In Harvard Magazine, a profile of Kerala-born, U.S.-based architect and painter George Oommen.
He creates his abstract landscapes mostly in acrylic and oil paints and, since 1994, has often used a drip technique in which he squirts water (or turpentine, for oil-based paint) at the top edge of the canvas and lets it trickle down, taking paint with it and creating a vertical line on the surface. “I use water to paint water,” he explains. Generally, he fills the frame with many parallel drips that, depending on the subject, can suggest raindrops on a window, wooden blinds, hanging vegetation, tree trunks, or the fabric of silk saris. More:
When terrorists stormed this city nearly two years ago, killing at least 163 people, they also dealt a blow to the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, an architectural landmark that has played a critical role in nurturing and housing Indian art.
During a three-day siege the hotel, a Moorish-Florentine palace that opened in 1903, was ravaged by fires, gunshots and grenade explosions. The roof collapsed, and intricate woodwork was burned away. Paintings by modern Indian masters like Vasudeo S. Gaitonde and Jehangir Sabavala were covered in soot and fungus, which thrived in the humid air after air-conditioners gave out, and sprinklers and fire trucks doused the building with water.
Over the last 21 months a team that has at times swelled to more than 2,000 has gutted and renovated the hotel. A smaller group of five specialists spent 10 months restoring nearly 300 pieces of art, working in the Crystal Ballroom, where guests and staff sought refuge during the attack. More:
The art installation of classical hand gestures. Image: Incubis Consultants
Tripti Lahiri on the series of giant hands jutting from a wall along the main concourse of Delhi’s new airport terminal T3. In the Wall Street Journal:
Indian industrial design firm Incubis Consultants, and U.S.-based branding company Landor Associates shaped the artistic choices for the terminal and settled upon the idea of the hands, which were made and installed by Jaipur-based designer Ayush Kasliwal. Here are edited excerpts from a conversation with Incubis head Amit Gulati.:
IRT: How did you come up with the design?
Gulati: It was a bit of a team effort. There was a lot of brainstorming done on it. This artwork is part of a larger process of creating design installations and graphics within the terminal. It’s the largest, so it’s hogged all the limelight.
GMR has built a pretty world-class infrastructure over here. All airports have very similar design vocabulary. They are actually machines. They tend to evolve in a similar glass and metallic fashion. Very early on they were keen to give the terminal an Indian context and infuse it with Indian values. The basic positioning we created for the terminal was “Expressive India.” All classical Indian dance forms use mudras [hand gestures]. It’s a common vocabulary. More:
In The Indian Express, a review of The Art Of Bollywood by Rajesh Devraj and Edo Bouman (Taschen):
Old-timers in the movie business get nostalgic at the drop of a billboard. Om Prakash Katyal a.k.a. Chachaji, who’s been around in showbiz for more than five decades, talks wistfully of a time when the size of posters and hoardings would be a matter of fierce competition: Bhala unka poster mere poster se bada kaise? At a time when movies were getting bigger with every release, size mattered.
The Art Of Bollywood by Rajesh Devraj and Edo Bouman is a magnificent ode to an extended period of Hindi cinema that doesn’t exist anymore. The book starts from the early 20th century and traces the tumultous growth of the film industry. Cinema filled Bombay and made it synonymous with the movies, harkening to a future when it would be called Bollywood. And it filled our imagination: nothing unites Indians, anywhere on the globe, quite like its movies.
What Devraj, filmmaker and screenwriter (also formerly of Channel V where he created Quick Gun Murugan), has done along with Bouman, an Amsterdam-based collector of Indian film posters, is create a uniquely wrought, painstakingly researched, well written history of Hindi cinema, from its beginnings to the mid-1990s. Back in the day, shows of movies would be accompanied by what the trade called “booklets”. These would be prized possessions because they would have photographs from the movies and some would even have the lyrics of all the songs. Cinema halls would display large hoardings with imaginative cutouts of the stars. Posters would bring the movie out of darkened halls. They would be plastered on the walls, on the sides of buses, everywhere. They were pop art. They were kitsch. They were street shows. More:
Saurashtra, a massive 79x79in acrylic on canvas by Syed Haidar Raza, one of India’s veteran masters, was bought for a hammer price of £2.1m – £2.4m ($3.5m) including buyer’s premium at a Christie's auction in London.
