German Historical Institute London

THE 2021 ANNUAL LECTURE

Modernism’s Relational Geographies:
Global (Art) History With and Beyond the
Nationby

Monica Juneja

Monica Juneja is Professor of Global Art History at the Heidel­berg
Centre for Trans­cultural Studies. She has written extensively on trans­
cultural­ity and visual represen­tation, the disciplin­ary prac­tices of art
his­tory in South Asia, the his­tory of visual­ity in early modern SouthAsia, and heri­tage and archi­tectural his­tories in trans­cultural per­spective. Her latest book is Can Art His­tory be Made Global? Medi­tations
from the Per­iphery (2023), for which she re­ceived the Opus Magnum
award of the Volks­wagen Foun­dation. To­gether with Sumathi Rama­swamy, she has recently edited Mother­land: Push­pamala N.’s Woman
and Nation (2022) to accom­pany an ex­hibit of the video and perform­
ance artist Push­pamala N. at the Völker­kunde Museum, Heidel­berg.
Monica Juneja edits the series Visual and Media His­tories; is on theeditor­ial board of Ding, Material­ität, Ge­schichte, Ästhetische Praxis, andHis­tory of Human­ities; and is co-editor of the Jour­nal of Trans­cultural
Studies. She is a member of the ad­visory board of the Walter Ben­jamin
Kolleg at the Uni­versity of Bern, the Hyundai Tate Re­search Centre,
London, and the Deutsches Zentrum für Kultur­gut­verluste that sup­ports provenance research of objects acquired in colonial contexts.

General Editor: Christina von Hodenberg
Editor: Jozef van der Voort
London: 2022
Published by
The German Historical Institute London
17 Bloomsbury Square
London WC1A 2NJ
Tel: 020 7309 2050
email: ghil@ghil.ac.uk
website: www.ghil.ac.uk
ISSN 0269 8560

Talking to a gathering of historians is an opportunity for which I, an
art historian, am grateful; at the same time it presents a chal­lenge,
since our re­spect­ive discip­lines have long had a tendency to set up
walls separ­ating one from the other. This pro­cliv­ity is cer­tainly morepro­nounced in the case of art his­tory, whose prac­titioners have assidu­
ously sought to secure the fences of their domain against poten­tial
intrusion, especially by historians. Art history has been slower thanother discip­lines in the human­ities and social sciences to re­spond tothe call of the global turn. While global history has a number of dec­
ades of re­search and writing to its credit, art his­tory framed glo­bally
began to attract the atten­tion of scholars only around the begin­ningof this cen­tury. Since then, publi­cations seek­ing to define what itmeans to write a glo­bally oriented art history have been pro­lific. My
inter­vention there­fore enters an al­ready densely pop­ulated field, but
per­haps it can make belated­ness pro­ductive.1
For both historians and art historians, the contestations over writ­ing
in a global per­spective unfold along two dis­cursive axes: the emanci­patory rhet­oric of global­ization that eu­logizes a world with dis­solving
borders and its net­works of cosmo­politan­ism; and the heavy foot­printof the nation state, whose ad­herence to retro­spectively in­vented andim­posed trad­ition con­tinues to shape the pro­duction and organ­iza­tion of know­ledge, both con­cep­tually as well as in­sti­tution­ally. We areaware of a con­stant ten­sion be­tween the nation as framing space andthose pro­cesses that cannot be con­tained within that space. In the caseof art history, such phenom­ena include artists, pic­torial prac­tices, andcanons on the one hand, and museo­logical dis­plays, cur­ators, col­lect­ors, and patrons on the other, all of whom have had mobile his­tories
across cen­turies. These can no longer be plaus­ibly accom­modated
My heartfelt thanks to Christina von Hodenberg and the GHIL for in­viting
me to deliver this prestigious lecture, and to members of the audience for
their engaged discussion. I am also grateful to Jozef van der Voort for his
editor­ial support with the publication.
Though numerous, these publications are mainly edited volumes, often
eclectic­ally compiled. I have discussed this historiography at length in myforth­coming monograph Can Art History be Made Global? Meditations from the
Periphery (Berlin, 2023).

1

1

within disciplin­ary frame­works and in­sti­tutional set­tings con­sti­
tuted according to fixed and stable units such as nation states orcivil­izational en­tities dating to the nine­teenth cen­tury. This ten­sion
has brought forth a flurry of ap­proaches and termin­ologies—all byproducts of the global—such as en­tangled, con­nected, trans­national,or trans­regional his­tories. I will not go into the issue of their explana­
tory power and its limits at this point, as that would take us off on atan­gent. In­stead, I would like to bring to the table my ap­proach as anart histor­ian to the place of the nation within a glo­bally framed art his­
tory, as it de­viates from those en­deavours of global stud­ies which, by
virtue of their very defin­ition and self-positioning, seek to tran­scend
and trans­gress na­tional space and scale. I wish to attend, rather, to theuneven and at times di­vergent re­gional valen­ces that have sur­faced
within his­tories of the ‘na­tional’ and deploy these as a wedge to break
open the idea of the nation.
The nation, characterized in the social sciences as a juridical, geo­
political entity, takes on in the artistic imagination the add­itionalqual­ity of an imagined conceptual realm, not territorially bound­ed,
but one that in the imagin­ation of artists and scholars could both belocal and trans­gress bound­aries. This is par­ticu­larly so in the oncecolonized regions of the world, where the idea of the nation was anemancipating force: the nation was the terrain on which the strug­gle
to cast off the colonial yoke was waged and won. In my work I ex­
plore a more complex dynamic between a critique of the na­tional asa con­strict­ing ideo­logical frame and the uses of its past as a groundof liber­ation, espe­cially in the his­tory of post-colonial nations. I bringthis pos­ition to the study of artistic modern­ism, con­ceived of as a
global pro­cess and viewed from the so-called periphery—that is, alo­cation beyond the Western Europe–North Atlantic axis. The ‘per­iphery’ in my use of the term connotes both a locus and a schol­arlyper­spective. Though identified with marginal­ity and ob­scur­ity, a sodesig­nated per­iphery has the capacity to chal­lenge found­ational ideasof ex­clusiv­ity and uni­versal­ity, and to offer alter­native pos­itions tosedi­ment­ed intel­lectual claims. In other words, mining the per­ipheries
to re­bound on the centre can effectively dis­mantle the Mani­cheandual­ism of centre and per­iphery. However, such a prop­osition cannot
be carried out by simply re­vers­ing an estab­lished hier­archy while2

