Mondrian used the foot rule and the set square, and created colourful geometric patterns. And colours were imbued with complex emotions.
   Now, the American painters went to the extreme. They dispensed with the easel, the palette and the brush to them canvas painting had become dated. They stretched the canvas on the floor and allowed the paints to drip on it. This ‘drip-and-dry’ technique was manipulated in such a manner that wild conglomerations of colours resulted. They were considered to be paintings done by the ‘action’ of the Unconscious.
   Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were two great Action Painters of America. Both were sensitive artists, who had gone through all the theories and practices of modern art. But traditional aesthetic values and disciplined skills seemed to have lost their meaning in the postwar art world. The Action Paintings, however were welcomed and hailed by contemporary artists. This was all the more surprising because three decades earlier in 1913, when the first comprehensive exhibition of European Art, the ‘Armory show’ in New York was held, the newspapers and the public considered the show absurd and “unadulterated cheek”. One newspaper said that the exhibition was “making insanity profitable”. The New York Times dismissed it as “pathological” and accused Cubists and Futurists as “cousins to the anarchists in politics”. Now, the tide had turned.
   What was once unacceptable to the American public and the elite now had become the fashion. Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning had launched American supremacy in art matters-movements, styles, and techniques. And, they spread world-wide and to absurd limits. A certain Niki de Saint-Phalle used to tie up plastic bags full of assorted paints over a stretch of canvas laid on the floor. Then the bags were shot with an air-gun. Whatever ‘accidental’ patterns were formed on the canvas were considered a work of art.

Pop Art

  Pop Art or Popular Art as a parallel to Pop Music is America’s significant contribution to the art of our times. Named as such by Lawrence Alloway, the Curator of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, it soon became a world-wide movement. Recognition and acceptance of Pop Art came when its greatest exponent, Robert Rauschenberg, was awarded the first prize at the Venice Biennale in the mid-sixties.
   The Pop artists have been using the symbols and images popularized by the mass media, like the American flag, Life magazine covers, photographs of actresses like Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, familiar consumer goods like Campbell’s soup-cans and canons of Brillo, letters of the alphabet, road signs, stuffed birds, hamburgers-all these everyday banalities became the subject-matter of pop artists.
   Roy Lichtenstein, a champion of Pop An has described it in a very picturesque way - “Pop Art is anti-experimental, anti-contemplative, anti-nuance, anti-getting-away from the rectangle, anti-movement-and-light, anti-paint-quality, anti-Zen and anti-all those brilliant ideas of the preceding movements.” Lichtenstein’s specialty has been in blowing up comic strips hundredfold over, then painting over them and presenting them in beautiful frames. Familiar comic strips and characters became the subject-matter of painting.
   Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns are said to be the founders of the movement. Rauschenberg specialized in what is known as ‘combines’. He used newspaper cuttings, rags, ropes, flattened cans, stuffed birds and attached them to his canvases in a casual manner, allowing accidents to play a vital part. Silk-screen images of the same photograph in different colours also are passed off as art.
   Jasper Johns became famous with his sculpture of a broken torchlight without batteries or bulb, mounted on two nails. Since then he has been using beer cans. Discarded day-to-day objects are given a new lease of life in his work and presented in a specific ‘art context’, as for instance, in a prestigious art gallery.
   Andy Warhol another big name in Pop Art, Specialized in silk-screen images of six feet high cans of Campbell’s soup cans, over-sized Coca-Cola battles, etc. He explained - “Why I am painting this way is that I want to be a machine and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.”