We do, however, know one remarkable fact: historically, before Bombay became the epicentre of Hindi cinema in India, it had already established itself as the beating heart of the subcontinent’s commercial Hindustani theatre. Remarkably, this Deccan port, a thousand miles from heartland of Hindi-speaking India, remained the hub of both commercial Hindustani drama and commercial Hindi cinema for a hundred-and-fifty years. It’s not a coincidence that India’s most successful repertory theatre and its most profitable film industry were both incubated in Bombay and that the medium for both was Hindustani.
Bombay’s history brought this about in two ways. As one of the principal sites of colonial rule in India, the city hosted English stage plays in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries which helped create a hybrid commercial theatre that drew on both European and Indian theatrical traditions. But this wasn’t unique to Bombay; the same could be said of Calcutta. What was peculiar to Bombay was the presence of a merchant elite from elsewhere that was willing to experiment with commercial drama in any language that would fetch a return. Parsi theatre happened in Gujarati, Marathi, Urdu and even English, but given the currency of forms of Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani in northern and even some southern cities, it was a cheerful and robust Hindustani that found it the largest audience.
And while the Parsi theatre as a mobile repertory form wasn’t confined to Bombay, it is in Bombay that many of the major companies were centred. It was Bombay that provided much of the entrepreneurship, and many of the patrons, financiers, managers and performers who helped the Parsi theatre create the largest ticket-buying audience in Indian stage history. More
Gayatri Rangachari Shah in the International Herald Tribune:
New Delhi: For a man who grew up knowing nothing about art, Rajiv Savara has amassed quite a collection. In a decade, Mr. Savara, a first-generation entrepreneur, and his wife, Roohi, have built a museum-worthy selection of Indian works spanning the late-19th to mid-20th centuries.
Housed in a gated residence in New Delhi that overlooks the Idgah, a 600-year-old monument, the Roohi and Rajiv Savara Family Collection, as they call it, can be distinguished by its focus on specific artists who the Savaras say they believe will, “50 years hence, define pre-Modern and Modern Indian art.” By this they refer to the periods spanning pre-independent India from 1890 to 1947 and after independence, from 1947 to 1985.
While many newly minted millionaires in India seek art to hang as status symbols in their homes, the Savaras, who made their money in oil and gas, have “chosen to focus on and create a narrative of Indian Modernism, especially leaning toward artists working in Calcutta and Mumbai,” said Dr. Darielle Mason, a curator of Indian and Himalayan art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in an e-mail message. “Because of the quality of each work, the Savara collection is coming to tell the story of Indian Modernism on a level not yet presented, and one that will be able to communicate to a global audience the vitality and originality of this art.” More:
Salman Rushdie explores the myth and magic of the illustrated manuscript The Adventures of Hamza. In Lapham’s Quarterly:
India, in the mid-sixteenth century. Just thirty-one years have passed since a fierce Timurid warlord, Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, a descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and possessor of a surprising literary gift, was unhoused from his native land, and swept down to establish, by force of arms, a new kingdom in Delhi. Just sixteen years have passed since that warlord’s less puissant son Humayun was deposed and fled into ignominious Persian exile, abandoning his infant son to be raised by an Afghan uncle. Just one year has elapsed since the fugitive’s victorious return and the reestablishment of his dynasty, and just one month since the returned monarch fell down a flight of steps and died in a moment of bathetic slapstick, leaving his thirteen-year-old son, the son who barely knew him, to ascend his father’s precarious throne. What follows this period of near-perpetual upheaval, almost impossibly, is a time of political stability, economic prosperity, religious tolerance, cultural openness, the rule of law, and an artistic renaissance: the half-century-long reign of one of the most remarkable rulers the world has ever known, Jalal al-Din Muhammad, known as “Akbar,” the Grand Mughal, called jahanpanah, the wonder of the world. More:
When bad art and bad politics meet. From Foreign Policy:
Woman of the people: Kumari Mayawati, chief minister of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, is best known as an advocate for the rights of Dalits, the historically marginalized caste also known as the “untouchables.” But Mayawati’s populist image took a hit last year when India’s Supreme Court rebuked her for spending $425 million in public funds to build statues of herself and other famous Dalits. Mayawati remains popular among Dalits, but the scandal over this lavish public expenditure in one of India’s poorest states continues to dog her.
