Art Histories
2015/ 2016

Atreyee Gupta

The Promise of the Modern: Anti-illusionism, Abstraction, and Inter-cultural Modernism (India, ca. 1937-1968)

Previous Fellowships: 2014/ 2015

Film Still, Explorer, 1968. 7:02 minute black and white experimental film directed by Pramod Pati. Repository: Films Division of India

Atreyee Gupta’s interest in global aesthetic flows arises from her academic experiences in India (BA, Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda), the US (PhD, University of Minnesota), and Europe (fellowships at Haus der Kunst, Munich and Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices, Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin), shaping her current monograph on abstraction in postwar India and its multimodal transregional vectors. Excerpts from this project have appeared in Partha Mitter et al. eds. Twentieth-Century Indian Art (2016) and in journals such as Yishu (2014) and Art Journal (2014). Related exhibition catalog essays include Postdate (2015) and Prajakta Potnis (2014). Coedited volumes include Postwar – Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 (with Okwui Enwezor and Ulrich Wilmes, forthcoming 2016). Her research has been supported by the SSRC, New York and the Getty Research Institute. Gupta has taught at the University of Minnesota, Duluth (tenure track Assistant Professor, resigned) and the University of California, Berkeley (Visiting Lecturer). Atreyee Gupta is Affiliated Art Histories Fellow 2015/16.
 

2015/ 2016

The Promise of the Modern: Anti-illusionism, Abstraction, and Inter-cultural Modernism (India, ca. 1937-1968)

Gupta’s book project, The Promise of the Modern, examines anti-illusionism and abstraction (in painting, sculpture, photography, and experimental film), art’s infrastructure (critical ekphrasis, exhibitions, and supporting structures), and aesthetic flows (through Cold War networks and across the Non-Aligned Movement) to highlight dialogic links between formal concerns of modernism and art’s infrastructure. This leads her to methodological questions centered on the absence of a teleological unfolding of modernist form in the former peripheries. Art History presents modernism as a crucial break from Renaissance perspectivalism. Yet, rooted in a particular history, such an account cannot be extended globally without revising both modernism’s narrative arc and conceptual projections accumulated in terms like avant-garde, figuration, abstraction, and flatness. Thus, alert to the ways in which aesthetic form paralleled debates on urbanity, technology, and modernization and the extent to which such precepts arose from local epistemes but precipitated global interlocutions, Gupta uses the contingency of modernism, the elasticity of its formal and social impulses, to script a polyglot history.

2014/ 2015

The Promise of the Modern: Anti-illusionism, Abstraction, and Inter-cultural Modernism (India, ca. 1937–1968)

Gupta’s book project, The Promise of the Modern, examines anti-illusionism and abstraction (in painting, sculpture, photography, and experimental film), art’s infrastructure (critical ekphrasis, exhibitions, and supporting structures), and aesthetic flows (through Cold War networks and across the Non-Aligned Movement) to highlight dialogic links between formal concerns of modernism and art’s infrastructure. This leads her to methodological questions centered on the absence of a teleological unfolding of modernist form in the former peripheries. Art History presents modernism as a crucial break from Renaissance perspectivalism. Yet, rooted in a particular history, such an account cannot be extended globally without revising both modernism’s narrative arc and conceptual projections accumulated in terms like avant-garde, figuration, abstraction, and flatness. Thus, alert to the ways in which aesthetic form paralleled debates on urbanity, technology, and modernization and the extent to which such precepts arose from local epistemes but precipitated global interlocutions, Gupta uses the contingency of modernism, the elasticity of its formal and social impulses, to script a polyglot history.