Until the early 1960s in India, “an expressionist realism of different shades” actively participated in the “enactment of modernism” with the idea of social transformation through works, says art critic Geeta Kapur. Artists with this commitment were M F Husain, Ram Kumar, Satish Gujral and others. In the 1960s, however, this stream suddenly seems to have drained off. The aesthetics of the powerful played a crucial role in this shift.
Soon after the Second World War, New York suddenly emerged as a centre of world art with the introduction of a new style of painting called Abstract Expressionism. Flat application of paint on unprecedentedly large canvasses with no identifiable image are the hallmarks of this new style. Conceptually Abstract Expressionism seeks to eliminate from the work any literal content or subject matter.
As atrocities and historic tragedies unfurled in the forms of the First World War, Great Depression, Nazism, Stalinism and the Second World War, artists found themselves stripped off their representational means and the social function of art. They had no more hope that “there will be a better tomorrow”. This historic disillusionment resulted in the ‘contentlessness’ of their works, which in effect became unintelligible. The unintelligibility, as German intellectual Theodor Adorno says, is the very content of the works under modernism that destructs the hierarchy of meaning and intelligibility. This assumes significance in a philosophical sense but at the same time, it reduces the aesthetic experience to mere paint or “painterly paintings” in the case of Abstract Expressionism. Because, it is not the painting but the gesture of the painter to be looked at. “The gesture on the canvas was”, says Harold Rosenberg, “of liberation from value—political, aesthetic, moral. The artist’s rejection of all values stems out of his pessimism that the world would not be different and better”. Therefore, “he wanted his canvas to be a world”. This theoretical legitimation may sound meaningful in many ways, but this alone does not account for how Abstract Expressionism was accepted across the world as an advance in modern art.
Even before this new style came to the limelight, the biggest American gallery, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, a Rockefeller-backed institution, bought most of its works. Soon after, MoMA conducted numerous large-scale exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism in America, Europe and Asian countries including India. This series of curated shows consistently made use of eminent art critics and historians for theorising and contextualising this American style of abstraction as opposed to that which emerged decades earlier in Europe. As a result of this artist-gallery-critic nexus, by the mid-1950s, Abstract Expressionism was established not only as an important movement but as an “advance” in art in such a way that any criticism against it was severely suppressed by the critics, collectors, publishers, university professors and so on almost in a totalitarian way. John Canaday’s criticism and many letters to the editor in The New York Times bear testimony to this fact.
There was another turn of events that came to coincide with these developments. During this period, the American government came to realise that Abstract Expressionism with its ‘contentlessness’ could be utilised as an effective tool in the propaganda against the USSR and the Soviet bloc, if it was given a cultural centrality. With this orientation, MoMA’s international programme, as art historian Russell Lynes says, was overtly political: “To let it be known especially in Europe that America was not the cultural backwater that the Russians, during the … Cold War, were trying to demonstrate that it was.” In addition to it, as Abstract Expressionism celebrated unrestrained freedom and individualism of artists, it was also going in tune with the value system of American capitalism and imperialism as opposed to individual and artistic freedom suppressed in the communist regime.
The absence of an overt subject matter being equated with an artist’s political neutrality may sound very simplistic. Rather it was recognised by the American establishments engaged in the Cold War that dissenting intellectuals who believe themselves to be acting freely could be useful tools in shaping international propaganda in favour of America.
When American cultural establishments propagated Abstract Expressionism as an “advance” and quintessential form of modern art, “those who had been part of the school of Paris, among them some of the best Indian artists of the 1950s, turned sympathetically to New York in the 1960s” (Geeta Kapur). The US agenda to export cultural freedom to India under the guise of scholarships also presumably exerted considerable influence on Indian artists to give up their earlier social commitment. As Geeta Kapur puts it, “Fellowships for artists’ residencies in New York were made available in the 1960s and 1970s to well-known Indian artists by J D Rockefeller III Fund as a kind of postscript to its blatant strategies of intervention in Latin America; and the American side was highlighted by Clement Greenberg’s visit to India in 1967”, when he accompanied the international touring exhibition of ‘Two Decades of American Painting’ sent by MoMA.
Various forms of abstraction persistently appeared in the period between the 1960s and 80s in the works of major Indian artists like V S Gaitonde, Ram Kumar, Raza, Jehangir Sabawala, Akbar Padamsee, J Swaminathan, K C S Panicker and many others. By issuing folk/ritual motifs in their modernist visual vocabulary they all sought to evoke a sense of Indianness. But its root may also be traced back to Abstract Expressionism. To justify the fascination for the flat surface, abstract expressionists looked at the Oriental, primitive and children’s art as instances of universality and naturalness, two-dimensionality and decorativeness. Indianness or indigenism as manifested in the abstraction thus largely seems to be a gloss over a style which was projected as the symbol of freedom for political ends. Contemporary art, too, is not much free from such ideological laundering.
Chandran TV
Art critic & author. Teaches art history at the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram
(chandrantv67@gmail.com)
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BLURB: During the mid-1950s, the US government came to realise that Abstract Expressionism with its ‘contentlessness’ could be utilised as an effective tool in the propaganda against the USSR and the Soviet bloc, if it was given a cultural centrality