leav­ing its teleology intact. Writing from the periphery is premisedon viewing both centres and peripheries through a transcultural lens;in other words, unpacking both to unravel their mutual re­lation­al­ity (or re­lational geog­raphies, as in the title of this lecture) and thetrans­regional pro­cesses con­sti­tutive of each region. The tra­jectories ofmodern­ist art in the twen­tieth cen­tury, for in­stance, were con­sti­tuted
through the ex­peri­mental energies of sites across the globe, travers­ing
all con­tinents. Yet scholar­ship pro­duced in regions which have beenpar­celled into na­tional units or iso­lated area studies does not featurein the con­temporary canon of the global. Not only has it not found aplace in a global re­pository of intel­lectual re­sources and narra­tives, its
poten­tial to exert ana­lytical pressure on that re­posi­tory, to re­calibrate,even unsettle the certi­tudes of that canon, has yet to be fully real­ized.
We might there­fore use­fully imagine the per­iphery less as a place andmore as a critical modality.
The study of artistic modernism as a relational phenomenon nur­
tured by ex­periments at mul­tiple lo­cations across the globe, rather
than a story of diffusion from Euro-American centres to absorp­tive
margins, has followed innumerable studies of modernity, which aresite-based, yet inter­connected. These have argued for a modern­ity thatis mi­grant and mutable, con­tinuous and at best con­tingent; one withmany pos­sible ‘habitations’, to borrow from Dipesh Chakrabarty.2 The
recog­nition that the West, though a major ‘clearing­house of global
modern­ity’, no longer offers the sole tem­plate for the un­fold­ing of its
cul­ture, is now scarcely a matter of debate.3 Modern­ism, a cog­nateof modern­ity, was a prod­uct of a world of artistic and cul­tural ex­change enabled by com­merce, colonial­ism, and travel. Today, ouratlas of modern­ist art has been enriched by countless micro-stories
un­earthed from in­numerable sites across the globe. These in­clude
Shang­
hai, Mexico City, Bombay, Tehran, Ljubljana, Cairo, Dakar,
Tokyo, São Paulo, Lahore, Lagos, Moscow, Beirut . . . the list goes on.
In the light of such findings, it is no longer plaus­ible to hold on to a
now notor­iously histor­icist or Green­berg­ian account of modern­ist art
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Sub­altern
Studies (Chicago, 2002).
3
The expression comes from Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative
Modern­ities’, Public Culture, 11/1 (1999), 1–18, at 1.
2

3

that pre­sents Euro-America as its original locus and central axis, from
where its achievements are said to have spread and brought forthde­rivative versions of its ex­pressive forms. Each of the stor­ies above
pre­sents us with a vigor­ous modern­ism that is not re­ducible to styl­
istic content, informed but not determined by counter­parts in Paris,
Vienna, or Berlin.
Today the challenge facing art historians and curators, there­fore, isno longer that which the art historian Kobena Mercer in 2005 de­scribedas ‘the limit­ations of our avail­able know­ledge about modern­ism’s
cross-cultural past’.4 Nor can we con­tinue to speak of this plural­ity interms such as mul­tiple, alter­native, re­gional, or vernacu­lar modern­isms; each of these desig­nations implies a norma­tive centre whose
status it re­affirms. The chal­lenge is how to mean­ing­fully write thosemodern­ist initia­
tives and ex­peri­ments that un­
folded in lo­
cations
beyond the New York–Paris corridor into a shared re­lational matrix.
In other words, what kind of an art histor­ical frame­work do we requirein order to go beyond simply adding un­known modern­ist artists toan exist­ing canon or, alter­natively, rele­gating re­gional articu­lationsof the modern to the iso­lated domains of indi­vidual ‘area stud­ies’?
How can regions and nations be brought into a more dy­namic, nonhierarchical, and, import­antly, non-homogenizing relation­ship witheach other? Can we bring to the term modern­ism a less formal­istic
inton­ation and open it to accom­modate ex­peri­mental ven­tures, attimes dis­parately so?
Two recent exhibitions, Postwar at the Haus der Kunst in Munichand Museum global at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in
Düssel­dorf, have pro­vided an initial set of im­pulses to meet­ing theabove challenge.5 Exhib­itions enjoy the licence to plot their ma­terial
Kobena Mercer (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 7.
The full title of the show in Munich, curated by the late Okwui Enwezor,
was Postwar: Kunst zwischen Pazifik und Atlantik, 1945–1965 and it ran from14 Oct. 2016 to 26 Mar. 2017, with catalogues in German and English. See
Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, and Ulrich Wilmes (eds.), Postwar: Art between
the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 (Munich, 2016). The Düssel­dorf ex­hib­ition Museum global: Mikro­geschichten einer ex-zentrischen Moderne was initi­atedby Marion Acker­mann and curated by a team from the museum; it ran from
10 Nov. 2018 to 10 Mar. 2019. See Kathrin Beßen et al. (eds.), Museum global:
Mikro­geschichten einer ex-zentrischen Moderne (Cologne, 2018).

4
5

4

asso­cia­tively and in doing so can bring a fresh impetus to scholar­ship.
Postwar sought to redraw the geo­graphical and chrono­logical mapof modern­ism by its in­clusion, along­side the North Atlantic West, ofsites in emer­gent nations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as wellas those of the newly formed East­ern bloc in East and Cen­tral Europe.
This in­clusion also import­antly meant doing away with a persist­ent
blind spot in the telling of modern­ism’s story. In other words, untilre­cently that ac­count con­cluded in 1945, there­by leaving out all thoseplaces where anti-colonial strug­gles and the form­ation of new nation
states were imbri­cated with the form­ation of cul­tural modern­ism. The
years follow­ing 1945 also wit­nessed, along­side the bi­polar div­isionsof the Cold War, the form­ation of a Non-Aligned Move­ment com­prising newly inde­pendent nations of Asia and Africa that re­fusedco-optation by one or the other of the power blocs. Such far-reachingchanges in the world order gener­
ated in­numerable debates thatsought to link issues of aes­thetics and form with cul­tural ques­tionsof auton­omy, sub­ject­ivity, human­ism, inter­national solid­arity, and re­gional­ism. The idea that art and artists had a role to play in a period
of in­stabil­ity, re­covery, and self-definition through new sub­jects andex­peri­ments with form and ma­terials was cru­cial to the shaping ofartistic modern­ity. Actors in differ­ent regions of the world in­variably
worked with, and within, the lan­guage of domin­ant inter­national
forms and prac­tices, yet could and did resist their formal canon­icity.
The ex­hib­ition Postwar, in other words, made visible on a global scalea shared hor­izon for the study of modern­ism—be it in the Carib­bean,
South Asia, Egypt, or what was then Yugo­slavia—even as each sitede­veloped its own vocabu­laries and prac­tices gener­ated by re­gional
and local con­stellations and the subjectivities of the actors involved.
Within such shared horizons, individual studies take a par­ticu­larsite as a start­ing point from which to delve into deep his­tories as well
as ex­plore con­nections and reson­ances with regions across space. This
was the ap­proach taken by the second ex­hib­ition—Museum global—
which, as its sub­title sug­gests, used micro­histories as a cura­torial de­vice
to make tan­gible a global matrix of shared con­cerns and local art­istic
initia­tives. The ex­hib­ition par­cours allowed visit­ors to follow the logicof the indi­vidual stories fea­tured there, and in doing so un­cover the
tracks of barely ac­know­
ledged net­works, of sites of inter­action, of5jour­nals and uni­versities, all of which force open the binaries positing
the West against the rest. Surrealism in North Africa, the CoBrA group,
Mexican mural­ism, and the Harlem Re­naissance are only a few among
an in­creas­ing number of ex­amples that show modern­ist art to havebeen from its in­ception a multi-centred, always and already trans­
cultured phenom­enon, whose actors dy­namic­ally en­gaged with its sites
in Europe, with­out how­ever pre­suming the universal­ity of the models
they en­countered. Each of the micro-stories show­cased in the ex­hib­ition
took as its start­ing point a site beyond Europe, to then unravel spe­cificissues and con­ditions of the par­ticu­lar local­ity where modern­ist ideas
became a pro­duct­ive site of con­fron­tation and negoti­ation. Though theindi­vidual actors were focused on deal­ing with the situ­ation­al prob­
lem­atics of their own con­texts, their re­sponses to shared or sim­ilar
prob­lems and con­stell­ations allow us to speak of reson­ance or in­directre­ception rather than direct en­counters. Reson­ant micro­histories are
more than a frac­tured plural­ity of stories; they are par­ticu­lar thoughalready global, re­veal­ing syn­chron­icity and co­eval­ity where pre­viously
belated­ness or deriv­ative prac­tices were assumed.
The different approaches that the two exhibitions embody make it
evi­dent that bring­ing regions and nations into a re­lational geog­raphyasks us to simul­taneously delve into local­ities and to navi­gate mul­
tiple scales—the re­gional, the na­tional, and the global. It also means
having to grap­ple with scale from the per­spective of the actors forwhom it be­comes a mode of self-positioning. For in­stance, in a con­textof anti-colonial strug­gle, the nation in sub­jective per­ception is con­flated with local­ity; for the actors en­gaged in that strug­gle it emerges
as some­thing to be re­trieved from the larger, global con­stell­ationof empire. Indeed—and this brings me to what I started with—thena­tional within this con­text emerges for large sections of the oncecolonized regions of the world as a double-edged tool in the makingof the modern. Historic­ally a mobil­izing force for re­claim­ing sover­eignty and chan­nel­ling modern­ist energies, the nation, by the very
logic of its form­ation, ends up repli­cating those colo­nial tem­poral­
ities and hege­monic repre­sen­tational modes it sought to over­turn, an
aspect that we will encounter in the course of this lecture.
Let me now zoom into the context I wish to investigate here, whichis that of South Asia. There are different paths I could take, for the6story of modern­ism in South Asia is as multi­faceted as it is varied, andany at­tempt to char­acter­ize its sev­eral cur­rents and di­vergent trails
as a single and dis­tinct­ive mode ends up being a vexed pro­cess. It is
not my in­ten­tion to re­capitu­late an en­compass­ing story of modern­ist ex­peri­ments in the sub­continent; instead I have chosen to follow
the tra­ject­ories of certain indi­vidual actors across the scales they tra­versed and ask how these tra­ject­ories were con­sti­tutive for art­istic
modern­ism, which I wish to study from a per­ipheral lo­cation, as are­lational phenom­enon. I should also per­haps point out that re­lation­al­ity en­com­passes, to­gether with inter­sections and en­tangle­ments,
also re­fusals, failed con­nections, or dis­ruptions. Global his­tories havejust begun to pay atten­tion to such phenom­ena.6 I will problem­atize
this issue in order to signal the possi­bility that the urge to be ‘global’
could also become a trap.
My account of actors begins with the art historian Stella Kram­risch(1896–1993), a name cer­tainly known among scholars of South Asianart, though a ser­ious schol­arly en­gage­ment with her work is still
await­ed des­pite her enor­mous product­ivity.7 She has been equallyover­looked in art histories in the West, even though she was an Aus­
trian who stud­ied in Vienna and wrote and pub­lished in German,espe­cially in the early dec­ades of her schol­arly life. The story ofKram­risch’s life un­folds across three con­tinents. She com­pleted her
doctor­ate on early Bud­dhist art from Sanchi and Bharhut under thesuper­vision of Josef Strzygow­ski and Max Dvořák at the Uni­versityof Vienna. In 1919, she moved to London as an inter­war emi­grée andcon­tinued her schol­arly pur­suits. It was here that she met Rabin­dranath Tagore, and follow­ing his in­vitation moved to the newly
founded uni­versity Visva Bharati in Santini­ketan in 1921. In the years
that followed, Kram­risch became an import­ant schol­arly voice who
took on the role of a cul­tural medi­ator to make what she dis­cerned asthe ‘inner affin­ity’ between Indian and Euro­pean art trad­itions vis­ible
The recently instituted Käte Hamburger Research Centre at the LMU
Munich, which defines its thematic focus as ‘global dis:connect’, is one suchre­search enterprise.
7
A recent work exploring Kramrisch’s life and scholarship through a femin­
ist lens is Jo Ziebritzki, Stella Kramrisch: Kunsthistorikerin zwischen Europa undIndien. Ein Beitrag zur Depatriarchalisierung der Kunstgeschichte (Marburg, 2021).
6

