ONE

The Formalist Prelude

BAUHAUS ARTISTS IN CALCUTTA

To many of us Cubism’s revolutionary mode of representation is synonymous with modernism. It was the first Western movement to attract Indian artists, although it failed to leave any lasting mark until its resurgence in the 1940s. We may take December 1922 as a convenient entry point for modernism in India. An exhibition of works of the Bauhaus artists in Calcutta in that year symbolized the graduation of Indian taste from Victorian naturalism to non-representational art. We first hear of the Western avant-garde in 1914 in the Bengali journal Prabasi, which described Brancusi’s Mlle Pogany as unacceptably bizarre. Its author Sukumar Roy, a fervent believer in naturalism, had previously been a critic of orientalist distortions of reality. (I use orientalism, orientalist artists and oriental art in lower case to refer to the first nationalist art movement in India known as the Bengal School and use capitals for European Orientalists in the Saidian sense.) In his essay, ‘Exaggerations [distortions] in Art’, Roy acknowledged Cubism’s revolutionary objective of challenging academic naturalism, but he rejected its extreme distortions of reality, while he condemned outright Futurist glorifications of war, the machine age and other odious trappings of progress.1

Others were more welcoming of modernism. In 1917, the widely read Modern Review carried an anonymous piece on ‘automatic drawing’, which dealt with Freud’s impact on avant-garde art.² The poet Rabindranath Tagore, who had increasing misgivings about the nationalist Bengal School of art, was intent on broadening the artistic horizon of his university at Santiniketan. In 1919, during a visit to Oxford, he hired Stella Kramrisch (1898–1993) to teach art history at the fledgling art department (Kala Bhavan). Of Austrian-Jewish descent, Kramrisch had received a thorough grounding in art history at the University of Vienna, becoming a renowned authority on Indian art in later life. She became one of the foremost figures in the dissemination of Indian modernist art. At Santiniketan her personal knowledge of the avant-garde made it a living reality for the students.³

In January 1922, the globe-trotting polymath and fervent nationalist Benoy Sarkar (1887–1949) decided on a ‘much-needed infusion of modernism’ into the art of Bengal. His controversial article ‘Aesthetics of Young India’, sent from Paris to the orientalist journal Rupam in 1922, prompted a heated debate.4 Dismissing the Bengal School’s much vaunted ‘spirituality’ of Indian art as a species of myth making, Sarkar made a passionate plea on behalf of the avant-garde ‘aesthetics of autonomy’, comparing it with the nationalist demand for self rule or autonomy from the Raj. Finally, he demanded the emancipation of Indian art from the tyranny of literary critics, historical analysts, nationalists and Bolsheviks. A ‘dyed-in-the-wool’ formalist, who extolled the objectivity of the ‘artistic eye’, Sarkar considered modernism to be a truly international style that overcame all cultural barriers.⁵ Sarkar was in Berlin in the 1920s, where he came under the spell of modernism. His rousing manifesto welcoming formalism and the immediacy of art appreciation however recalls Clive Bell’s notion of ‘significant form’ that distinguished art from ‘descriptive painting’. In 1914, Bell asserted that in order to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing ‘but a sense of form and colour . . . Significant form stands charged with the power to provoke aesthetic emotion in anyone capable of feeling it.’⁶

The nationalists felt impelled to respond to Sarkar. Barindranath Ghosh, an intellectual and a former political prisoner, rejected Sarkar’s ideas as inimical to Indian culture. Ordhendra Gangoly, editor of Rupam and the leading ideologue of the Bengal school, mocked Sarkar’s presumption that Indians were unaware of recent developments in Western art: ‘I have a secret sympathy for the latest Parisian craze over Negro sculpture. I can recall my own feeling of ecstasy at seeing Polynesian images when I first set foot in Java . . . I can therefore understand Picasso, Matisse and Derain’s first thrills on viewing the Tami masks from New Guinea.’⁷ Kramrisch exposed the flaws in Sarkar’s formalist canon. A relativist, she rejected the primacy of Western art, arguing that ‘significant form’ in each individual artistic tradition was a product of a complex interaction of form, content and wider cultural values which suggests her familiarity with Alois Riegl.⁸ Referring to the Bengali painter Gaganendranath Tagore’s recent experiments in Cubism, she contended that even if an Indian artist used a ‘foreign’ form such as Cubism, he would still remain Indian since he had internalized the peculiar cultural experience of India.⁹