Threatened Buddhist art at a 900-year-old monastery high in the Indian Himalayas sheds light on a fabled civilization. Jeremy Kahn in The Smithsonian:
The wood-framed door is tiny, as if intended for a Hobbit, and after I duck through it into the gloomy interior—dank and perfumed with the saccharine scent of burnt butter oil and incense—my eyes take a while to adjust. It takes my mind even longer to register the scene before me.
Mesmerizing colored patterns scroll across the wood beams overhead; the temple’s walls are covered with hundreds of small seated Buddhas, finely painted in ocher, black, green, azurite and gold. At the far end of the room, towering more than 17 feet high, stands an unblinking figure, naked to the waist, with four arms and a gilded head topped with a spiked crown. It’s a painted statue of the Bodhisattva Maitreya, a messianic being of Tibetan Buddhism come to bring enlightenment to the world. Two hulking statues, one embodying compassion and the other wisdom, stand in niches on side walls, attended by garishly colored sculptures depicting flying goddesses and minor deities. Each massive figure wears a dhoti, a kind of sarong, embellished with minutely rendered scenes from the life of Buddha.
These extraordinary figures have graced this small monastery in Alchi, a hamlet high in the Indian Himalayas along the border with Tibet, for about 900 years. They are among the best-preserved examples anywhere of Buddhist art from this period, and for three decades—since the Indian government first allowed foreign visitors to the region—scholars have been trying to unlock their secrets. Who created them? Why don’t they conform to orthodox Tibetan Buddhist conventions? Might they hold the key to rediscovering a lost civilization that once thrived, more than a hundred miles to the west, along the Silk Road? More:
“Baba Uncle”, as residents of this posh apartment complex near Dubai Creek call M F Husain, is getting ready for a lunch date with a mystery lady at his favourite haunt, the popular Noodle House in Emirates Towers.
A tough choice confronts the artist — should he take the Bentley, or the Bugatti? Husain opts for the stately Bentley, even though the sleek, low, uber-sexy Bugatti is the one that grabs eyeballs (it is one of only five in the Middle East and bears his initials on the headrest).
Dressed in traditional Emirati gear, the painter is wearing socks, but no shoes. Mustafa, his handsome third son, explains that this is in deference to local sensibilities with regard to bare feet. Even the mighty Maqbool (used to going shoeless for decades) has had to compromise and make a few concessions. Husain laughs his sardonic laugh. “After watching 3 Idiots, I am proud to call myself an idiot. I am a fool. It is good to be a fool.”
The previous night, Dubai’s ruler and his graceful wife singled out Husain at a gathering of over 500 celebrities from across the world who were there to attend Sheikh Mohammed’s spectacular World Cup Race (and a coming-out party of sorts). “How are you, sir?” the Sheikh asked the newly-minted Qatari citizen. Husain’s benign smile said it all — Dubai’s loss is now Qatar’s trophy. More:
One of Hanan Tabbara’s most provocative sketches is a charcoal and pastel drawing of blood pouring out of a woman’s vagina. She made it after a close friend was raped, and later uploaded it as her Facebook profile picture. For two years now, the 20-year-old, political science student from Brooklyn has been drawing nudes. “I’m aware that it is prohibited but it doesn’t bother me,” Tabbara says.
While the Koran does not specifically ban nude art, the almost universal opinion of religious leaders is that Islam forbids it. However, a handful of Muslim artists have been daring to depict nudity. “This leads to moral consequences that are against Islam,” says Imam Shamsi Ali, the leader of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. “There is no justification to say it is allowed in the name of art.”