7

and grasp­able to audi­ences in Europe and India through reg­ular actsof cross-cultural trans­lation.8 On the one hand, she wrote in German
to intro­duce Indian art to a German-speaking public. On the other, she
lec­tured to artists and stu­dents at Kala Bhavana, the newly formed art
school of the Visva Bharati, on the art of Europe from the Gothic to
im­pression­ism and post-impressionism.
Modernism in Santiniketan at this time was primarily in­formed by
East Asian art; at the same time, it drew im­pulses from the in­digenous
folk and craft aes­thetic of Bengal. Into this con­text Kram­risch intro­
duced modern Euro­pean art to­gether with a lan­guage of formal­ist art
crit­icism with which to write the story of trad­itional as well as modern
art. This vocabu­lary found its way into her pro­lific writings on a rangeof sub­jects, from ancient Indian sculp­ture to the cubist forays of theartist Gaganen­dranath Tagore (1867–1938), and left a last­ing impact
on emer­gent art crit­ical writing during the 1920s and 1930s.9 In add­
ition, she initi­ated and cur­ated an un­usual ex­hib­ition of ex­pression­ist
works from Ger­many in Cal­cutta in 1922, a subject to which I willsoon return.
Before that let me focus on Kramrisch’s role as cultural medi­atorof Indian art and its his­tory—that is, her am­bition to make Indianart known to a primar­ily West­ern reader­ship. To this am­bition she
brought her schol­
arly skills ac­
quired primar­
ily at the Uni­
versityof Vienna, fol­lowed by a stint in Eng­land, and ultim­ately en­richedby her direct en­counter with sites, prac­tices, and objects in India.
Her pro­lific writings fur­nished an art histor­ical narra­tive no longer
depend­ent on ethno­logical or anti­quarian stud­ies, two frames that
had character­ized con­temporary per­spectives on Indian art, both in
the German-speaking regions of Europe and in colo­nial India. Amongthe signifi­cant writings of this time ad­dressed to a German reader­ship, two stand out: the mono­graph Grund­züge der indischen Kunst,
pub­lished in 1924, three years after Kram­risch arrived in India, andthe chap­ter of some 135 pages on the art of the Indian sub­continentthat she con­trib­uted to the sixth volume of Anton Springer’s Hand­buch
Stella Kramrisch, ‘Indian Art and Europe’, Rupam, 11 (1922), 81–6.
Joseph M. Dye III, ‘A Bibliography of the Writings of Stella Kram­risch(1919–1981)’, in Barbara Stoler Miller (ed.), Exploring India’s Sacred Art: Select­ed
Writings of Stella Kramrisch (New Delhi, 1994), 35–48.
8
98

der Kunstgeschichte, published in 1929.10 This volume of Springer’s
survey was entitled Die ausser­
europäische Kunst; it was edited by
the sin­ologist Curt Glaser to re­spond to a grow­ing inter­est in nonEuropean art, under­pinned—as the pre­face claimed—by the desire to
break free from a Medi­terranean class­ical canon.11 This trend was partof a historio­graphical cur­rent in German-language art his­tory called
Welt­kunst­geschichte (world art his­tory), about which I have writ­ten indetail else­where.12 Welt­kunst­geschichte had emerged in re­sponse to thein­flux of objects from Asia and Africa into Euro­pean mu­seums, whichchal­lenged the discip­line of art his­tory—hither­to fix­ated on class­ical
an­tiquity—to find explana­tory para­digms to make sense of this newreper­toire. This strain of art his­tory was in­spired by anthro­pology,social psych­
ology, and not least Darwin­
ian theor­
ies; it sought tolocate the ‘origins’ of art (in the earli­est soci­eties) in order to estab­lish
a relation­ship be­tween art and the stages of develop­ment of human­
kind. Art, how­ever ex­pansively the ex­ponents of Welt­kunst­geschichte
may have de­fined it, always served as a key to access a cul­ture. The
state of develop­ment of a group of people could be read off from thema­terial sur­face of any of its objects, be it an archaeo­logical frag­ment,a carpet, a bronze deity, a cave draw­ing, or a paint­ed scroll. If a par­ticu­lar art is deemed raw or ugly, the same must be in­ferred about its
makers.
Kramrisch instead brought her training in formalist art his­tory
as well as her study of San­skrit aes­thetics to her writings. This ap­
proach regis­tered a shift from the evolutionist-cum-anthropologicalorient­ation of Welt­kunst­geschichte. Indian art, Kram­risch sought todemon­strate, was neither redu­cible to ‘orna­ment’, nor to be stud­ied asa source of un­spoilt forms that prom­ised a new begin­ning for West­ern modern­ism. Her ac­count ap­proached the sub­ject as a dis­tinct fieldthat merited ser­ious study using methods iden­tical to those de­ployed
to investi­gate Euro­pean art. For the con­text of South Asia too, Kram­risch’s ap­proach in­volved an import­ant taxo­nomic shift. At the time
Stella Kramrisch, Grundzüge der indischen Kunst (Hellerau, 1924); Anton
Springer and Curt Glaser (eds.), Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, vol. vi: Die
ausser­europäische Kunst (Leipzig, 1929).
11
Curt Glaser, ‘Vorwort’, in id. and Springer (eds.), Die ausser­europäische Kunst.
12
See Juneja, Can Art History be Made Global?, ch. 1.
109

