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Abstract
As student, teacher, and principal of the Madras School of Art, and as mentor, colleague, editor, and painter, KCS Paniker (1911–77) lived within a network of relations that one might map, following Alex Seggerman’s reading of Egyptian modernism, as a constellation. These figures include artists and critics in his immediate local network, students who helped build Cholamandal Artists’ Village with him, and his legacy in the form of the following generations, including his son, the sculptor Nandagopal. He also corresponded with a range of collectors, critics, scholars, and artists around the world, during three trips abroad and in subsequent editorial efforts related to the journal Artrends. In past frameworks, we might think of these constellational relations as “influences” but this too unidirectionally defines them, and it causes us to privilege one end or the other of the interaction. My project here is to think broadly and critically about these relations, to acknowledge them as deeply important for our understanding of Paniker’s work, but also to look for the dimmer stars – the fleeting comets that might be missed. How might attentiveness to Paniker’s intellectual and artistic wanderings enable us to find toward a richer, pulsating and shining, picture of relation?
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to the community at Cholamandal Artists’ Village, especially Kala and Pallavi Nandagopal, P. Gopinath, and C. Douglas, and also to Sumitra Menon and her family for their unfailing enthusiastic support of this project. My thinking has been deeply informed by conversations with colleagues at the Asher symposium in Delhi and Gurgaon in 2022, with the audience at Berkeley in 2023, and with colleagues and students in formal and informal dialogue over the course of the last five years. I sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful, generous prodding to make the piece fulfill its promise. And I hope this work lives up to Rick and Cathy Asher’s model of generous, rigorous, counter-normative scholarship and their shared commitment to intellectual community. They live on as bright stars in my constellation.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Karin Zitzewitz’s work on infrastructures has been a thread throughout her scholarship and has shaped my thinking here, from her engagement with Kekoo Gandhy, to her discussion of gossip as a mode of interrelation and market making, and her engagement with infrastructure in the 1991–2008 period. See Infrastructure and Form: The Global Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991–2008 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022); The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); The Perfect Frame: Presenting Modern Indian Art – Stories and Photographs from the Collection of Kekoo Gandhy (Mumbai: Chemould Publications and Arts, 2003).
2. For more on the Rockefeller foundation and its artist grant program, see Rashmi Viswanathan, “Art as Communication: Small Diplomacy and The Formation of The Grey Collection,” Art Journal, 80, 2 (Summer 2021), 73–83 and Sarah-Neel Smith, Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022). Scholars working on Middle Eastern art of this period have probed the diplomatic framework in which many artists were working; see Smith’s Metrics of Modernity and Sarah Rogers, “The Artist as Cultural Diplomat,” American Art, 25, 1 (Spring 2011), 112–23.
3. Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
4. Alex Dika Seggerman, Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), p. 23.
5. Seggerman, Modernism on the Nile, p. 27, emphasis in original.
6. Seggerman builds her constellational approach from Martin Jay’s reading of Theodor Adorno, which traces the idea back to Walter Benjamin. There, Adorno’s use of Benjamin’s concept enabled him to emphasize a “cluster of elements” that remained in flux while resisting any “common denominator, essential core, or generative first principle.” Thus, the temporal element, alongside the dispersed, specifically variegated aspect of constellation finds a lineage in Adorno’s appropriation of Benjamin’s concept. Jay draws out Adorno’s use of constellation by situating it within the philosopher’s approach to negative dialectics: Adorno resisted the urge to privilege any one node in the constellation, or to bring the pieces to a triumphant coalescence in a final overcoming of the dialectical relation; Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 15. These elements remain embedded in Seggerman’s and my own approach to the constellational.
7. Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness.
8. Underlying my thinking here is Jacques Derrida’s understanding of deferral; see “Signature, Event, Context,” in his Limited Inc., Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, trans. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988 [1972]), pp. 1–24.
9. I draw here on Édouard Glissant’s articulation of errantry; see Poetics of Relation, trans. by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]).
10. The history of twentieth-century art is often told via a series of groups, each with a manifesto, publication, location, or exhibition anchoring their coalescence as a group. India’s twentieth-century art history is no exception; this remains but one way of organizing a narrative about this history – regional narratives centered on cities or art schools, national narratives drawing connections between regions, artist-centered monographs, or exhibition-driven histories might also be offered, among a few productive options. Here, I put aside the Madras Movement grouping to think orthogonally to the group, but as I do so I recognize the group’s power and its existence as a physical and conceptual organizing framework for the artists who worked and continue to work in Cholamandal’s orbit.
11. Personal conversation with the artist, 11 December 2022. It’s notable that Douglas’s work performs this outward and inward thinking as well – having begun in a geometric, line-driven idiom, he shifted to what many call a more surrealist, figural mode, painting works that occupy his own imagined dreamscape. See Josef James, Cholamandal: An Artists’ Village (Chennai: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 92–123 for more on Douglas’s work.
12. Ashrafi Bhagat: “The Gupta sculptural panel of Bhuvaraha at Udayagiri in Madhya Pradesh, the Tibetan bronzes, the large Sati Stones at the Madras Museum, the ‘Viragal’ or the Hero stones that dot the regions of South India made a deep impression upon his aesthetic sensibilities.” In her Sculptural Configurations: Retrospective-Prospective (Chennai: Oxford University Press, 2003), np.
