Ethnic Gond art finds boutique on high street

Source Times of India
"The demand for Gond art in the international market is growing because of its affordable price range and vibrant compositions. It has a contemporary appeal and fits with any kind of furniture," Kedia said. Kedia, who owns more than 2,000 Gond art works, is collaborating with noted French collector of Indian tribal art, Herve Pedriolle, to host Jangarh's son Mayank Shyam, a promising artist, in Paris later this year.
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Folk art gaining in popularity

Source The Economic Times by Nalini Malaviya
Interestingly, folk and tribal art have also been going through a shift in content and execution over the years, and the effects of globalisation and elements from urbanisation are slowly becoming part of these traditional art forms. There is an increasing interest level in such artistic endeavours and some of the folk and tribal paintings are even being showcased in mainstream galleries. There are collectors who support and promote the vernacular arts in a big way, even organising major exhibitions representative of such art forms from across the country.
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A look at the (very private) world of the top art advisers

Source Financial Times
Another criticism levelled at advisers is that their growing influence has led to homogenisation, particularly in the private art museums that are proliferating today. In the past, collectors could be highly individualistic, with the Barnes in Pennsylvania or Sir John Soane’s museum in London, for instance, reflecting the quirky, but very personal, taste of their founders. Now, with advisers “ticking all the boxes” to ensure that all the major names are represented, their collections have lost that singularity.
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The Next Chandigarh ?

Source ArtInfo
Rakhi Sarkar described the museum project as "the grandest project in almost five decades, since the construction of the city of Chandigarh in the 1950s by French architect Le Corbusier." Herzog & de Meuron, who designed the Tate Modern, took their inspiration from temple architecture to create a design that synthesizes eastern and western influences, according to the Telegraph.
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Vingt ans après, les Indiens se rappellent la vie d'avant le boom économique

Source Aujourd'hui l'Inde/AFP par Ben ShepardAvant 1991, l'Inde vivait protégée des investissements étrangers par de solides barrières douanières, rendant extrêmement rares les marques internationales dans une volonté d'être autosuffisant, conformément aux idéaux socialistes et nationalistes du pays. Mais ce modèle a failli mener l'Inde à sa perte en raison d'une croissance stagnante, comprimée par une planification économique et un système d'autorisations administratives concernant la production des entreprises privées, baptisé le "Licence Raj". "Tous les biens et services étaient tellement limités", témoigne M. Bhasin. "Les gens suppliaient leurs proches se rendant à l'étranger de ramener des jean's Levis et des produits électroniques", détaille-t-il. Il se souvient aussi que les rares Indiens se rendant à l'étranger n'avaient le droit qu'à une somme restreinte de devises à dépenser quotidiennement et s'il leur en restait au retour, ils devaient retourner à la banque reconvertir les devises en roupies.
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Bientôt le KMoMA, un musée d’art moderne et contemporain à Calcutta

Source Artclair
Tout près de Calcutta, dans la nouvelle ville de Rajarhat, le projet du Kolkata Museum of Modern Art (KMoMA) vient d’être lancé. Sa construction a commencé le 15 juillet 2011. Ce musée, qui sera le premier de la ville à être consacré à l’art moderne et contemporain, devrait ouvrir en 2015. Selon The Telegraph, il s’agit de l’un des plus grands chantiers architecturaux qui aient été entrepris depuis les années 1950 et la construction de Chandigarh par Le Corbusier. C’est le cabinet suisse Herzog & De Meuron qui est en charge du projet. Inspirés par les temples indiens, ses architectes ont conçu le KMoMA comme une synthèse des influences orientales et occidentales.
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50 milliards de dollars

Source Le Monde.fr
C'est le montant des échanges commerciaux entre les Etats-Unis et l'Inde, qui ont bondi de 30 % en 2010, faisant des Etats-Unis le premier partenaire commercial de l'Inde. Hillary Clinton, la chef de la diplomatie américaine, a plaidé mardi à New Delhi pour le renforcement des liens Etats-Unis - Inde dans les domaines de la sécurité, du commerce et du nucléaire civil.
La coopération peut créer des millions d'emplois dans les deux pays, mais aussi aider à sécuriser toute la région, a-t-elle assuré au début d'une visite de trois jours à New Delhi et Chennai.