of her arrival in India, a large number of actors from a range of pro­fessional groups were in­volved with Indian objects: archae­ologists,
anthro­pologists, photog­raphers, and makers of plas­ter casts on the
one hand, and col­lectors, offi­cials, and keepers of an­tiquities in mu­
seums on the other. The status accord­ed to these objects, how­ever,re­mained a sub­ject of contro­versy. Dis­cussions took place primar­ily
within a colo­nial con­text of col­lection, adminis­tration, and know­ledge
pro­duction. The terms used to desig­nate the objects ranged fromidols to arte­facts or from an­tiquities to curi­osities, de­pend­ing on theirproven­ance and their indi­vidual tra­ject­ories.13 The cate­gory of art, or
fine art, be­longed to a securely guard­ed domain whose keepers were
not yet ready to accord Indian objects an entry. In the work of colo­nial
schol­ars, a discip­line fix­ated on class­ical Greek civil­ization con­tinued
to pro­vide the norma­tive frame­work within which aes­thetic qual­ity
was evaluated.
As her sojourn in India progressed, Kramrisch’s scholar­ship turned
primar­ily to the domain of Hindu sculp­ture and temple archi­tecture,
where she located the prim­ordial prin­ciples of aes­thetic pro­duction.
Her magnum opus, The Hindu Temple, repre­sents a crystal­lization ofher syn­thetic ap­proach that viewed the temple as a sym­bolic imageof the cosmos real­ized through the integ­rity of archi­tectural forms,
sculp­tures, myths, ritual prac­tice, and meta­physical con­ceptions, as
they are visual­ized in the eye and mind of the wor­shipper.14 As withher con­temporary Ananda Coomara­swamy, the form­ative role of Is­
lamic trad­itions and prac­tices that came in the wake of cen­turies of
migra­tion from West and Cen­tral Asia finds no place in Kram­risch’s
oeuvre, though unlike Coomara­swamy her ap­proach was less depend­ent on ab­stract meta­physics and more rooted in con­crete objects andimages—visual, material, and literary.
Strange though it may sound, the prolific output of this Vien­nese
schol­ar can be seen as pro­viding a blue­print for national­ist art his­tory
in the years follow­ing the emer­gence of India as an in­depend­ent nation
state, though this is rarely ac­know­ledged. Her formal­ist methods,
Discussed in Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, 1997), ch.
3. See also Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of Euro­pean Re­
actions to Indian Art (Oxford, 1977).
14
Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple, 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1946).
13

10which re­placed anthro­pology to dig­nify objects as art, proved useful intaking the art of the erst­while colony out of the zone of ‘other­ness’. The
dis­course of differ­ence that per­vades Kram­risch’s under­stand­ing ofIndian art proved to be equally attract­ive to Indian schol­ars seek­ing to
rebut the colo­nial casti­gation of its in­adequacies. National­ist scholar­
ship too searched for the prim­ordial sources of art­istic creativ­ity inan an­cient Hindu past, while sub­ject­ing a more recent, millenniumlong Is­lamic pres­ence to era­sure. It priv­ileged the tran­scend­ental­ist
dimen­sion of art pro­duction and strove to place art­works within an
in­digenous know­ledge system wait­ing to be ex­cavated from aes­thetic
or philo­sophical texts. National­ist art his­tory in this sense was equallya prod­uct of trans­cultur­ation to disciplin­ary ap­proaches and methods
formed elsewhere, which had unfolded through a history of con­tact
among actors across scales.
Recent years have seen an emergence of interest in Stella Kram­risch, who has been valor­ized as a cul­tural broker. A high point of
this cele­bration of her per­sona is the ex­hib­ition I men­tioned earlier
which she cur­ated in 1922, now known as the Cal­cutta Bau­haus ex­
hib­ition. This show has in recent years been singled out, both in art
histor­ical ac­counts and in global cura­torial pro­jects, as a found­ational
moment in the his­tory of modern­ism, as a har­binger of a ‘trans­culturalavant-garde’—a valor­ization that de­serves a closer, critical look.15 The
ex­hib­ition itself, which opened in Decem­ber 1922 in the rooms of the
Indian Soci­ety of Ori­ental Art in the heart of colo­nial Cal­cutta, broughtsome 250 works from Weimar to Cal­cutta. These works com­prised
primar­ily prints, wood­cuts, and water­colours by lead­ing artists of ex­pression­ist and ab­stract cur­rents, including Lyonel Fein­inger, WassilyKan­dinsky, Sophie Körner, Gerhard Marcks, Georg Muche, Oskar
Schlem­mer, Paul Klee, and not least Johannes Itten, who was respon­sible for select­ing the ex­hibits and organ­izing their trans­fer at theGerman end. The works were in­tended from the start not only for ex­
hib­ition, but also for sale to inter­ested buyers.16 Detailed in­form­ation
See e.g. Regina Bittner and Kathrin Rhomberg (eds.), The Bauhaus in Cal­
cutta: An Encounter of the Cosmopolitan Avant-Garde (Ostfildern, 2013).
16
Contrary to the long-held view that the initia­tive to organ­ize a show ofworks from the Bau­haus came from Rabin­dranath Tagore, ar­chival docu­
ments, in­cluding Kram­risch’s corres­pond­ence with Johannes Itten, have now
15