Op Art

  Op art came as a reaction to the American Pop Art, and as a European response to it. Known also as Retinal Art, it depends on purely visual impact. Op art was derived from Optical art-an art which depends on the impact of lines, stripes, dots, circles, triangles, squares, and other geometrical forms on the retina of the viewers. It also depends very much on arrangement of colours, and their mutual interaction. Op art's “eye-tick-ling, eye-smarting and eye-wrenching" masterpieces are based fundamentally on distortion of perspective, by which non-existent shadows and ripples materialize.
   Op art created the illusion of motion in a medium that is basically static. Non-existent ripples and waves can be noticed if one goes on staring at the static optical paintings. Scientifically determined and most often made on mass production basis, op art has been acclaimed to be as important and as the discovery of perspective in the fifteenth century and as the biggest thing since Cubism. It has been created with the draftsman’s ruler and compass and mechanical gadgets. It scorned the emotionalism of the abstract expressionism. It derided the preponderance of chance in Action paintings. Op art scoffed at the naivete and the vulgarity of the pop artists.
   Op artists insist that they are the direct descendants of Cezanne, Seurat and Mondrian, They said they derived their art from Cezanne’s idea of colour, from Seurat’s Pointillism, from Mondrian’s geometrical compositions, and so on.

Kinetic Art

  Kinetic Art extended the dimensions of paintings and sculptures. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘kinetic’ means ‘of, due to motion’. The sum and substance of Kinetic art is motion. The Kinetic artists subscribed to the view that if the art of today must reflect the spirit of the times, and then motion must be introduced into the static art of conventional paintings and sculptures. In the age of space travel, static paintings and sculptures must go, the Kinetic artists say. And they were not the first to say this. More than forty years ago, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Francis Picabia, Naum Gabo, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray debated over this problem and experimented with ready-mades - “irrational machine, rotary hemispheres” and other gadgets.
   The most famous among them all was the American sculptor, Alexander Calder, who with his ‘Mobiles’ revolutionized the art of sculpture. His metal sculptures, suspended in the air, moved and rotated. His was a revolutionary concept of sculpture hanging from the ceiling, moving with the wind, even making sounds. His ‘Mobiles’ had “a playful fantasy and a wonderfully resourceful inventiveness”. Calder used thin wires and light-weight, oddly-shaped, metal plates. The art of sculpture was given ‘movement’ in space.
   Frank Malina has made electro-paintings, which are adjudged to be the best kinetic paintings. The basic composition in Malina‘s paintings is painted in the usual manner on a transparent stator, fixed on a frame and hung on a wall. Behind the stator are several painted rotors, moved by electricity. Coloured shapes are thus thrown on the stator for the onlookers to see.
   Nicholas Schoffer, a French artist, has made Kinetic sculptures in which curved and angular metal pieces are arranged vertically and horizontally along with a coloured mobile disc and an electric light. Interesting images are thrown on a large opaque screen by this Kinetic sculpture.

Musical Paintings

  “Paintings that can be seen and heard” of Gunter Mass, a German, deserve mention. After his travels in Europe, Egypt and India, he invented the audio-visual paintings. In his work, music does not merely accompany the painting. Forms and colours are converted into sounds. The elemental geometrical forms in his paintings are converted into sounds through dispositive. Thus, a circle has one sound, a triangle, another and a rectangle, still different.

Neon Art

  Neon sculpture-cum-paintings too come within the purview of this survey. Two European artists, who were spellbound by the neon-light advertisements of the Times Square in New York, launched these garishly bright, animated sculpture-cum-paintings. Mortial Raysse, a French sculptor, who used to make his Sculptures out of radio parts and tooth brushes, took to neon-light images done imaginatively. They are not street signs, but an object, he insists For instance, his ‘Flower Pot’, neon sculpture-cum-painting, lights up slowly first the pot, then the stem and then the flowers.

SOME OBSERVATIONS

  Now, a rapid survey of the developments in art after the Second World War is required here. Most of the important modernist movements came as an aggressive rejection of the aesthetic values of the nineteenth century, concerned with “Anti-Art”. This Anti-An movement has been parallel to developments like “Anti-Novel”, “Anti-Literature”, and “Absurd Drama”.
   From the developments described earlier, it is clear that science and technology have been a major influence in the transformation of aesthetic ideas and art practices of our times. There is an increasing use of new, non-permanent materials, ranging from plastics and plexiglass to scrap and junk materials, in the contemporary art works.
   Even as much as the artist has been depersonalized, there has been dehumanization in am Human situation, specificity of time and space, have all vanished. Spellbound by colours and abstract forms, artists title their paintings and sculptures as ‘Untitled’. There seems to be nothing for the artist to communicate to the art lovers.