This engaging dialogue in Rupam set the scene for the key date of December 1922, the year that introduced the works of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and other Bauhaus artists to Calcutta, an Asian city far removed from the metropolitan West. The German school of design (later architecture) in Weimar, the Bauhaus, had attracted radical artists, theoreticians and pedagogues to the institution. In 1921, the Indian Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore (best known in the West as Tagore), undertook one of his periodic trips to Europe. On 7 May he celebrated his sixtieth birthday in Weimar with readings from his poetry and a recital of his songs at the German National Theatre. Visiting the Bauhaus in Weimar, Tagore quickly sensed the affinities between its teaching methods, imparted by Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten and Georg Muche, and his own holistic experiments at Santiniketan (q.v.). As Oskar Schlemmer, also then at the Bauhaus, noted, there were two elements at the school, a penchant for mysticism and a commitment to the machine, the latter ultimately taking over. Muche and the mystically oriented Itten were deeply involved with Eastern philosophy. At Tagore’s suggestion, Muche arranged for a selection of Bauhaus works to be shipped to Calcutta for an exhibition there.10

The 14th annual exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, which opened in Calcutta on 23 December, showcased the Bauhaus works. Among the 250 items shown at the exhibition, the most important were Kandinsky’s two watercolours dated 1915 and 1921, and Paul Klee’s nine watercolours.¹¹ There were also works by Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, George Muche, Gerhardt Marcks, Lothar Schreyer, Margit Tery-Adler, Sophie Körner and 49 ‘practice work[s] in the course of instruction’. The show also included an original work by the English Vorticist Wyndham Lewis and reproductions of other European modern artists. The Bauhaus artists were interested in selling their works and priced them modestly but, with the exception of one of Sophie Körner’s works, they remained unsold.¹²

The reverential press previews reaffirmed Kandinsky’s international reputation, The Statesman of 15 December making it clear that he was the most important figure in the show. The Englishman congratulated the society for showing original works by the European avant-garde never before seen in India, paying homage to ‘the great Russian’, whose Art of the Spiritual had discovered ‘emancipation in new forms of art undreamed of in its previous history’.¹³ Kramrisch, who wrote the introduction to the catalogue, praised Kandinsky as the first artist to paint pictures without any subject matter and infusing his works with his inner experience. She exhorted the Indian public to study this exhibition, ‘for then they may learn that European art does not mean naturalism and that the transformation of the forms of nature in the work of an artist is common to ancient and modern India’.¹⁴ This was to remind not only the public but also critics such as Sukumar Roy that the Bengal School’s anti-naturalist credo was akin to Kandinsky’s rejection of a materialist conception of art. Her comment highlights the fact that while the artistic objectives of the Western abstract artists and the orientalists were different, they were making a common front against academic art.¹⁵

The exhibition offered a tantalizing glimpse of an art hitherto known mainly through publications to a milieu that had until now feasted on Alma-Tademas and Lord Leightons. The immediate impact of this show was not obvious but it sounded the death knell not only for academic art in India but also for orientalism, and its engagement with the past. Even Abanindranath, the archpriest of orientalism, quoted Kandinsky a few years later to repudiate his own historicism as an anachronism because, he confessed, it was impossible to live and feel like the ancients.16 This was in the 1920s when the ‘here and now’ would seriously challenge historicism, which was administered the final coup de grâce by Abanindranath’s own brother Gaganendranath. Once sympathetic to oriental art, Gaganendranath had gone down the path of modernism even before the Bauhaus show, and indeed made his ‘Cubist’ début at the very same show.¹⁷

GAGANENDRANATH TAGORE, A POETIC CUBIST

Gaganendranath Tagore (1867–1938) was the only Indian painter before the 1940s who made use of the language and syntax of Cubism in his painting. Older than Abanindranath by a few years, Gaganendranath was an individualist, who impressed people with his intellect and personal charm. The English painter William Rothenstein met him in 1910 and was much taken with the breadth of his culture and reading. The former Governor of Bengal, the Marquess of Zetland, was a particular admirer of his, commenting on his dynamism tempered by an inner serenity and refinement.¹⁸ Always keen to experiment, Gaganendranath began in the 1880s with ‘phrenological’ portraits inspired by his uncle’s work, followed by delicate pen-and-brush paintings, learned from the visiting Japanese Nihon-ga painter, Taikan.¹⁹ These black and white works, notably of rain-soaked crows, a familiar sight in Calcutta, prepared him for his later monochrome Cubist interiors. In 1908 he joined the oriental art movement, acquiring a major collection of Mughal and Rajput miniatures in the process.

Gaganendranath Tagore, Crow, c. 1905, watercolour wash on paper.

