HART0079 Art and Visual Culture in Modern South Asia - indicative weekly topics

HART0079: Art and Visual Culture in Modern South Asia

UCL History of Art, Year 3 BA Special Subject Option, Autumn-Spring 2020-21; Tuesdays 2-4pm

Suggested Reading:

• Partha Mitter, “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” The Art Bulletin, Vol 90, No 4 (2008).
• Sonal Khullar, “Ch 1: Affiliation, Worldliness, and Modernism in India,” in Worldly Affiliations (2015), pp. 1-40.
• Salima Hashmi, “The Eye Still Seeks,” in Memory, Metaphor, Mutations: Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan, Y. Dalmia and S. Hashmi (2007), pp. 9-36.

Indictive Weekly Topics:

1. Decentering Modernism in South Asia
2. Modern Legacies of the Mughal Miniature
3. British Artists in India and the Power of the Picturesque
4. Company School Painting and the Crisis of Artistic Subjectivity
5. Kalighat Painting and the Art of the Bazaar 
6. Photography and the Colonial Gaze 
7. Raja Ravi Varma, A National Artist?
8. Swadeshi and Aesthetic Discourse in South Asia
9. The Bengal School of Painting 
10. Critiques of the Bengal School 
11. Santiniketan, the Subaltern, and the Sculpture of Ramkinkar Baij
12. Feminism, Subalternity, and Retakes: Amrita Sher-Gil
13. Gendered Iconographies of the Nation
14. Midnight’s Children: The Progressives and the Lahore Art Circle
15. The Crisis of Partition
16. Partition and the Present
17. Architecture, Nation-Building, and the Nehruvian Ideal
18. The Baroda School 
19. Globalization and Installation Art in Modern South Asia
20. Bhuphen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All at Tate Modern