All the Trappings of Victorious Headhunters

Source The New York Times by Ken Johnson
It would be hard to imagine a more misleading title than “Fiercely Modern: Art of the Naga Warrior,” the name of a show at the Rubin Museum of Art. The Naga, a diverse collection of peoples speaking similar languages and residing in a mountainous area in northeastern India, certainly were fierce. Headhunting was one of their prized pursuits. But they were far from modern by present-day standards. In fact, the culture of the Naga was nearly destroyed by modern Europeans. First came mid-19-century subjugation by the British, who wanted to stop the irritation of headhunting raids on neighboring Indian territories. Then American Baptist missionaries invaded, eventually succeeding in almost totally suppressing the Naga’s “satanic” practices and converting nearly all of the population to nominal Christianity.
> read more

Generation to generation, Indian contemporary art on film

Source Art radar Asia
The world premiere of To Let the World In, a two-part documentary film featuring three generations of India’s visual artists by director and cinematographer Avijit Mukul Kishore, debuted at the Sheffield Doc/Fest, in South Yorkshire, UK on 13 and 14 June 2013.
> read more

The 10 Most Expensive Artworks Ever Purchased at Auction

Source Mutual Art
When considering the question of who is the greatest artist of all time, the laurels could go to Pablo Picasso who sweeps the premium category with three paintings in the 10 most expensive artworks purchased at auction including #2 – Nude Green Leaves and Bust (1932), #3 – Garçon à la Pipe (1905), and #5 – Dora Maar au Chat (1941). The list also includes a relative newcomer in the #1 slot, Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1895) purchased in May 2012 at Sotheby’s New York by financier Leon Black for almost $120,000,000. This is one of four versions of the famous howl, and the only one remaining in private hands.
> read more

Les nouvelles pistes des "Corps subtils" au LaM

Source Le Quotidien de l'Art par Roxana Azimi
Voilà un accrochage qui bruit de plaisir et palpite d'énigmes, qui s'autorise du hors piste, à une éraflure de l'abîme, sans jamais y glisser. Basé sur le dialogue entre les deux collections d'art brut et d'art tantrique...
> lire plus

Neo-Miniaturist Imran Qureshi on His Rooftop Painting for the Met

Source Art Info by Sehba Mohammad
When this imagery first appeared in your work it had a deep blue tone. Why did you change it to a blood red? "In 2009 and 2010, Lahore, where I live, was a main target for Al-Qaeda. There were bomb attacks almost twice a week. They destroyed the city. There was a blast near my house. I had very nostalgic connection to one place I used to go with my wife, Aisha, a market that had been full of life. After this blast it was transformed into a bloody landscape. That was when I switched to using a blood-red tone."
> read more

Clash at Art Basel: Police Forcibly Evict Protestors from Tadashi Kawamata’s Art Favela

Source Art Info by Lisa Contag

Occupiers at Art Basel had a rough encounter the local police force on Friday night. After having taken over Tadashi Kawamata’s Art Favela, a village of concession shacks installed in front of the fair’s main entrance, a group of about 100 partying protesters were evicted by armored Basel police (see video below). According to a spokesperson, the group, which included a donkey, wanted to underline the decadence of including a slum setting as part of one the world’s biggest art fairs.
> read more

55th Venice Biennale The Encyclopedic Palace

Anonymous Tantric Paintings from different parts of India collected by Franck André Jamme between 1966 to 2004
> see more photos of the Encyclopedic Palace

Manchester International Festival: 65 hours with Nikhil Chopra

Source The Guardian by Jim Norton
Chopra will eat, sleep, wash and – most importantly – draw in the half-completed wing of the Whitworth art gallery from sunrise on 5 July to sunset on 7 July. The project will explore the city's history of textile production and the people who produced and made them in India and Britain. "When I isolate these materials, they resonate a lot in the context of Manchester and Mumbai," says Chopra, who will use charcoal to draw onto fabric made of cotton imported from Mumbai and woven in Manchester's few remaining mills.
> read more

An ode to tribals

Source Times of India by Ekta Yadav
The four-day long film festival, which concludes today, had around 80 films from across the world, screened at the museum. AK Bir, whose film Aranyak was screened on the opening day, said, "I'm glad that my film was screened at this film festival. I've come to this city for the first time and I really liked it here. The Tribal Museum is very interesting and it's good that we are paying attention to tribal art and culture."
> read more

Collection de corps subtils à Lille

Source Libération par Dominique Poiret
Cette année, le LaM (Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut) fête ses 30 ans. Bâti par Roland Simounet en 1983, fermé de 2006 à 2010, le bâtiment a été agrandi par Manuelle Gautrand pour mettre en valeur l’exceptionnelle donation de l’association l’Aracine, 3 500 œuvres d’art brut. Le musée reçoit durant l’été la collection d’art brut et d’art indien (photo, œuvre anonyme) de Philippe Mons. «Corps subtils» est la troisième collection particulière qu’il présente depuis sa réouverture. L’exposition rassemble plus de 500 œuvres - sculptures, peintures, objets - que le médecin psychiatre et professeur de yoga accumule depuis les années 70.
> lire plus