11

on the cura­torial aspects of the show has long re­mained elu­sive,
though some has recently come to light, in­cluding the ex­hib­ition cata­
logue, which had for many years been un­trace­able. It now reveals thata broad cross-section of Indian artists from Cal­cutta fea­tured in theevent.17 Their work was in­formed by vary­ing interpret­ations of what
it meant to be ‘modern’, yet did not reveal an overt resem­blance toor even affin­ities with the formal lan­guage and pic­torial con­cerns ofBau­haus modern­ism. What joined the two was a shared re­jection ofaca­demic natural­ism, intro­duced to India via colo­nial art schools. The
art world in Cal­cutta was div­ided among those who painted in this‘West­ern’ idiom and those who—from a national­ist pos­ition—re­jected
it in favour of a more nativ­ist return to pre­modern styles.18 The worksof the Bau­haus and Cal­cutta artists could thus be brought to­gether
by a cura­torial hand, even though their motiv­ating im­pulses dif­fered
and their under­stand­ing of modern­ist form re­mained pic­torially dis­similar. At the Indian Soci­ety of Oriental Art, the two sets of exhibits
were dis­played in ad­jacent but separ­ate rooms, so there is little evi­
dence of any form of en­counter. If any­thing, the event of 1922 madevis­ible the deep fault-lines within the Cal­cutta art world, high­light­ing
the re­traction into ‘Indian­ness’ as one claim to modern­ity. In the end
only one work was sold—a paint­ing by Sophie Körner. The buyer wasnone other than Rabin­dranath Tagore.
In 2013, the event of 1922 was resurrected by a collabora­tive cura­torial and schol­arly project to re­construct the Cal­cutta ex­hib­ition at theBau­haus Foun­dation in Dessau, with a view to re­framing the his­toryof this avant-garde German in­sti­tution as a global and cosmo­politan
under­taking.19 The show was an am­bitious cura­torial ex­peri­ment that
estab­lished beyond doubt that she was the one who initi­ated and con­cept­
ual­ized the show; see Kris K. Manjapra, ‘Stella Kram­risch and the Bau­haus inCal­cutta’, in R. Siva Kumar (ed.), The Last Harvest: The Paint­ings of Rabin­dranath
Tagore (Ahmedabad, 2011), 34–40, at 34.
17
A detailed review of the exhibition—in all likelihood authored by Kram­risch—names several of the partici­
pating Indian artists and con­tains six
re­pro­ductions of ex­hibited works. See Anon., ‘The Four­teenth Annual Ex­hib­ition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art’, Rupam, 13 (1923), 14–18.
18
Discussed extensively in Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India
1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 9.
19Bittner and Rhomberg (eds.), The Bauhaus in Calcutta.

12sought to ‘restage’20 the 1922 event, though without any of its works,
which have been lost. It was there­fore more of a simu­lation than a pre­cise re­construc­tion, though it was cast as an ex­ample of ‘trans­culturalmodern­ism’, a label that raises many ques­tions. A word of caution isthere­fore in order in the face of an eager, un­equiv­ocal valor­iza­tion ofwhat was no doubt an un­usual event as a har­binger of a ‘cosmo­politan
avant-garde’.
The Calcutta Bauhaus exhibition of 1922 is instead an ex­ample of
how certain global pro­cesses, while pro­pelled by the humanist-cumvanguard spirit of indi­vidual actors, falter in the face of contin­gencies
of local prac­tice and fault-lines within sites where they unfold, so thatthe in­tend­ed aims of indi­vidual initia­tives prove to be at best only
par­tially achiev­able. This in turn raises ques­tions about the criteria
scholar­ship de­ploys to judge the long-term effects of such pro­cesses.
Our eval­uation often tends to rest, at least in part, on spe­cific intel­
lectual predi­
lections and philo­sophical con­victions of our times.
In­stead, ex­amples such as this one urge us to fur­ther nuance our
vocabu­lary as we unpack the morph­ology of trans­cultur­ation, and to
make place for failed con­nections, so we can speak more pre­cisely andplaus­ibly across dis­parate contexts.
The second actor whose trajectory—again across scales—I wish
to trace here is an artist, Francis Newton Souza (1924–2002). Souza,a Chris­tian from Goa, was one of the found­ing mem­bers of the21
Progressive Artists’ Group, which was con­sti­tuted as a col­lect­ive
20
The term is taken from Saloni Mathur, ‘The Exhibition as “Re-Job”: Re­construct­ing the Bau­haus in Bengal’, in Bittner and Rhomberg (eds.), The
Bau­haus in Calcutta, 191–9, at 191.
21
A photograph taken in 1950 that documents the formation of the groupcan be found online in Ranjit Hoskote, ‘Requiem for a Pioneer’, Art in Amer­ica, 20 Dec. 2012, at [https://www.artnews.com/gallery/art-in-america/
aia-photos/requiem-for-a-pioneer/], accessed 19 Jan. 2023. It shows a mixed
group of Indians and Europeans—artists, critics, con­noisseurs, and gallery
owners—exuding optimism and solidarity, assembled in the some­whatcramped space of an exhibition gallery. The paintings hanging on the wallsin the back­ground are recog­nizable as the work of the artist and member ofthe group, M. F. Husain (1915–2011), seated in the front row (fifth from left).
The owner of the gallery, Kekoo Gandhy (1920–2012) (standing, second fromright, wearing a striped tie) was one of independent India’s earliest gal­lerists

13enterprise in 1947, the year of India’s independence. Six young men,22
all mi­grants to Bombay, came together with another small groupof Jewish emi­grés from Cen­tral Europe who had sought refuge in
Bombay in the 1930s, having es­caped the Nazi regime. What joined
the members of the group was an op­position to colonial­ism and fasc­ism, which also reson­ated with crit­iques of West­ern human­ism in aworld re­cover­ing from the trauma of war and geno­cide. De­colonialana­lyses of lib­eral human­ism’s com­plicity in up­hold­ing colo­nial vio­
lence found ex­pression in the domain of art, be it in Ni­geria, Egypt,
Viet­nam, or Indo­nesia. Every­where, cul­tural sover­eignty and indi­vidual auton­omy con­joined in a pro­duct­ive ten­sion to seek out art­istic
and lit­erary forms ade­quate to articu­late the aspir­ations of a modern,cul­turally con­fident, de­colonized sub­jectiv­ity.23
On the Indian subcontinent, the liberation from colonialism went
hand in hand with the trauma of partition. This was pre­ceded by adevas­tating famine in Bengal and a communist-led peas­ant up­risingin Telan­gana. All these develop­ments vio­lently de­stabil­ized the ideaof the ‘modern’, built on nos­talgia for the past. In­stead, cul­ture wasseen to play a cru­cial role in the move­ment for na­tional sover­eignty
and to free an en­slaved econ­omy. The artists who came to­gether towho helped give shape to the infrastructure of an emerging art world. The
photograph has been reproduced in several works: Yashodhara Dalmia, The
Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives (New Delhi, 2001), fig. 20; Karin
Zitze­witz, The Art of Secular­ism: The Cul­tural Polit­ics of Modern­ist Art in Con­
temporary India (London, 2014), fig. 3.5; Sonal Khullar, Worldly Affili­ations:Art­istic Prac­tice, Na­tional Iden­tity, and Modern­ism in India, 1930–1990 (Oak­land,
Calif., 2015), fig. 48; Zehra Juma­bhoy and Boon Hui Tan (eds.), The Pro­gress­
ive Revo­lution: Modern Art for a New India (New York, 2018), fig. 41. Kekoo
Gandhy is discussed by Zitzewitz, The Art of Secularism, ch. 3.
22
Zehra Jumabhoy intriguingly mentions the presence of a female artist,
Bhanu Rajo­padhye Athaiya, within the group, whose name ap­peared oncein a cata­logue of 1953, and who appar­ently soon gave up paint­ing to becomea cos­tume de­signer. Though two of her works are repro­duced in the Asia
Soci­ety ex­hib­ition cata­logue of 2018 men­tioned above, her relation­ship to thegroup re­mains in­conclu­sive; see Zehra Juma­bhoy, ‘A Pro­gress­ive Revo­lution?
The Modern and the Secular in Indian Art’, in ead. and Tan (eds.), The Pro­
gress­ive Revo­lution, 18–19 and figs. 1 and 2.
23
See Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Judgment of Art: Postwar and Artistic Worldli­
ness’, in id., Siegel, and Wilmes (eds.), Postwar, 20–41.

