By drawing on devotional understandings of the image as a space of sacred presence in his modernist works on intimacy, the Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar challenged modernist art's presumed secularity, demonstrating that there is no normative history of modernism. This seminar explores the multiple local and global processes that illuminate the contextually particular densities of modern cultural life in South Asia through a focus on art and visual culture. It discusses the colonial emergence art schools and the discourse of fine art and processes of decolonization through cultural articulations of nationalist movements. The seminar also locates these developments in a wider ecology of image practices and technologies, such as popular posters and cinema, to bring 'high' art into conversation with regional cultural practices. In doing so, this course seeks to decolonize Art History by pushing against Eurocentric narratives of modern art that marginalize others as insufficiently modern or derivative.

Textbooks/Other Materials: All readings for this course will be scanned and posted on Canvas.

HISTART Concentration Distributions: C. Asia, D. Europe and the U.S., 3: Early Modern and 4: Modern and Contemporary.