Nation, Region, Modernity

The Art of K. Venkatappa

Deeptha Achar, Pushpamala N. (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

200 Seiten

2025
Garland Publishing Inc (Verlag)
978-0-8153-6170-1 (ISBN)

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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 volume explores the Indian artist, K. Venkatappa’s life (1886–1965), 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 contextualises Venkatappa’s work in the milieu of Calcutta, princely Mysore and later Bangalore in the first half of the twentieth century, at a time when boundaries, horizons, and identities were in great flux. It complicates a unitary history of modern Indian art and, indeed, modernity in colonial India with its engagement with the question of region.

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. Through an in-depth reading of these diverse contexts, the essays in this book examine the artist’s legacy and his contemporary relevance, while showing how the trajectories of regional modernities can unsettle singular accounts of a nation’s art. 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.

Deeptha Achar is Professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat, India. She has co-edited Towards New Art History: Studies in Indian Art (2003), Discourse, Democracy and Difference: Perspectives on Community, Politics and Culture (2010), and Articulating Resistance: Art and Activism (2012) apart from academic articles and catalogue essays. Her research interests include visual culture studies and childhood studies. Pushpamala N. is an internationally recognised 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.

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

Erscheinungsdatum	23.01.2025
Reihe/Serie	Visual and Media Histories
Zusatzinfo	36 Halftones, color; 55 Halftones, black and white; 36 Illustrations, color; 55 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	Philadelphia
Sprache	englisch
Maße	189 x 246 mm
Gewicht	570 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien
ISBN-10	0-8153-6170-X / 081536170X
ISBN-13	978-0-8153-6170-1 / 9780815361701
Zustand	Neuware