14form a ‘pro­gressive group’ en­gaged with sev­eral cur­rents: they looked
out to Mexi­can mural­ism, to Négri­tude, and to the power­ful lan­guagesof ex­pression­ist art brought by the exiles from Aus­tria, all of whichcata­lysed their en­
thusi­
asm into product­
ivity. Bombay modern­ism
sur­vived on a meagre budget, min­imal infra­structure, and throughthe sup­port of indi­vidual sym­pathizers. Its members at the same time
had re­course to a spe­cific self-fashioning that drew heavily on theroman­tic habitus of Euro­pean modern­ism. In other words, they styled
them­selves as a col­lect­ive of bo­hemian artists living on the edge ofpov­erty, bonded by their valor­ization of re­bellion per se and a deeply
masculin­ist ethos.
Within the Progressive Artists’ Group, the ‘progressive’ was sin­gled out in the group’s mani­festos as stand­ing for un­trammel­led
free­dom to ex­peri­ment with form; yet their pic­torial choices worked
against the domin­ance or iso­lation of formal­ism. In­stead, they set out
to re­think the polit­ical, the per­sonal, the pop­ular, and the every­day
as dy­
namic­
ally ex­pressed in paint, colour, and fac­ture. The pre­occupation with the human sub­ject trig­gered ex­peri­ments with thehuman form in vari­ous states, ranging from the heroic–statuesque andthe volup­tuous to the de­prived pushed to the edge of pre­carity. How­ever, the qual­ities and the sub­jects that artists of the group select­edfrom Euro­pean modern­ist idioms were those already in­sti­tution­al­ized in the West rather than the younger, more radical avant-garde
pos­itions that came with surreal­
ism or Dada. Their sub­jects—themodern city, monu­mental­ized peas­ants, workers, and prosti­tutes, themar­ginal figure of the rag-picker, and above all the cele­bration of thefemin­ine as a nur­tur­ing force for a male artist’s creativ­ity—were alla direct legacy of a Euro­pean canon, ready to be in­fused with local
per­sonae, sensi­bilities, and stories. For in­stance, the in­tense modern­
ist pre­occupation with the female nude lent itself to easy assimil­ation
within an ‘Indian’ trad­ition of erotic re­ligious art; for artists such as
Akbar Padam­see (1928–2020), K. H. Ara (1914–85), Souza, and espe­
cially Husain, sen­suous feminin­ity was a paean to the fecund­ity ofIndian visual cul­ture. Work by Souza grafted the lan­guage of bronze
statues and temple sculp­tures on to the modern­ist genre of the nude.
Ara’s nude figures drew atten­tion to the role of the Indian bo­hemianartist living in a squal­id Bombay garret. He made no bones of the fact
15

that his models were prosti­tutes from the red-light district of cen­tral
Bombay close to where he lived.24
Similarly, a celebration of the rural and the marginal as a counterimage of the industrialized urban—a repre­sen­tational trope char­acter­istic of much of nineteenth-century Euro­pean art25—reson­atedwith the Gan­dhian valor­iza­tion of the village. A con­den­sation of thistrans­lational praxis is Zameen, an early work by M. F. Husain, whose
title stands for both Earth and land.26 The paint­ing on canvas extends
hori­zontally over a width of some five and a half metres, taking on
the qual­ity of a frieze. It is a non-narrative en­semble of com­part­ments,
two-dimensional forms, em­blems, and picto­graphs, brought to­gether
in a self-consciously ex­peri­mental idiom. Its vivid details—a peas­
ant till­ing the land with a pair of bulls, a woman win­now­ing grain,a dancer, a woman churn­ing milk, an­other giving birth, re­ligious
sym­bols such as the wheel, the foot­print associ­ated with the Buddha,
Vishnu, and the prophet Muham­mad, the hand evoking Fatima—
are both an in­vent­ory and com­ponents of a myth­ology of the young
nation. This em­phasis on the nation was an open one, turned in­wards
as well as looking out­wards. No contra­diction was felt in cre­ating an
art for the nation that was em­bedded in a global con­text.
Yet the collective life of the group did not endure for long fol­low­ing
in­depend­ence. Three of its artists, in­cluding Souza, mi­grated to metro­
politan centres—London, Paris, New York. They decided to turn theirbacks on the ‘develop­mental national­ism’27 of the Nehru­vian years
24
Souza, Padamsee, and Husain were all tried for obscenity; Husain was sub­sequently accused of ‘hurt­ing re­ligious senti­ments’. In each case, the artists’de­fence rested on the art histor­ical evi­dence of Indian ‘trad­ition’. See e.g.
the full text of the judge­ment in the Padam­see case, pub­lished by Mulk Raj
Anand, the editor of Marg: ‘Judg­ment in the Trial of Akbar Padam­see for Al­
leged “Ob­scene Paint­ings” ‘, Marg, 7 (1954), 90–1; also Zitzewitz, The Art ofSec­ular­ism, 86.
25
Monica Juneja, Peindre le paysan: L’image rurale dans la peinture française deMillet à Van Gogh (Paris, 1998).
26
Zameen can be viewed online at [https://artsandculture.google.com/
asset/zamin-maqbool-fida-husain/iwHUdYLtb88WQg?hl=en], accessed 24
Jan. 2023.
27
The term is taken from Atreyee Gupta, ‘After Bandung: Transacting the
Nation in a Postcolonial World’, in Enwezor, Siegel, and Wilmes (eds.),

16

that, though it valor­ized cul­ture in the ser­vice of the nation, privil­
eged genres such as murals and public sculp­ture at the ex­pense of an
infra­structure con­genial to more indi­vidual­istic, ex­peri­mental formsof creativ­ity. Aspir­ations to modern­ity during the Nehru­vian years
indeed soon showed that many of the modern­iza­tion pro­grammes ofthe young, now auton­omous nation con­tinued the colo­nial policy ofappro­priating forests and rivers as key sites of re­sources for in­dustry.
In doing so, they ex­tended the ex­pro­priation and marginal­iza­tion oflarge groups of in­habit­ants—classed as tribes (again in con­tin­uitywith colo­nial cen­suses)—who at the same time became objects of apol­itics of both every­day vio­lence and cul­tural nos­talgia.
In 1949 Souza moved to London, becoming thereby a par­tici­pant ina re­verse move­ment: the post-colonial jour­ney of mi­grant art­ists fromthe former col­onies of Asia, Africa, and the Carib­bean into the West­ern metro­politan world.28 This was a trans­form­ative con­juncture in
the story of twentieth-century modern­ism, when indi­vidual his­tories
came to be mapped across (post-)empire and former colony in a fresh
con­nect­ive relation­ship. Souza’s early years in Brit­ain were marked
by iso­lation and pov­erty, as his work en­countered little inter­est in
the art world. Re­views of his work were couched in oriental­ist tropesof the exotic or belated­ness, char­acter­istic of art crit­ical re­sponses tothe pro­ductions of art­ists belong­ing to Asian, African, or Carib­beandia­sporas in Brit­ain. From the start of his art­istic career as a memberof the Pro­gressive Artists’ Group, Souza’s work was a kaleido­scopeof mul­tiple icono­graphic refer­ences—the sculp­tural lan­guage of thenude body appro­priated from Hindu icon­ography, the jagged planesof ex­pression­ist idioms, and, above all, the tor­tuous as well as sub­lime aspects of re­ligion prof­fered by Chris­tian art. His con­tinued anddeep ex­plor­ation of these became a way of identify­ing with his newlo­cation; yet they ran counter to the ex­pect­ations of metro­politan
viewers and critics anxious to ‘read’ diasporic iden­tities through refer­ences to a single locus of origin.
For Souza, Christianity was a bridge that connected him to otherdias­poric com­munities, in par­ticu­lar artists from the Carib­bean. Yet
Postwar, 632–7, at 635.
28
See Sarat Maharaj, ‘The Congo is Flooding the Acropolis: Art in Britain of
the Immigrations’, Third Text, 5/15 (1991), 77–90.