SOME HOPEFUL FEATURES

  Even while waiting on the threshold of the twenty-fast century, anticipating further developments, we may also look backwards in time and record some significant trends.
   With the extraordinary progress made in the mass media, both print and electronic, the artists today have made considerable progress, which the artists of the last century could not have dreamt of. Artists and their works are getting immense exposure through newspapers, radio, and television.
   In the early days of this century, artists depended only on exhibitions in the art galleries and that too for short periods of time. At the most only a few hundred people could attend the exhibitions. These days millions can see the art works and hear the artists being interviewed. Artists and their works enter our drawing rooms through art books and reproductions of paintings and replicas of sculptures. The video tape can reveal the collections of different museums and art galleries whole periods of art, and even fictionalized versions of artists’ lives. Documentary' films and feature films have brought artists and works of art closer to a vast video watching public.
   Ernst Fischer; the Austrian poet and philosopher of aesthetics, who was for some time a Minister of Education in his country, concluded his book, The Necessity of Art with the following paragraph, which sums up art history, and which will be applicable in the next century too -
   Man, who became man through work, who stepped out of the animal kingdom as transformer of the natural into the artificial, who became therefore the magician, man the creator of social reality, will always stay the great magician, will always be Prometheus bringing fin: form heaven to earth, will always be Orpheus enthralling nature with his music. Not until humanity itself dies will An die.