13. While going into the “family business” was likely a source of pride for Nandagopal and Paniker both, the twentieth-century art world valued uniqueness, and Nandagopal certainly knew that. Operating in a 1960s global flow, the need to make a name for oneself, for being “original,” certainly shaped Nandagopal’s decision. My thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for pushing me on this point.
14. He departed for the US on 29 September 1963, per his letters to his wife, Remabai (Nandagopal family archive).
15. The issue date of April may not match the actual date of publication of the issue – they were sometimes delayed. I have no evidence to suggest that this issue was delayed beyond November 1963, when Paniker returned from his US trip, so I am assuming it was published more or less on time.
16. Paniker, using his pseudonym Sunanda, wrote an essay on Roy’s work in the second issue of Artrends, where he makes the case that Roy builds his mature idiom “inspired by Bengal Folk and Romanesque France, Jamini Roy has created a new vision of beauty which is Indian in its essentials and international in its appeal. It is modern without being ecole de Paris.” Sunanda [KCS Paniker], “Jamini Roy,” Artrends 1, 2 (Jan 1962), 12–13 [as reprinted in Progressive Painters’ Association, Artrends: A Contemporary Art Bulletin (New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 2011)].
17. Shivaji Panikkar, “The Madras Metaphor: A Re-Take,” in 40 Years of the Madras Metaphor (Chennai: Art World Gallery, 2003), np. Here Panikkar is referring to Paniker’s Garden series, which pre-dates the Words and Symbols group, and incorporates floating figures with exaggerated eyes and heads. See Rebecca M. Brown, “KCS Paniker’s Painterly Deflections,” in Niharika Dinkar and Megha Sharma Sehdev, eds., Tirchhi Nazar: The Gaze in South Asia Beyond Darshan, special issue of South Asian Studies 37, 2 (2021), 103–16; Ashrafi S. Bhagat, Framing the Regional Modern: K.C.S. Paniker and the Madras Art Movement (Chembukkvavu, Thrissur: Kerala Lalithakala Akademi, 2011), 53–108.
18. Daniel Herwitz, in his essay on a 1985 exhibition of his parents’ collection at the Phillips Collection in DC, characterizes Indian modern painting in a range of ways, including emphasizing a reading of Indianness via vibrant color and busy compositions; his writing is but one example in a longstanding trope connecting art of the global south to vibrant color. See “Indian Art from a Contemporary Perspective,” in Indian Art Today: Four Artists from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Family Collection (Washington, DC: Phillips Collection, 1985), pp. 17–27. See David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000).
19. See Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 129. These connections are grounded in the circulation of particular dyes and colors in relation to mercantile and later colonial and imperial trade routes around the world. As such, certain colors become associated with the location or traded art form that carried them from the colony to metropole. See also Natasha Eaton, Colour, Art and Empire: Visual Culture and the Nomadism of Representation (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013).
20. Color was central to Bauhaus pedagogy and has been the subject of many subsequent academic studies. See Johannes Itten, Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus and Later (London: Wiley, 1975); Clark V. Poling, Kandinsky’s Teaching at the Bauhaus: Color Theory and Analytical Drawing (New York: Rizzoli, 1986).
21. For Sher-Gil and others, these discussions are internal to the artists’ own understanding of their work. For more on Sher-Gil and color, see Geeta Kapur, “Body as Gesture: Indian Women Artists at Work,” in Vidya Dehejia, ed. Representing the Body: Gender Issues in Indian Art (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997), 166–97; Nilima Sheikh, “On Amrita Sher-Gil: Claiming a Radiant Legacy,” in Gayatri Sinha, ed. Expressions and Evocations: Contemporary Women Artists of India (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 1997), 18–29; Geeti Sen, Feminine Fables: Imaging the Indian Woman in Painting, Photography and Cinema (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2002), 61–101.
22. See Kathryn Porter Aichele, Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 114–63.
23. K.C.S. Paniker, “Why do I Paint?” original in Malayalam, Sameeksha Quarterly, 16, (July-September 1971); republished in English, translated by Ramji, Chitram Ezhuthu: a publication on art and letters (March 1979), pp. 19–20; republished again in Nandagopal ed., Paniker (Chennai: ArtWorld, 2016), pp. 120–22.
24. Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
25. Bhupen Khakhar famously proclaimed his rejection of Klee – but one must of course take this with a grain of salt as he also performed certain art world norms as part of his artistic production. Khakhar: “I deny the known, trained and cultured part within me which responds to Paul Klee, graffiti and ‘expressive’ works of children.” Six Who Declined to Show at the Triennale, Kumar Gallery, New Delhi, February, 1978, quoted in Gieve Patel, “To Pick up a Brush” Third Text 31, 2–3 (2017 [1985]), 289–300 (p. 291).
26. Madhvi Parekh, quoted in Gayatri Sinha, “Reading the Artist: ‘There is No End,’” in Kishore Singh, ed. Madhvi Parekh: The Curious Seeker (New Delhi: Delhi Art Gallery, 2017), 8–23 (p. 13).
27. Sinha makes these connections in “Reading the Artist,” pp. 13–15.
28. Brown, “KCS Paniker’s Painterly Deflections.”
29. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 [1973]).
30. See Partha Mitter, et al., “Interventions: Decentering Modernism,” Art Bulletin, 40, 1 (December 2008), 531–74 (pp. 534–38).