Centre Pompidou's Indian Excursus

Source ArtInfo par Emilia Terracciano
Attempting to capture the artistic fluidity of a massively complex culture is risky. "Paris-Bombay-Delhi..." succeeds in avoiding the pitfalls of many surveys, but it is hardly experimental. Perhaps the show could have shed light on the longstanding relationship between India's first modern artists and Bohemian Paris. In the 1920s, while Indian artists were nervously tiptoeing through the contemporary art scene in London, they were making their mark as moderns across the Channel. Amrita Sher-Gil, India's first modern female artist, plunged headlong into Paris as an "exotic Indian princess," and after independence, in 1947, members of the Bombay Progressive art group, including the painters S. H. Raza and F. N. Souza, chose the city as their second home. More recently, Paris has been much more receptive than London, which still shows little enthusiasm for showcasing the former colony's contemporary art. If Indian art has grown out of a host of Western reflections, the traffic has moved in the opposite direction, as well, making the all-encompassing category "Indian" problematic, perhaps obsolete. This may be why photographer Singh (photo : "House of Love" 2010 detail), who can afford to be more experimental, plays her Oriental card in this show with "House of Love" but still claims: "I don't know to which category I belong.... I am really happy to be unclassifiable."
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Rina Banerjee, 'Chimères de l'Inde et de l'Occident' au musée Guimet

Source Le Courrier de l'Architecte
Sculptures sensuelles mêlant coquillages, crânes d’animaux, plumes et étoffes indiennes, installations spectaculaires associant objets coloniaux et matériaux plastiques trouvés dans les rues de New York, dessins oniriques aux couleurs exotiques mettant en scène la transe des corps... Déployées dans l’espace-temps singulier du Musée, les oeuvres de Rina Banerjee y expriment - sans doute davantage que dans l’espace vierge de la galerie d’art - les ambiguïtés de sa double appartenance au monde occidental et oriental, les illusions héritées du passé et les 'chimères' des temps nouveaux, les contradictions du monde post-colonial et l’envers de la mondialisation.
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New perspectives

Source Deccan Herald by Giridhar Khasnis
Mohamedi never dated or titled her profoundly personal body of work. She chose to pursue the abstract and minimalist path, even when she belonged to an environment which was dominated by narrative and figurative art. Her work is often compared with that of American painter Agnes Martin (1912 – 2004), but Mohamedi was unaware of Martin’s work until late in her life.
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Story in a sketch

Source Deccan Chronicle by Dr Seema Bawa
Chittaprosad is one of the most productive artists of the 1940s and 1950s whose contribution and impact was overshadowed by his more glamorous and ambitious contemporaries. An extensive retrospective of his works at the Delhi Art Gallery highlights his seminal contribution not only to Indian art but to the history of modern India alongside his creative genius. Among his many series spread over nearly four decades, this reviewer had decided to concentrate on a singular-but-prolific series by Chittaprosad on the Bengal Famine painted and printed during 1943 and 1944.
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Bill Viola and Anish Kapoor Win Japan's Praemium Imperiale Awards

Source Art Info
The Preamium Imperial awards were founded in 1988 in celebration of the Japan Art Association's 100th anniversary in order to recognize lifetime achievement in the arts in categories not covered by the Nobel Prizes. The 2011 Laureates were chosen by a panel of advisors including star collector François Pinault, former Japanese prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, and onetime Metropolitan Museum of Art president William H. Luers.
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Les enchères se portent bien

Source Le Figaro / AFP
Dopées par "l'appétit des acheteurs chinois" et "la course aux chefs d'oeuvre", les ventes aux enchères françaises se sont bien portées au premier semestre avec des résultats affichant des hausses à deux chiffres sur un marché qui a tourné la page de la crise de 2008. "Nous sommes portés par l'appétit des acheteurs chinois. Ils représentent 22% des ventes au premier semestre (21,4 millions d'euros)", commente Guillaume Cerutti, Pdg de Sotheby's France. "C'est mathématique ! (commente le commissaire priseur Henri Gros, citant la vente de l'ancienne collection de Paul-Louis Weiller et l'adjudication d'un plat de la dynastie Yuan -14e siècle- pour près de trois millions d'euros) Pour 4 à 5 acheteurs européens, on en a 100 fois plus en Chine" prédisant un phénomène identique pour "l'Inde d'ici trois ans".
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The tide turns

Source Business Standard by Kishore Singh
“Who,” I’ve been asked by at least a dozen hopefuls in the last dozen weeks, “will the next Raza and Husain be?” The corollary to that question is always, “Who will identify these new Razas and Husains?” This short-circuiting of the perseverance (and pain) and performance (and experimentation) of art created credible harm at the turn of the millennium when contemporary artists were lauded not just as the next stars but ranked and valued on par with or higher than the proven masters.
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