Indian Art and Contributions Essay

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arts in the modern era in India. The discussion would revolve around the conditions and the situations that led to the so-called modernization of the Indian art form and the relation of the socio-economic changes in the Indian society and its impact on Indian art transformation or modernization. The discussions in the essay would revolve around this topic.

The India in the 21st century is a representation of a society which is modern and traditional at the same time, and yet religious and secular at the same time. The social make-up of the country consists of some of the richest in the world as well as home to some of the poorest. Democracy, the largest in the world, is another aspect of modern India (Raghuramaraju, 2009). Hence modern India is varied and full of opposing perspectives put in a box. And the Indian art has developed within this environment and with the development of these aspects of the Indian society.

Discussions

The opposing and varied makeup of modern India has resulted in the Indian contemporary art or the modern form of art in India in the break of the 21st century to be as varied as never before. Art in India is no more limited to the elitist business houses and the royal families and has in fact entered the drawing rooms of a large section of the huge middle-class buyers in the country. Apart from this modern art forms are also now traveling offshore from the domestic market and it sometimes fetches immense and often astronomical prices (Raghuramaraju, 2009).

In Indian modern art, one of the ways to categorize art is the creation of the medium of art which is often used by the Art Schools. Indian modern art classifies the art from on the basis of the medium of expression of the art such as oil painters, watercolorists, acrylic painters, installations artists, terracotta sculptors, etc. but there is an opposing view to this as well since many of the artists in modern India don't stick to just one medium but in fact use more than one. Modern artwork in India in the 21st century has seen artists experimenting with a number of media simultaneously. And this has led to the blurring of the distinction between paintings, installations, collages, assemblages and sculptures.

The regional aspect or the origin of the artist is also often used to categorize artwork in India. During the evolving of modern artwork in India and the subsequent development of many regions and cities or centers, this form of criterion has gained popularity. This trend has helped identify artwork based on the characteristic of a particular region. In this context, the names of some center of modern arts such as Santiniketan, Baroda, Calcutta, Bombay, Pune, Delhi, and Trivandrum are noteworthy. The artwork and the styles are sometimes named after these important centers of art. Despite this, many of the artists have moved from one place to another and therefore have managed to detach themselves from any particular school of artwork (Raghuramaraju, 2009).

However, the more difficult yet more contemporary and logical way of categorizing artwork is to use the approach which seeks to understand the artists' artwork in relation to the inspirations that was latent behind the works. In various times in history, art in India had been able to reach very high degrees of sophistication and abstraction during different periods as is evident from excavations of art objects. These historical styles are often used by the artists in India in the 21st century. The rich and varied folk traditions in the country also from the inspiration of the work of many artists.

The major transformation in the artwork in modern India has been it the growing influence and the amalgamation of art forms of various other countries. With the development of the Indian society and the greater intermingling of other societies and cultures, the styles for other art forms and cultures have also influenced modern Indian art. Despite the fact that there have been close connections between India and other countries and art forms have been influenced by these various cultures over various periods of time, this aspect has times helped in the modernization of Indian art form like never before as in the 21st century. Indian artists are more open these days to adapt to any of the emerging styles in European or the Oriental styles as they tend to remain connected with the trends and happenings in the outside world aided with the advent and development of technology (Mitter, 2007).

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Despite this intermingling, contemporary Indian art has managed to retain a distinct Indianness. Never seen before styles and forms in the art word in India is emerging, inspired from various sources, which are actually hard to categorize or compartmentalized into any of the existing genres.

Art historian Gayatri Sinha, describes modern India art as: "India's eager embrace of technology, the democratic and imaginative use of the photograph, and an alliance with international modernities" (Sinha, 2009). Hence technology and modernization of the Indian society and the country as a whole has exerted an influence on the changes that one sees in 21st-century art forms in the country. Sinha further says that such an influence of modernization has created an Indian idiom that lies somewhere between "the street and studio, tradition and contemporary media, ideology, and practices" (Sinha, 2009).

An example of this impact of modernity on Indian art from can be had at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA). The website of the gallery clearly states that the modernism and the development of Indian art were different from one that was West-inflected and influenced, and this modernism has developed on its own in what is described as a postcolonial recovery for Indian art ("National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi," 2016).

Conclusion

The sociological change towards the end of the nineteenth century in India ushered in the period of modernity and thus influenced art. This change came from the middle-class gentry. The Tagore, who art work was greatly immersed in what was considered to be common 'folk', was one of the factors, influenced by social change, that was instrumental in bringing in the modern era in Indian art. The evidence of the creation of Shantiniketan by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore bears testimony to the development and the subsequent modernization of Indian art as successive artists later such as Nandalal Bose and Ramkinkar Baij, often considered as fathers of modern art in India, had emerged from that school of art.

Populist modernism as depicted in the works of Jamini Roy was influenced by the entanglement of the folk, which served as a repository of tradition, with modernity. In more recent times, the blurring of the The trajectory of Indian modernist art saw the rise of the national/modern aesthetic in the 1950s which had special affinity to the socio-political status of the Indian nation as a new formation in the post-1947 phase wherein artists like M.F. Husain, K.C.S. Paniker, Satish Gujral and Paritosh Sen articulated the modern vision of the nation to the people in the modernist lexicon. The 1960s saw the formation of the narrative-figural mode of artistic address that was instituted as a response to the Progressive Artists' Group's modernist interventions in the 1950s, that was seen to draw too uncritically the Western modernist lexicon. Spearheading this campaign was the Group 1890 which was formed in Baroda, Gujarat by Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh and eleven other artists including J. Swaminathan, Jeram Patel, and Jyoti Bhatt. This artistic intervention extended into the 1970s with the emergence of Baroda as a central node of contemporary Indian art especially around the Faculty of Fine Arts at M.S. University, where the linkages between art practice and theory were forged in a milieu that sought to ground itself in a narrative language for the articulation of personal and contemporary history.

A perceptible shift in the art form in India was visible by the 1970s as the aspect of intimate realities as well as exploring the local environments became the basis for artwork. By the 1980s, the greater intermingling with western artists through the holding of a number of very well-known exhibitions paved the way for the advent of the latest art from s and practices in India. As the country moved towards an era of greater liberalization and adopted the free market economy in the 1990s, a new dimension in Indian art started to emerge (Mitter, 2007). Indian artists were able to experiment and explore the possibilities of a mixture of east and the west in artwork during this period helped by greater mobility and exposure as well as access to the global art scene. And this tradition has further manifested itself in the new century.

The aspect in this paper that stands out is the rapid transformation of artwork and art form in India and the very clear influence of social, political and economic development of the art and craft in India. The paper clearly sets….....

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