Gaganendranath Tagore, The Fake Brahmin Dispensing Blessing for Lucre, c. 1918, hand-coloured lithograph.

Until the 1920s, Gagenendranath was best known for his brilliantly savage lithographs caricaturing the social mores of colonial Bengal.²⁰ In early 1922, he seized the ‘modernist moment’ to realize his artistic vision through Cubism. Evaluating Gaganendranath’s Cubism in an essay published that year, Kramrisch asserted, somewhat provocatively, that even though Cubism was a European discovery, its formalist simplicity was neither unique nor significantly different from the objectives of other forms of non-illusionist art. The Indian artist’s ‘musical’ paintings, she argued, avoided the danger of becoming a sterile form of abstraction by their blend of the allegorical and the formal. His cubes did not build up a systematic structure, but rather externalized the turbulent forces of inner experience, transforming the static geometry of Analytical Cubism into an expressive device. However, she cautioned that Gaganendranath’s dynamic diagonal compositions tended to set up a contradiction between the flowing life of Indian art and the geometric rationality of Cubism.²¹

Gaganendranath Tagore, A Cubist Scene, c. 1922, watercolour on paper.

Gaganendranath’s Cubist fantasies, including his well-known House of Mystery, had their first public exposure alongside the Bauhaus artists at the exhibition of 1922.22 Two years later, he held an ambitious one-man show, mainly consisting of his Cubist works including Aladdin and His Lamp, Duryadhana at Maidanab’s Palace, The City of Dwarka, Symphony and other well-known pieces. Kramrisch once again engaged in establishing his essential difference with the European Cubists. While not glossing over his failed experiments, she brought out his strength as a storyteller through his own brand of Cubism, as also his ability to soften Cubism’s formal geometry with ‘a seductive profile, shadow or outline of human form’.²³

Gaganendranath Tagore, A Cubist City, c. 1922, watercolour on paper.

The paintings were well received in the daily papers, though the reviews dwelled more on his poetic qualities than on the new language of Cubism. The Englishman, which had been following his artistic career closely, described his Cubism as a new phase of oriental art, complimenting the artist on his beautiful colours.²⁴ While the Statesman admitted the difficulty of appreciating Cubism’s revolutionary language, it praised the painting Symphony for successfully blending ‘rigid telling cubist lines with mysterious lighting effects reminiscent of Rembrandt’.²⁵ Forward found him to be one of the finest painters of light, confessing that the appeal of his works lay in their beautiful colours, not to mention their intelligibility.²⁶ By 1925, the Englishman acknowledged the power of Gaganendranath’s personal treatment of Cubism though it was less certain about Cubism as such.²⁷ Benoy Sarkar, the avowed modernist, gave Gaganendranath’s exhibition at the Indian Society of Oriental Art his unqualified endorsement as ‘object lessons in pure art’. ‘In such compositions’, he wrote, ‘we begin to appreciate without the scaffolding of legends, stories, messages and moralizings, the foundations of a genuine artistic sense’.²⁸

Gaganendranath Tagore, Cubist Subject, c. 1922, watercolour on paper.

In 1928 Gaganendranath held his last major retrospective at the Indian Society of Oriental Art. The Englishman, once again reviewing the show, crowned him the ‘master of modern art in Bengal’.²⁹ The Welfare gave an indication of its awareness of Roger Fry in describing the artist’s synthesis of the Bengal School and Cubism as a quest for ‘significant form’. Interestingly, the reviewer seemed uncertain about the worth of avant-garde formalism, suggesting that despite his eclectic sources, the Bengali artist had ‘shown himself a great painter in the originality and the intenseness of his vision’.30 In 1930, at 63, a cerebral stroke left the painter paralysed and speechless. He died eight years later.³¹

Gaganendranath Tagore, Interior, c. 1922, watercolour on paper.