MODERN ART IN INDIA

  The modern art described in the preceding pages was specific to the Western world where it first arose. In other pans of the world also, art underwent many changes, and the art which grew there was very different from the traditional art practices. It was contemporary because it was distinguishable from the past art of these countries. However, the development of art in these countries did not follow the same lines as in the West. It grew under very different circumstances-circumstances which had been created by European colonization. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards as the Indian kings and princes went down one after another under the English colonial rule, the Indian art scene became more and more bleak and barren.
   The ancient and medieval Indian art traditions of painting, sculpture and architecture lay forgotten in caves, mined palaces, temples, mosques, and deserted towns. The artists and craftsmen lost their traditional royal patronage, because few Indian royal courts remained to pay for the art works. And there was no English patronage for Indian artists either; only in small pockets, for instance, in the Punjab hills and isolated princely courts in Rajasthan; a thinning number of artists went on working in the Mughal and Rajasthan traditions.
   India was changing under the foreign domination. Calcutta, Bombay and Madras emerged as important urban centers, and a new kind of urban culture began to grow with English education. Economic and political domination led to ‘cultural' domination by the alien rulers.
   Shortly after 1857, art schools were founded in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. Their teaching methods and syllabi were modeled after the British Royal Academy practices. Indian students started handling new art materials like oil colour on canvas, water colour on paper, and they became familiar with art practices like drawing and painting from the models in the ‘studios’. In the traditional Indian art theories, exact copying of the objects or living forms were never prescribed; instead pictorial equivalent of the essence of beings was valued. Similar were the art theories in China and Japan also.
   While the first few generations of Indian artists started mastering European art materials and techniques, some deeper changes took place in the thinking of the English-educated urban middle class in India. There was an increasing awareness of the evil nature of British rule.
   By the last decades of the nineteenth century, India slowly emerged as a ‘nation’, criticizing, resisting and struggling against the foreign domination. Nationalism inspired Indian scholars, poets and artists to discover the country‘s rich cultural heritage. The work done by European scholars like William Jones and Max Mueller in bringing to light India’s literary and philosophical heritage fed Indians national pride and inspired their search for national identity.
   The initial inspiration of the new kind of Indian art produced in this period was nationalist and patriotic-a search for the past artistic heritage and the desire to create ‘Indian art’ distinct from the kind of art they were taught at art schools.
   Some important archaeological discoveries also helped this search for Indian identity. The discovery of the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa pushed back the cultural history of India by about two thousand years.
   The discovery of the wall paintings in the cave temples at Ajanta and Ellora in the nineteenth century stimulated a new Indian art movement early this century. Young Indian artists like Nandalal Bose and others visited the cave temples and studied the wall paintings, discovering and appreciating Indian traditions in painting that could be traced back to the first century, B.C.
   About the new art movement early this century, it can be said that it received its primary stimulus from emerging nationalism, from its desire to create a truly national art as against the foreign art.
   At this juncture appeared a remarkable artist, Raja Ravi Verma of the princely family of Travancore. He had studied art in Madras and specialized in portraiture. He had won some prizes too. He had been conversant with Indian temple sculpture as well. He welded Royal Academy naturalism with Indian myths and legends. Ravi Verma painted anecdotes from the Indian epics and Sanskrit literature. He used his exceptional talent in creating lively images of India’s past.
   In the rise of the Bengal School led by Abanindranath Tagore (nephew of Rabindranath Tagore), E.B. Havell and Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy played a vital role. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Havell had joined the art school in Calcutta as the Principal. It was he who drew the attention of Abanindranath Tagore, who was on the staff of the school, to the rich heritage of classical Indian art and the Mughal miniatures of the medieval period. Abanindranath studied ancient Indian texts on art and wrote and talked about these to a growing group of students around him. He benefited from the writings of Coomaraswamy and from the long discussions he had with him.
   Coomaraswamy was from Sri Lanka, the son of an important Tamil political leader. Though trained as a geologist, Coomaraswamy had abandoned a successful career and took to the study of arts and crafts of what was then Ceylon. For several years he was in India and wrote several authoritative books on the history and development of Indian art.
   These people and their friends and admirers created what came to be known as the ‘Bengal School of Painting’. The themes of their paintings were mostly from Indian mythology, the epics (Puranas) and classical literature. Guided by the Indian canons of painting and tradition, they painted small-size paintings in water colours, mostly with a limited palette. Abanindranath was influenced by the Japanese technique of water colour wash paintings, which created delicate tones and mystifying areas of light and dark.
   The Bengal School had a great flowering of talent at Santiniketan, where Rabindranath Tagore had set up the Kala Bhavan. Three eminent artists dominated the scene-Nandalal Bose, Binode Behari Mukherjee, and Ramkinkar Baij.
   Nandalal Bose was a painter of distinction and a nationalist. He derived inspiration from folk art also. When he did large posters for decorating the pandal for the Haripura session of the Congress, he was inspired by the folk tradition. Binode Behari Mukerjee, another important painter, was deeply influenced by oriental art traditions. Ramkinkar Baij was a sculptor with immense drive and energy, rooted to the native Indian soil for sculptural forms.