Indian contemporary art fetches millions at Christie's auction

Source Hindustan Times
Indian contemporary art set new records at a Christie's auction in London, fetching £4.7 million through the sale of paintings by celebrated artists like Vasudeo S Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta and MF Husain. The highlight of the South Asian and Contemporary Art sale at the auction house on Tuesday was a major untitled work by abstract artist Gaitonde which sold for £625,875, with all his paintings going under the hammer for over £1.2 million. The collection had emerged on the auction circuit for the first time in 50 years and many of them have been acquired by a private art collector.
> read more

Indian Artist Highlights the Absurdities of Our Time

Source The New York Times by Gayatri Rangachari Shah
Ms. Gupta also shies away from calling her art political, preferring to refer to her works as “everyday art” because they are a direct response to her daily observations, including on current events. “I don’t like the term political because it’s just another category,” she said. “I am interested in the absurdity of large-scale group-making practices and what human beings do with that.”
> read more

Global Gaitonde

Source Business Standard by Kishore Singh
Gaitonde first exhibited in New York in 1959, and subsequently in 1963, where his works drew the attention of the John D Rockefeller III Fund, offering him a yearlong fellowship in the city in 1964, which was followed by a solo exhibition at Willard Gallery in 1965 when a critic described his work as "non-objective" - a term Gaitonde was to favour through his lifetime, insisting there was no such thing as abstract art. A meticulous and exacting artist, he would apply layers of translucent paint to give his canvases luminous depth, and was famously disagreeable to painting prolifically, which is responsible for the current demand since a possible drought looms ahead as his works move into collections that would be loath to recycle them any time soon. That could be the reason why his prices have remained hard and can only strengthen as his buyer base moves from the Indian to the global. Should the Chinese develop an interest in him - as some expect - they might then rise faster than any other Indian artist.
> read more

Corps Subtils. Une traversée des collections d'art brut et d'art indien de Philippe Mons

Source Paris Art
Construite comme une fable, l'exposition fait dialoguer des créations artistiques indiennes, à vocation religieuse et traditionnelle, avec des œuvres d'art brut, fruits de l'individualisme et de la singularité. Elle met en regard les tentatives d'atteindre le divin exprimées par l'art tantrique, avec la pensée magique ou ésotérique qui anime de nombreuses œuvres d'art brut. Le parcours commence par une salle d'introduction intitulée Éloge de la liberté en référence aux expositions d'art brut organisées par Philippe Mons.
> lire plus

20th century pop calendar arts brought ancient storytelling to everyday India

Source Women News Network by Habiba Insaf
The invention of lithography and its mass circulation in Indian consumerist society profoundly transformed the patterns of communication with individuals, society and with gods in both private and public spaces. The cheapness and ease of production along with the portable nature of lithographs soon turned them into weapons of anti-imperialist propaganda that inflamed nationalist sentiment through eulogizing portraits of militant rulers like Shivaji, Maharana Pratap who fought to overthrow foreign rulers. It also depicted cultural nationalists like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Tilak, as well as freedom fighters like Bhagat Singh, Subhash Chandra Bose etc. who sacrificed their lives for ‘Mother India.’
> read more

Missing India in Venice

Source The Indian Express by Vishakha N Desai
As we were perusing the Angola pavilion and picking up our share of printed photographs from the award-winning installation at the Venice Biennale, my American friend stopped and asked with a surprised look: "Where is the Indian pavilion? Why is India so glaringly absent here?" Over the four days I spent at the Venice Biennale, I heard this sentiment expressed by many of my art literati friends from different parts of the world. There are 88 national pavilions in the historical Giardini and scattered throughout the city. Close to a thousand artists from all parts of the world are represented in exhibitions, national pavilions and collateral events. Some 35,000 art leaders and enthusiasts have gone through the Biennale in the first three days of the preview alone, and 5,00,000 people are expected to visit this extravaganza by the time it closes in November. Most countries realise the enormous opportunity to project their cultural strength at this oldest, largest and most prestigious global art event. So, the question is a fair one: if Angola and Estonia can present themselves to the global art world, why can't India?
> read more

Prez inaugurates tribal culture museum

Source Business Standard
President Pranab Mukherjee today asked the Madhya Pradesh government to conduct serious anthropological studies to develop better understanding of human evolution. Mukherjee inaugurated a Madhya Pradesh government museum that exhibits the art and culture of the tribes of central India. He said it is from a clearer understanding of traditional societies and their culture that we can better appreciate the dynamics of our nation's evolution and the greatness of its ancient civilisation.
> read more

Bauhaus in Calcutta. An Encounter of cosmopolitian Avant-Gardes

Source Hindustan Times by Martin Kämpchen
The new exhibition of Bauhaus Dessau Foundation is telling the story of an extraordinary show in india. In 1922, works by Bauhaus artists like Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, or Wassily Kandinsky and were shown together with works of indian avant-garde artists in Calcutta. Both avant-gardes were united by the mutual search for intellectual reform and cultural emancipation. Ninety years later, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation shows a selection of european and indian works, which were part of the exhibition in calcutta in 1922.
> read more