17

it was also more than that: the image of Christ as an in­car­nation of
the tragic was a tool that enabled the artist to inter­vene in the postwar crisis of human­ist values. The en­quiry into the fail­ure of humancivil­iza­tion un­folded in two dir­ections: to re­think the mem­ories ofmass annihil­ation, as in the work of Nietzsche and Sartre; and in
the dis­courses of Négri­tude, as well as Frantz Fanon’s im­passioned
work Black Skin, White Masks, which re­claimed for the once-colonized
the ethical right to bring forth their vision of human­ity. For Souza,
having grown up in the midst of Goa’s pageant-like church imagery,a locally trans­cultured Christian­ity—with its prim­ordial para­doxes ofsuffer­ing, guilt, and the prom­ise of grace—came to be an en­duringforce shaping his life and art. Even as his in­numerable paint­ings anddraw­ings of a suffer­ing Christ were in­jected with un­relieved afflic­tion, even ran­cour, Christian­ity re­mained for the artist a vital sourceof human­ism. His render­ing of Christ im­bibed some of the emo­tions
sur­round­ing the an­guished debates of his time—rage coupled with acasti­gation of colonial­ism’s degra­dation of human­ity.29 The cruci­fied
Christ has been turned in the artist’s work into a black, spindly figure,as if cob­bled to­gether from thorny pieces of wood, with gro­tesquelyjut­ting white teeth, a sig­nature trope in the artist’s re­ligious imagery.
Flanked by two men—one of who is sur­mised to be St John—clad inpatched shirts of red and green, this de­formed triad borders on theedge of carica­ture rather than in­viting com­passion. Souza’s hand­ling
reson­ates with the sim­ilarly brutal treat­ment of re­ligious themes byhis con­tempor­aries, such as Francis Bacon (1909–92), articu­lating the
deeply dis­turbed psychic repre­sen­tation of the human subject thathaunted the imagin­ations of post-war generations.
London also afforded Souza the opportunity to study Goya’s
works in the National Gallery, and from these came the com­pulsion
to en­gage with another face of Christian­ity: the theme of hyp­ocrisy
tied to cler­ical author­ity. The artist’s render­ing of Chris­tian saints
bris­tles with ambiva­lence. St Sebas­tian, ironic­ally titled Mr Sebas­
tian, dons a dark suit and tie very much in the style of the numer­ous
carica­tural por­traits of ‘gentle­men of our times’ paint­ed by the artist:
29
See F. N. Souza, Crucifixion (1959), at [https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/
souza-crucifixion-t06776], accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

18

face with­out a fore­head, beard­ed, bulging eyes, and the signa­turepro­truding razor-teeth.30 Arrows that had once pierced the saint’s
inno­cent body and pro­vide the clue to his martyr­dom, are now stuckwith a ven­geance into the ‘gentle­man’s’ black face and neck. Theseand other works brought Souza favour­able crit­ical atten­tion during
the 1950s—he partici­pated in group ex­hib­itions, while the newly
opened Gallery One hosted a one-man show of his work, gener­ating
sales and re­views by emi­nent critics such as John Berger and Edwin
Mullins.
The mid 1960s brought forth a series of ‘black paintings’, an­choredwithin a com­plex net­work of art­istic prac­tices that char­acter­ized a
global modern­ism of the post-war years. Sev­eral read­ings of theseenig­matic works have been prof­fered. While Okwui Enwezor lo­catesthem in the dis­cursive frame of a ‘black­ness con­sti­tuting a resist­ance
to an ideal­izing and blind­ing white­ness’,31 Aziz Kurtha con­jecturesthat these works were a homage to Goya’s Pinturas negras of the lastyears of his life, from around 1819.32 A con­nection between Black­ness,
civil rights move­ments, and the resist­ance to racial segre­gation andvio­lence has been frequently sought in works by artists in­vesti­gating
the ten­sions between human­ism and colonial­ism,33 yet the sub­jectof racism was only rarely ad­dressed in Souza’s oeuvre. In the con­text of one par­ticu­lar paint­ing, Negro in Mourn­ing, that stands apartfrom so much of his other work in that it exudes a deep em­pathy andmelan­choly for its sub­ject, the artist refers to the period of height­ened
racism in which it was paint­ed, sug­gest­ing a ges­ture of mourn­ing
A reproduction of Mr Sebastian (1955) can be seen in Neysela da Silva-Reed,
Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945–1965. Learning Resource (London, 2022),
at [https://www.barbican.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/2022-04/
Postwar%20Modern%20A4%20Teacher%20Resource%20large%20text%20
v1.pdf], ac­cessed 15 Sept. 2022. For ex­amples from the ‘gentle­men of ourtimes’ series, see Rob Dean and Giles Tillot­son (eds.), Modern Indian Paint­ing:
Jane and Kito de Boer Collection (Ahmedabad, 2019), Figs. 78, 79, 80, 81, 85.
31
Enwezor, ‘The Judgment of Art’, 32.
32
Aziz Kurtha, Francis Newton Souza: Bridging Western and Indian Modern Art(Ahmedabad, 2006), 39.
33
Enwezor, ‘The Judgment of Art’, 32–3; Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Remember­ing
Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition’, in Enwezor, Siegel, andWilmes (eds.), Postwar, 350–5.
30

19

for a victim of racist vio­lence.34 Souza’s works in the Black on Black
series emerge above all as a formal­ist ex­peri­ment in their re­fusal tochoose be­tween the un­productive binary of ab­straction and figur­
ation, in­stead delib­erately com­bining figur­ation with fac­ture.35 The
1960s saw sim­ilar ex­peri­ments in black among ex­pression­ist artists
such as Robert Rauschen­berg and Ad Rein­hardt as an act of ex­ploring
the limits of the vis­ible.36 By allow­ing the figure and the ground tomerge and inter­penetrate, the black paint­ings demand of the viewer
an in­tense act of look­ing, almost an act of ex­cavation of the resist­ant forms deeply en­sconced in the thick im­pasto of black-on-black
paint. Though immedi­ately suggest­ive of a classic melan­choly, theworks are a demon­stration of tremen­dous skill both as paint­er andas draughts­man. They are also de­signed as a chal­lenge to tech­niquesof mech­anical repro­duction, de­mand­ing light at par­ticu­lar angles in
34
The work, part of the collection of the Birmingham Museums Trust, is re­pro­duced in Shelly Souza, ‘Shelly Souza’s Elegy to A Negro in Mourn­ing’,
Sotheby’s.com, 7 July 2020, at [https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/
shelley-souzas-elegy-to-a-negro-in-mourning], accessed 10 Jan. 2021. Souza
cites her father’s mes­sage of 16 Oct. 1997 to the Birming­ham Mu­seum and Art
Gallery: ‘Al­though I wasn’t in­volved in any un­pleasant­ness over skin colour
and have never been, preju­dice is a fact of life. Being born in India I know
better. But the black man, the negro, had the worst of it. In fact, it was inLondon that I became aware of this black–white dis­crimin­ation. Much of it
had to do with sex. It was danger­ous for a black man, a negro, to be seen witha white woman!’ The artist’s state­ment draws atten­tion to the nuances withinprac­tices of racial segre­gation that dis­tinguish be­tween Brown and Black.
Though he ex­peri­enced racism in post-war Brit­ain, he also saw him­self as anem­pathetic ob­server of ‘black–white discrimination’.
35
In 1966, London’s Grosvenor Gallery hosted a solo exhibition of Souza’s
works en­titled Black Art and Other Paintings; in 2013, it fea­tured many of thesemono­chromatic works in a fresh show, FN Souza, Black on Black. See [https://www.grosvenorgallery.com/exhibitions/126-fn-souza-black-on-blackfrieze-masters/overview/], accessed 20 January 2021.
36
See the catalogue of the exhibition at Haus der Kunst, Munich: Steph­anie Rosen­thal (ed.), Black Paint­ings: Robert Rauschen­berg, Ad Rein­hardt, Mark
Rothko, Frank Stella (Ostfildern, 2006). A recent essay on Souza’s black paint­
ings, which ap­peared soon after this lec­ture was de­livered, exam­ines theinter­sections of ‘the polit­ics and poet­ics of color’ within the larger con­text of
post-war con­ditions; see Atreyee Gupta, ‘Francis Newton Souza’s Black Paint­
ings: Postwar Transactions in Color’, Art Bulletin, 103/4 (2021), 111–37.

