Author: Jyotindra Jain
Publisher: Mapin
Year: 1999
Language: English
Pages: 232
ISBN/UPC (if available): 1890206172
Description
With 181 illustrations and a map, this art book showcases images from a changing world.
Kalighat Paintings emerged from the changing world of nineteenth century Calcutta, with old and new images seemingly layered one upon another on a transparent plane. Traditionally inherited techniques, iconography and artistic practices co-mingled with revivalistic Mughal court culture, Sanskrit drama, the proscenium stage, and swiftly churned out and circulated images from photo-studios and lithographic presses in the fast-growing urban center, translating folk art forms into popular genres.
Artists expressed themselves in a language that they continuously recalibrated in line with transformations occurring in their immediate environment - the emergence of new lifestyles and aesthetic norms, shifting standard of morality, the influx of new imagery from the age of mechanical reproduction. How they confronted change, how saw in the process of transformation, the essence of expression, and how, as artists, they articulated a pictorial language, is the theme of this book.
Sitting in the bazaar and candidly reflecting the surrounding social environment, in their wok, the Kalighat painters not only became the first contemporaries of Indian art, but in a manner of speaking, anticipated the popular culture of the twentieth century that was to follow.