Around 1915, as Gaganendranath began quietly to withdraw from his brother’s nationalist preoccupations, he moved into a poetic fairytale world drawing upon the Bengali stage and literature. While literature nourished his imagination, unlike the orientalists, he was not interested in painterly historicism. It was at this juncture that he discovered Cubism’s possibilities. As he later confessed to the journalist Kanhaiyalal Vakil, ‘the new technique is really wonderful as a stimulant’.32 The multiple viewpoints and jagged edges of Cubism offered him the means to create compositions with many-faceted shapes evoking a remote mysterious world, for instance in his imaginary cities, such as the mythical Dwarka, the god Krishna’s legendary abode, or Swarnapuri (The Golden City). Mountain ranges also gave him scope for the interplay of diamond-shaped planes and prismatic colours, resulting in fragmented luminosity. What held these zigzagging planes together was a tight formal structure. His other preoccupation was what he called the House of Mystery, inspired by his involvement with his uncle Tagore’s plays staged in their home, for which he designed the sets. His growing preoccupation with imaginary interiors mysteriously illuminated by artificial lights hidden from view shows this involvement with the theatre. The painter conjures up a magic world of dazzling patterns, crisscrossing lights and shadows and light-refracting many-faceted forms. His paintings from the 1920s make constant references to stage props, partition screens, overlapping planes and artificial stage lighting. Their endless corridors, pillars, halls, half-open doors, screens, illuminated windows, staircases and vaults remind us a little of Piranesi’s Carceri prints or Alain Resnais’ film L’année dernier à Marienbad.

The obsession with ‘prismatic luminosity’ led Gaganendranath to look for mechanical devices for intensifying colour patterns. He is known to have often held up a crystal against the light to capture the rainbow colours on the paper placed below. He eventually possessed a kaleidoscope, a device that broke up objects into a fascinating variety of bright hues and geometric shapes. E. H. Gombrich suggests that the inventor of the kaleidoscope had vainly expected it to create ‘a new art of colour music’. However, it is precisely this quality that enabled Gaganendranath to compose paintings described by critics as ‘less pictures indeed, than visible music and pulsating light’.³³ As his pictorial language evolved, the Indian artist found the dynamic forms of the Futurists more suitable than the more static Analytical Cubism. Yet Gaganendranath’s visual conventions remained within the bounds of oriental art. Despite the criticism of the nationalists, the artist insisted that Cubism had simply ‘enabled me to [express] better with my new technique…than I used to do with my old methods’.³⁴ William Rothenstein was convinced that he remained an ‘oriental miniaturist with his eye for exquisite lapidary details’.³⁵

Gaganendranath Tagore, Sat Bhai Champa, 1920s, watercolour on paper, inspired by a popular Bengali tale for children.

In the brief seven years (1922 to 1929) that Gaganendranath was engaged in his modernist excursions, he created a fairytale world with the ‘language’ of Cubism, but without ever spelling out the actual tales themselves. On the surface, his watercolours purported to tell stories, but the stories themselves were hidden behind a mysterious twilight world of artificial lights and deep shadows that could not be easily deciphered. The very ambiguities of his poetic imagery prevented the paintings from becoming illustrative, the whole effect heightened by his use of evocative titles, such as The Poet on the Island of the Birds, The Seven Brothers Champa or the House of Mystery. The Englishman aptly called these a ‘new phase of oriental art’ with their exquisite colours and miniature format. Gaganendranath’s Cubism raises questions about the reception of modernism in India in the 1920s. Revelations of the Bauhaus show notwithstanding, his Cubist excursions threw into sharp relief the problem of reading the avant-garde visual language in a culture that had not yet fully confronted modernism. Today we perhaps take for granted modernism as the natural style of the twentieth century. However, in the 1920s, even in Britain modernism was still a minority affair, let alone in colonial India. At the same time, the initial unease about the new syntax began to give way to its gradual acceptance.36

MODERNISM AND COLONIAL ART HISTORY

How are we to read these works – are they Cubist or are they oriental? It was this no-man’s-land between Cubist formalism and a poetic narrative that infuriated the colonial art historian W. G. Archer, reared on Clive Bell and Roger Fry’s separation of formalist purity from the ‘sentimental clutter’ and literary associations of narrative art. Fry’s aesthetic polarity simply does not make allowances for works that do not fall into either of these categories.³⁷ Let me take a striking passage in Archer: ‘apart from their very evident lack of power – a power which in some mysterious way was present in the work of Braque and Picasso – Gogonendranath’s [sic] pictures were actually no more than stylized illustrations . . . weak as art, but what was more important, they were un-Indian. Not only had Gogonendranath’s style no vital affinities with other forms of Indian expression but its prevailing tone seemed frigidly indifferent to Indian feelings, interests or sensibility. As a result, his pictures, despite their modernistic manner, had an air of trivial irrelevance.’³⁸

