Following India s independence in 1947, Indian artists creating modern works of art sought to maintain a local idiom, an Indianness representative of their newly independent nation, while connecting to modernism, an aesthetic then understood as both universal and presumptively Western. These artists depicted India s precolonial past while embracing aspects of modernism s pursuit of the new, and they challenged the West s dismissal of non-Western places and cultures as sources of primitivist imagery but not of modernist artworks. In Art for a Modern India, Rebecca M. Brown explores the...

Following India s independence in 1947, Indian artists creating modern works of art sought to maintain a local idiom, an Indianness representative of their newly independent nation, while connecting to modernism, an aesthetic then understood as both universal and presumptively Western. These artists depicted India s precolonial past while embracing aspects of modernism s pursuit of the new, and they challenged the West s dismissal of non-Western places and cultures as sources of primitivist imagery but not of modernist artworks. In Art for a Modern India, Rebecca M. Brown explores the...

Place plays a fundamental role in the structuring of the discipline of Art History. And yet, place also limits the questions art historians can ask, and impairs analysis of objects and locations in the interstices of established, ossified categories. The essays in this interdisciplinary volume investigate place in all of its dynamism and complexity: several call into question traditional constructions regarding place in Art History, while others explore the fundamental role that place plays in lived experience. The particular nexus for this collection lies at the intersection and overlap of...