The prohibition principally stems from the taboo against entertaining sexual thoughts that a naked figure might provoke. In this light, Imam Ali also explains that it is “not desirable” for Muslims to view nude paintings, even if they are considered masterpieces. “Islam sees the harms of such exposure outweighing its benefits,” he says. “An artist can have an important message in his work without drawing nudes.” More:
A section of the page from The Hindu website. The caption reads: "The black-and-white line drawing eminent artist M.F. Husain shared with The Hindu. Though this exemplar of secular art did not apply for it, he was conferred citizenship by Qatar."
N. Ram in The Hindu:
M.F. Husain, India’s greatest and most celebrated artist, has been conferred Qatar nationality – something that is very rarely given. The artist gave me this news from Dubai early Wednesday morning by reading out the few lines he had written on a black-and-white line drawing that he released to The Hindu.
“Honoured by Qatar nationality” but deeply saddened by his enforced exile and the need now to give up the citizenship of the land of his birth, which he has lovingly and secularly celebrated in his art covering a period of over seven decades. India does not allow dual citizenship, even though it has instituted the category of the ‘Overseas Indian Citizen.’ Mr. Husain will no doubt seek to acquire OIC status after completing the due procedures.
It is important to note that Mr. Husain did not apply for Qatar nationality and that it was conferred upon him at the instance of the modernising emirate’s ruling family. More:
Also in The Hindu: Art under fire by Chitra Padmanabhan
In The Indian Express, Georgina Maddox reviews “Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters and Writings.”
Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters and Writings (Two Volumes); Edited by Vivan Sundaram (Tulika Books, Rs 5,750)
From the black-and-white Marg magazine that he brought out in 1972 to two superbly packaged mega volumes in 2010 — artist Vivan Sundaram has single-mindedly orchestrated the making of the Amrita Sher-Gil myth. Connoisseurs will argue that an artist as feisty and outspoken as Sher-Gil does not deserve less. While many publications on the half-Indian, half-Hungarian artist have been greeted with plaudits, one wonders if the bottomless interiors of the Sher-Gil archive have been finally plumbed with this exhaustive volume that reproduces her diary entries, letters, photographs, sketches and paintings.
This latest offering from Sundaram — who is also Sher-Gil’s nephew — surpasses anything that may have been printed till date on her. Priced at Rs 5,750, the collector’s item is glossy but lacks the frivolity of earlier coffee-table books on Sher-Gil. It also moves ahead of heavy-handed academic writing that some of the earlier books have displayed. The novelty of this avatar lies in its format: it spans her short life of 28 years (1913-1941) in refreshing epistolary style. It is a story told through the artist’s letters and diary entries that begin in 1920 when Amrita was barely seven years old. More:
New Delhi: Fifteen years ago, when artist Orijit Sen produced India’s first graphic novel — a story about the Narmada valley dam protest movement — he was only able to print the book with the help of government funding, and distribution meant carrying copies of the book to stores and trying to explain why it didn’t belong in the children’s section.
“No publisher would consider publishing something like a comic book,” Sen said. “We were only able to publish it with the help of a small grant from the government, and the government didn’t know what we were using it for, obviously.”
The scene is different now.
Amid a boom in publishing and contemporary art, India’s comic book scene is undergoing a renaissance of its own. Once known only for the beloved Amar Chitra Katha series, which focused on Hindu mythology, today India’s comic book industry includes homegrown superhero sagas, modernized versions of classic myths and even postmodern tales of urban angst. More:
From Raj Comics: Saviour of Mumbai, Doga tries to save the country from another 26/11. A note left by a dying terrorist.. A virus has been activated..All the SIM cards of a particular phone company would turn into an explosive if used between 8:36 to 9:36 p.m. on 26/11 this year.