Archer’s assessment of Gaganendranath’s painting – illustrative quality, lack of power, un-Indian, modernistic ‘manner’ rather than substance – tells us a great deal about his art historical discourse. He accepted the Western modernist canon, as did his contemporaries, including Indians, as the standard against which all modernist art must be judged. The ideology of ‘purity’, with its moral connotation, was integral to modernism. Its critique of representational art was inspired by the Platonic distinction between truth and appearance. Its extreme form was the notion of the absolute values of abstract art.³⁹ His linked expressions, ‘stylized illustration’ and ‘lack of power’ were an essential foil to the ‘pure’ and robust formalism, the very antithesis of meretricious and fussy narrative art. The word ‘power’ also suggests obvious gender connotations. Archer’s primitivist longing found the ‘power’, absent in Gaganendranath’s painting, in abundance in India’s tribal sculptures. In The Vertical Man, he expressed admiration for the ‘masculine’ vigour and abstract geometry of Indian tribal art, as he did for the ‘peasant art’ of medieval Britain. Primitivism had bestowed on modernist art criticism the notion of virility as standing for bold simplicity, as opposed to the weakness of complicated ‘feminine’ anecdotal painting.40

Archer’s modernism found both the high sculptures of English cathedrals and Indian temples to be less ‘authentic’ than their respective examples of primitive art. Yet the English art historian’s preference for Indian tribal art in comparison with Indian modernist art did not rest solely on his allegiance to the avant-garde. Notions of virility have been a compelling metaphor of power relations in colonial history, a metaphor derived from anthropology and its myth of the timeless ‘primitive’ tribes nestling in British protection.⁴¹ Archer’s idealization of tribal sculptures as the authentic art of India highlights his ambivalence about Indian nationalism, which he had to confront as a colonial civil servant. One of the persistent assertions of the Raj was that the nationalist movement was unrepresentative. Hostile to the Bengal School, Archer dismissed Gaganendranath’s paintings as déraciné efforts that lacked the national mandate.⁴² There are of course parallels between the new nationalist discourse of primitivism and Archer’s idealization of tribal India. However, in contrast to the anti-colonial primitivism of Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, Archer’s primitivism was grist to his colonialist mill. Archer’s final objection to Gaganendranath’s work was its failed modernism. Let us read on: ‘His picture, Light and Shadow . . . is made up of blacks, whites and greys and is a simple illustration of geometric architecture. . . There is no attempt to break the shapes into their fundamental structure or to link them into a single cohering rhythm…The artist merely selected a scene that looked Cubistic and set it down with academic care.’⁴³ I have already discussed Archer’s conclusion that Gaganendranath’s works were simply bad imitations of Picasso, and need not repeat the arguments here.

By what criteria can we judge Gaganendranath today? The artist named his paintings ‘Cubist’, even though he was perfectly aware that he was not seeking to reproduce Picasso. His Cubism makes sense in a global context and against the reception of Cubism in countries other than France. Analytical Cubism or the Braque/Picasso revolution of 1909–10, the great achievement of modernism, finally laid to rest the 500-year-old history of illusionism. Painters since Giotto had related different objects within a picture by means of consistent, directional lighting. Cubists set out to destroy illusionism by arranging objects within a picture formally, and by creating conflicting relationships of light and shadow. Thereby they restored the internal cohesion of a picture so that it was no longer a window to the external world. The implications of its revolutionary form did not affect other artists, Western and non-Western, so much as its flexible non-figurative syntax which could be put to different uses. The driving force behind the Expressionists, Franz Marc, Lyonel Feininger and Georg Grosz, behind the visual poetry of Marc Chagall and behind the orientalist Gaganendranath was the same: objects could be distorted and fragmented at will to create dazzling patterns. But their specific cultural contexts were as different as their artistic aims, not to mention their different artistic agendas. We now know that Eastern European artists created their own versions of Cubism that did not reproduce the Braque-Picasso experiment.44

The flexible language of Cubism, with its broken surfaces, released a new energy in Gaganendranath, enabling him to conjure up a painterly fairytale world. The German avant-garde critic Max Osborn, reviewing the exhibition of modern Indian art in Berlin in 1923, singled out Gaganendranath’s Poet on the Island of the Birds as having affinities with Feininger in its indifference to Analytical Cubism’s formal implications.⁴⁵ The Indian artist represents the decontextualizing tendency of our age – a tendency shared as much by artists in the centre as in the peripheries, a tendency we come across again and again: styles past and present can be taken out of their original contexts for entirely new modernist projects.

In short, Cubism served as a point of departure for Gaganendranath, the particular Western ‘device’ yielding a rich new crop in the Indian context. Although its revolutionary language released a new energy in the Bengali artist, Cubism was merely a passing phase in India. It was primitivism that would dominate the decades of the 1920s and ’30s, a story I take up next.

Kshitindranath Majumdar, Jamuna, c. 1915, watercolour on paper.