20

order for the viewer to be able to pene­trate the layers of paint andget a glimpse of the images con­cealed in the dark depths. At once apalp­able ma­terial sur­face and a meta­physical prop­osition, a paint­ing
acts as a space that refers to an­other space, chal­lenging, ex­hort­ing theviewer to grasp figure and ground in their com­plex or­ganic unity.
These works, no doubt an import­ant con­cept­ual develop­ment withinex­pression­ism, already ges­tured in the dir­ection of art across theAt­lantic. Indeed, soon after this ex­
hib­ition, which was strangelyover­looked by art crit­icism in the mid 1960s, Souza left Eng­land for
the USA where he spent the re­mainder of his life, re­turn­ing to India
shortly before his death in 2002.
This account has meandered across scales to under­line the ex­haus­tion of dif­fusion­ist models of art­istic modern­ism, and in­stead
to see modern­ism as a deeply re­lational phenom­enon, what­ever site
we choose as a start­ing point for an in­vesti­gation. From this per­spective, the explana­tory poten­tial of a crit­ical global­ity that draws
on prin­ciples of trans­cultur­ation as an ana­lytical tool ex­ceeds that ofthe ‘trans­national’, fre­quently used in global stud­ies to tran­scend thebound­aries of indi­vidual nation states, with­out how­ever dis­rupt­ing
the nexus be­tween the en­tities ‘nation’ and ‘cul­ture’. Trans­cultur­ationdis­connects cul­ture from the nation state by un­pack­ing its work­ings
and de­line­ating its in­ternal fault-lines. At the same time, ar­guing fromthe per­spective of an art histor­ian, I have pro­posed that the na­tional
is not entirely in­commen­surable with the global, this being an­other
under­lying prem­ise of much of global his­tory. The relation­ship be­
tween the two that I have sought to ex­plore in this lec­ture (and which
I dis­cuss more ex­ten­sively in my forth­coming book) is more com­plex
and contra­dictory in view of the nation’s role in resist­ing the vio­lenceof con­quest and colo­niza­tion on the one hand, and its need to stabil­ize its self-representation through a play of power, dis­possession, andevery­day vio­lence on the other.
And yet: relational geographies urge us to refuse the choice of thenation as a unit of investi­gation and char­acter­izing prin­ciple of theenter­prise of art-making, even while ac­know­ledging its poten­tial as
an imagined realm for art­istic pos­itions, a life-giving force in the faceof colonial­ism and neo-colonialism. When adopted as an auto­maticges­ture to frame sur­veys and units of art histor­ical in­vesti­gations,21the ana­lytical cate­gory of the nation is bound to lapse into the ethno­graphic re­flexes that under­
pin such a choice. Work­ing with andbeyond the nation in­volves using that cate­gory to func­tion as a pointof crit­ical in­terro­gation, built around ques­tions rather than answers.
It can also serve as an opportun­ity to redraw the matrix of refer­ences
within which concepts of culture might be recast.

22German Historical Institute London Annual Lectures
1979 Samuel Berrick Saul, Industrialisation and De-Industrialisation? The Inter­action of the German and British Economies before the First World War(London, 1980)
1980 Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Gustav Stresemann: The Revision of Versailles andthe Weimar Parliamentary System (London, 1981)
1981 A. J. P. Taylor, 1939 Revisited (London, 1982)
1982 Gordon A. Craig, Germany and the West: The Ambivalent Relation­ship(London, 1983)
1983 Wolfram Fischer, Germany in the World Economy during the Nineteeth
Century (London, 1984)
1984 James Joll, National Histories and National Historians: Some German andEnglish Views of the Past (London, 1985)
1985 Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Britain and Germany 1800 to 1914: Two Develop­
mental Paths Towards Industrial Society (London, 1986)
1986 Owen Chadwick, Acton, Döllinger and History (London, 1987)
1987 Hagen Schulze, Is there a German History? (London, 1988)
1988 Roger Morgan, Britain and Germany since 1945: Two Societies and Two
Foreign Policies (London, 1989)
1989 Thomas Nipperdey, The Rise of the Arts in Modern Society (London, 1990)
1990 Not published1991 Lothar Gall, Confronting Clio: Myth-Makers and Other Historians (London,
1992)
1992 Keith Robbins, Protestant Germany through British Eyes: A Complex
Victorian Encounter (London, 1993)
1993 Klaus Hildebrand, Reich—Nation-State—Great Power: Reflections on
German Foreign Policy 1871–1945 (London, 1994)
1994 Alan Bullock, Personality and Power: The Strange Case of Hitler and Stalin(London, 1995)
1995 Ernst Schulin, ‘The Most Historical of All Peoples’: Nationalism and the
New Con­struction of Jewish History in Nineteenth-Century Germany(London, 1996)
1996 Michael Howard, The Crisis of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1916–1917(London, 1997)
1997 Johannes Fried, The Veil of Memory: Anthropological Problems when
Considering the Past (London, 1998)
1998 David Blackbourn, A Sense of Place: New Directions in German History(London, 1999)
1999 Gerhard A. Ritter, Continuity and Change: Political and Social Develop­
ments in Germany after 1945 and 1989/90 (London, 2000)
2000 Peter Pulzer, Fog in Channel: Anglo-German Relations in the NineteenthCentury (London, 2001)

2001 Heinrich August Winkler, The Long Shadow of the Reich: Weighing Up
German History (London, 2002)
2002 Not published2003 Werner Paravicini, Fact and Fiction: St. Patrick’s Purgatory and European
Chivalry in the Late Middle Ages (London, 2004)
2004 Anthony J. Nicholls, Always Good Neighbours—Never Good Friends?
Anglo-German Relations 1949–2001 (London, 2005)
2005 Jürgen Osterhammel, Europe, the ‘West’ and the Civilizing Mission(London, 2006)
2006 John Breuilly, Nationalism, Power and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century
Germany (London, 2007)
2007 Stig Förster, The Battlefield: Towards a Modern History of War (London,
2008)
2008 Janet L. Nelson, Opposition to Charlemagne (London, 2009)2009 Hartmut Kaelble, The 1970s in Europe: A Period of Disillusionment or
Promise? (London, 2010)2010 Not published2011 Wolfram Siemann, Metternich’s Britain (London, 2012; open access)2012 Jane Caplan, ‘Jetzt judenfrei’: Writing Tourism in Nazi-Occupied Poland(London, 2013)2013 Ute Frevert, The Moral Economy of Trust: Modern Trajectories (London,
2014)
2014 Not published2015 Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Cultures of Decision-Making (London, 2016)2016 Mary Fulbrook, Subjectivity and History: Approaches to Twentieth-Century
German Society (London, 2017)2017 Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism and Its Critics: A Long-Term View (London,
2018)2018 Not published2019 Ulrike Freitag, Cosmopolitanism in a Global Perspective (London, 2020)
2020 Peter Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy: How Popular Demand (notPoliticians) Made Britain into a Mass Education Society (London, 2021)