From The National:
The inevitable outpouring of mainstream “26/11” cultural production has yet to occur (although the Bollywood director Ram Gopal Verma surveyed the Taj Hotel’s burnt shell for material for his next film), but the first signs are showing up – in comics. In November, Raj Comics published 26/11, a fantastical re-imagining of the three days during which 10 gunmen stormed two five-star hotels and the Chhatrapati Shivaji train station, killing 166 people in the process. Though Raj Comics does not publish circulation figures, the comics they publish are probably among the most widely read comic books in India. In an interview with Tehelka magazine, Sanjay Gupta, Raj’s founder and studio director, estimated their circulation at about 70,000 copies per standard issue.
Scripted in street Hindi, with the action laid out in busy, multi-frame pages, each Raj Comics instalment features one of a cast of a nine primary characters – including the half-man, half-snake Nagraj and the brawny, dog-mask wearing vigilante Doga – tackling challenges ripped from the headlines. Recent Raj plots recount the discovery of nine dead children in the house of an upper-middle class family in a Delhi suburb; a scandal involving the sale of contaminated blood to hospitals; and even the fate of an imaginary winner of Indian Idol.
In 26/11, the real-life Mumbai attacks are only a precursor to an international plot involving Russian arms dealers, Somali pirates, and a fictitious Pakistani terror group, the Lashkar e Aaka, that is determined to hijack the INS Viraat, India’s sole aircraft carrier. Nagraj and Doga clear the city’s besieged hotels with relative ease, only to discover an unholy international criminal nexus that threatens to destroy all of its residents. More:
Booker prize winner Salman Rushdie is in Mumbai with film-maker Deepa Mehta for the film adaptation of his book Midnight’s Children. Excerpts from the Times of India:
On meeting Amitabh Bachchan: I’ve met Mr. Bachchan before, in New York, and at both meetings, he was a charming, gracious presence.
On asking Deepa Mehta to film the novel: Her passion for my work and my admiration of hers.
Does Midnight’s Children have a ‘filmable’ quality? Now that we have a screenplay we like, I would say that, yes, Midnight’s Children is eminently filmable. I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
Monk memorizing under mango trees. Photo copyright: Nicholas Vreeland
Twenty-five years ago, Nicholas Vreeland, grandson of legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland, left New York for the quaint Rato Dratsang monastery in Mundgod, Karnataka, to become a Buddhist monk. When he returned home, his brother gifted him a Nikon camera. Vreeland discovered a passion for photography at 15, when he assisted noted photographer Irving Penn and spent a summer working with another cameraman, Richard Avedon. At Rato Dratsang, Vreeland rarely used the camera, except to photograph his surroundings. “I did not want to be the monk who went around taking photographs,” says Vreeland, 55, as he chooses 20 pictures shot at Dratsang for an exhibition at Delhi’s India International Centre.
Photos for Rato are on exhibit (click here to see the photos) at the India International Centre Annex in New Delhi from 13-18 January.
In Karachi, the men might buy the art, but it’s women — many single and young — who control the market. H.M. Naqvi at GlobalPost:
Karachi: Defying the global downturn in art and perhaps common sense, another gallery opened in Karachi last month, the second in three weeks. Both are run by women.
More intriguing than the dynamics of the market is the fact that the entire Pakistani art scene is run by women, single women.
Sumbul Khan is a spritely thirtysomething of vaguely Pathan extraction. She returned to Karachi several years ago after completing a masters in art history in the United States. After teaching art history and theory, she pitched a program on art in Urdu to Indus TV, the first independent channel in Pakistan. After the program was aired, the head of Indus TV, the legendary Ghazanfar Ali, asked her if she was interested in setting up a gallery in a cove of vacant rooms within the premises of MTV Pakistan (owned, in part, by Indus TV). Khan readily agreed. She named it Poppy Seed. More:
Raghava KK is a contemporary artist living and working in Bangalore. His paintings and drawings use cartoonish shapes and colors to examine the body, society, our world. Painting from www.raghavakk.com
Coded, from the series All Things Yellow To The Jaundiced Eey
Dubai: The Indian painter Maqbool Fida Husain, who exiled himself to the UAE four years ago after he found himself facing criminal charges, said yesterday he was ready to return home at “any moment” following reports New Delhi was trying to help him do so.