   Out of the Bengal School, folk traditions of mainly Bengal and Orissa and the Kalighat paintings of the nineteenth century Calcutta emerged Jamini Roy, who painted images with minimum of lines and bright colour schemes on a plain base. Simple but powerful movement of lines and colours derived from the folk traditions gave his paintings an important place in the history of modem Indian art.
   During the first half of the century, the British dominated the art scene-the art schools, the art societies, art exhibitions. The exhibitions were often inaugurated by governors. They patronized the artists by commissioning portraits of British functionaries. They bought paintings of the Indian scene.
   During the pre-Independence period, two major artists emerged in this sub-continent, who had thoroughly understood modern European art, the ‘modern’ spirit and modes of expression. One was Amrita Sher-Gil and the other, George Keyt.
   Amrita Sher-Gil was the daughter of a Sikh father, a rich and cultivated aristocrat from Punjab, and a Hungarian artist mother. Amrita had received her art education in Paris and Budapest. She was a prodigy, and it was a tragedy she died in her early thirties. She started as an Impressionist and switched over to the Post-Impressionism of Gauguin. Her palette was rich in bright colours. She painted a few portraits but many more paintings of Punjabi peasants, mostly women. Amrita went to south India and did there a series of paintings. Her oil paintings in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi form an impressive collection, diverse in themes and rich in colour, the figures having a quaint, emaciated physiognomy like that of Gauguin’s women. But they are thoroughly Indian.
   Though not directly involved in Indian art movement, George Keyt inspired many artists. He was a Ceylonese of Dutch-Sinhalese extraction. A great scholar of ancient Indian classics and a fine painter, he was one of the founders of the ‘43 Movement’, a modern art movement in Sri Lanka. Keyt understood instinctively and intuitively all that was Indian. His colour schemes were powerful and his style was his own version of Cubism, with sweeping lines that enclosed diverse colours harmoniously.
   Rabindranath Tagore emerged as an artist in his late sixties. The circumstances under which he discovered his own visual language of expression were interesting. Whenever he wrote a page of poetry or prose, he used to make corrections and deletions by blackening the unnecessary or wrong words and paragraphs. He started joining them up, creating forms and designs. Through his innumerable works in water colours, crayons and mixed media, Rabindranath emerged as an important painter. His paintings are strongly individualistic with his own moods instilled into them. The Bengal School had no influence on him. It was utterly his own art.
   By the late thirties, the artists’ search for Indian identity as a movement became a spent force. New economic and political forces were changing the Indian society, and the world was sliding towards the Second World War. India’s struggle for freedom became more and more acute. For the new generation of painters the poetical images of the past and the soft water colour wash of the Bengal School did not reflect the contemporary reality. It was during the war, through books and prints, that Indian artist became aware of the modernist movement in Europe. The findings of the Impressionists, the Cubists and the Expressionists profoundly impressed the new generation of painters.
   In 1943, during the war, Calcutta painters formed a group, who interpreted the new visual languages and techniques of European modernists with Indian sensibilities and contemporary awareness of the human situation in India. The pioneering artists of this group were Paritosh Sen. Nirode Majumdar and Pradosh Das Gupta.
   Another significant development was the formation of the Progressive Artists Group in Bombay, in 1948, due to the vision and initiative of Francis Newton Souza. Expelled from the Sir J.J. School of Art for his nationalist fervour and leftist leanings, Souza was a rebel painter, who defied old norms and conventions. His paintings were done in Expressionist colours and style and were suffused with the contemporary human situation.
   Souza joined hands with K.H. Ara, who had started his life as a motor-car cleaner, and later drifted into modernist movement. His ‘primitivist’ paintings of flowers, women and landscapes had colour and vitality. S.A. Raza was the third, a self-taught water colourist, whose paintings of monsoon-drenched Bombay were impressive.
   The other three were S.K. Bakre, a sculptor, H.A. Gade, an art teacher turned painter, and M.F. Husain, who started as a sign board painter, and is now a famous artist The next development was the emergence of a large group of young painters from the school of art in the Baroda University during the tenure of W.S. Bendre as the principal. He encouraged talent and nurtured individuality. Each student of his went his own way but the stamp of modernity was unmistakably there. Some of them are Shanti Dave, G.R. Santosh, Jyoti Bhatt, Ghulam Sheikh, etc.
   The Madras School of Art under Debiprasad Roy Chowdhury and K.C.S. Panikker emerged as an important art centre in the post-Independence period. Both of them influenced a whole generation of artists.
   Some of the other artists who later became famous are K.G. Subramanyan, Tyeb Mehta, Satish Gujral, Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar, KS. Kukkarni, Akbar Padamsee, J. Swaminathan, A. Ramachandran, and Jehangir Sabavala.
   The modernist trends in contemporary Indian art have received recognition and patronage from art connoisseurs and critics, individual and institutional buyers and two governmental institutions-the National Gallery of Modern Art, which has the largest collection of contemporary modern art under one roof and the Lalit Kala Akademi. This Akademi is one of the three started by Jawaharlal Nehru to promote arts and letters, music and dance. Apart from the annual exhibitions, the Lalit Kala organizes the Triennale, once in three years, which has provided a forum for modern artists from the First, Second and Third Worlds. The Lalit Kala hrs brought out several monographs on contemporary artists and has been publishing “Lalit Kala Contemporary”. Besides fellowships, scholarships and travelling grants are given to artists. There are several private galleries in the metropolitan cities. The artists of today are better off than their predecessors at the turn of this century.