Patterns of Trans-regional Trails

This paper will focus on a group of artists and their time they lived and worked in Bombay, Paris, Prague, and Lahore. In Bombay these artists were all trained in the same colonial art school in what was then undivided India in the 1930s and early 1940s. In post-war Paris, the same artists are to be found at the influential academy of the French painter and theorist André Lhote (1885-1962). From Paris this study will continue to Prague, a city to which a significant number of these South Asian mid-century artists became closely attached, only then to return to either Lahore in independent Pakistan or Bombay in independent India. Given the localities involved in this study, issues of artistic practice will be associated with questions of how socialism saw itself as an international movement while artist from the South still faced a tough struggle for recognition from the mainstream. By focusing on artists from the former periphery this research will not only set out to filling gaps in the history of 20 th century art but it will establish connections between places and practices by analysing networks of encounter and thereby investigating the circulation of information and ideas. Art in this research project is not viewed as an isolated practice but instead is understood to provide a point of analytical entry to the key political and ideological concepts of a particular historical period. By examining visual aesthetics, this study will attempt to develop an integrative approach by including key political and ideological concepts of the period under discussion. By looking at art as a form of communication, not unlike literature and language in general, it will offer an insightful perspective on the entangled cultural and political reality of a certain time across regions. Reflecting on transcultural encounters and entanglements and contingent constructs of regions is therefore seen essential for an understanding of how different cultures interact with one another. This project will be carried out by Simone Wille who has been researching artistic practice across cultural areas and interrogated aspects and the relevance of cross-cultural patterns. A central concern of her research and work focused on formalist analyses of works of art in relation to place and space and their historical context as well as their response to tradition. Over the past years, Wille has consistently shifted the focus away from the Western/European vantage point as a centre of artistic modernism and redirected attention to a multifocal examination of artistic practice that emerged in South Asia in the early 20th century. This project will be a further step in this direction.