Mr Husain, 94, described by critics as “the Picasso of India”, has repeatedly expressed a desire to return to India since charges were brought against him over a series of paintings, which included the depiction of a naked woman, in the shape of India, kneeling.
The Bharat Mata – Mother India – paintings sparked death threats and protests by right-wing Hindus. Mobs attacked Husain’s home in Mumbai.
The painter, whose work has sold for as much as US$1.6 million (Dh5.8m), said: “At last, they have taken this step after years of complete silence. More:
Watch Nina Paley‘s animated film “Sita Sings the Blues” — “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.”
Paley is an American cartoonist and animator and has set the story of the Ramayana to the 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. In 2002, Paley moved to Trivandrum, India, where her husband had taken a job. While she was visiting New York City he terminated their marriage.
“Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina Paley is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Ramayana…”
Nina Paley released the film freely under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. She is Artist in Residence at the non-profit QuestionCopyright.org.
If the YouTube link above does not work, click here to watch the full movie.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is trying to raise interest in its extensive collection of ancient Indian paintings by showing how they connect to modern day Indian comics in a new exhibit starting Saturday.
The museum, known as Lacma, is billing “Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India’s Comics” as the first major museum exhibit of Indian comics. The exhibit includes 18 paintings from its permanent collection. Some items dating back to the 16th century, along with current comic books and pages by Indian cartoonists.
While the comic books on display don’t have much in common visually with the ancient paintings, they borrow storylines and characters from the traditional paintings. More:
In The Telegraph, Calcutta, Anuradha Roy has this delightful story on Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first woman photo journalist. She was born in 1913:
In July this year, it was reported that India’s first professional woman photographer, Homai Vyarawalla, 96 years old, had decided to swap her 55-year-old Fiat for a Nano. She paid up, and was promised that the very first Nano out of the factory would be hers. However, the car company overshot its delivery date, upon which Mrs Vyarawalla cancelled her order. (To add insult to injury, she announced that a second-hand Maruti would do just fine instead.) In August, on Parsi New Year’s Day, Tata officials came personally to deliver her car and beg forgiveness.
After all that, by September she was considering selling the new car. She explained that she was tired of the media attention. Also, she didn’t like the car’s colour any more. She wanted to sell because she did not like driving a red car. More:
From the Wall Street Journal: This is a groundbreaking exhibition that displays a very high overall level of craft and intellectual depth. “Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art From Pakistan,” featuring 54 artworks by 15 artists, is the first museum survey in the Western Hemisphere of exclusively Pakistani contemporary artists. Considering the modest size of the show, one concludes that the curator, Salima Hashmi, did a lot of selecting out, but there can be no doubt of her qualifications for the task. Daughter of a famous poet, herself a prominent thinker and writer, for 30 years Ms. Hashmi taught at the National College of Art in Lahore, the leading such institution in Pakistan. Most of the show’s artists either taught or studied there.
A little museum in New York reveals his epic story. From the Washington Post:
By June 1935, Horch decided that his relationship with Roerich had been embarrassing and ludicrous, broke off contact, sued his former guru for $200,000 dollars in what he said were outstanding loans, took over the skyscraper and its art and evicted Roerich’s disciples. (Seven decades later, the details of the Roerich “scandal” are still in play. In an interview last year, art and dance historian Kenneth Archer, the author of a recent book about Roerich, said he believes that Roerich’s activities in Asia may have been on the up-and-up and that he could have been “swindled” by Horch. Archer says it would take a fully bilingual scholar, with access to archives in Russia and the United States, to get to the bottom of matters.)
By the time Roerich’s American reputation took its worst body blows, the painter was safely ensconced in a compound in the Kullu Valley in far northern India. When Roerich died there Jawaharlal Nehru gave the eulogy, speaking of how the artist had “touched and lighted up so many aspects of human endeavor.” The house is now a flourishing museum.
Roerich’s stock has also been rising elsewhere. “We get visitors from places where I wonder how they even know about Roerich — like from Africa,” Entin says. He explained that in the artist’s native Russia — source of many of his museum’s members — the fall of communism led to Roerich associations springing up in almost every city. More:
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