Tracing The Source

Art movements, trends and fashions are iffy, whimsical things, states Madhu Jain, who takes a ramble through the decades to find what is motivating creators in the subcontinent today.

- Madhu Jain

I still recoil from the finality with which the French painter declared, “Painting is dead. Apres Cezanne, rien — nothing!” this was a few years ago and the emphatic Parisian painter had recently laid down his easel and paintbrushes and picked up a pair of scissors and coloured paper. It was easier for young and (even more so) middle-aged artists to follow in the wake of Henri Matisse during his paper-cut-outs phase, towards the end of his life, than Cezanne with his masterful strokes and painterly contemplation of apples and mountains — and the revolutionary multi-perspective of his subjects.

Art movements, trends and fashions are iffy, whimsical things: when do they begin and when do they end? Hard to say, right? From the obtuse, jargon-studded prose of art theoreticians and critics to the simplistic, generalising overnight critics corralled by many publications and online portals to write about the contemporary art scene, and, of course, the art market — it’s confusing and deliberately opaque.

Each generation thinks it is bringing down the barricades and raising the bar. ‘The king is dead, long live the king’ declare the successive proclamations and manifestos about new movements. But if you rewind to the past, to art history lessons and memories of cruising through museums and galleries in Europe, the United States, India and elsewhere in Asia, you realise that transformations and transformers have always been active. Rarely is something ever really new: someone’s been there before you.

COMPUTER-SAVVY BREED