https://www.heraldgoa.in/Cafe/Nasreen-Mohamedi-Against-the-Grain/195191
Uncommon paradoxes abound in the art, reputation and startling posthumous
trajectory of Nasreen Mohamedi, the enigmatic modernist who died at 53 in
1990. In the past two decades, her spare, subtle oeuvre – in paintings,
drawings and photographs – has been appropriated wildly divergently by
institutions around the world. In the process, mountains of scattershot
verbiage have piled up about an artist who fundamentally resists
categorization. Thus, it is our good fortune that the landmark
exhibition *Nasreen
Mohamedi, From the Glenbarra Art Museum to India* opened yesterday at
Sunaparanta in Panjim, and we have until 22nd November to directly view an
excellent body of work from one of the most important artists of the 20th
century.
There are so many different takes about this great minimalist that it
inevitably recalls the parable about blind men and the elephant (where each
one imagines the whole based on fragmentary understanding). Way back in
1961, just before this Karachi-born and London-trained adept headed to
Paris, Richard Bartholomew set the pattern with his assessment of “graphics
in the truest sense of the word [and] calligraphy as pure as classical
Chinese.” That pattern of looking to far horizons to describe Mohamedi’s
work has persisted. In the monumental new *20th Century Indian Art: Modern,
Post-Independence Contemporary* (edited by Partha Mitter, Parul Dave
Mukherji and Rakhee Balaram for Thames & Hudson) Grant Watson nails down
the “tendency to discuss Mohamedi’s work in terms other than simply formal
ones, and to feel the need to allude to a range of additional
interpretations.”
Watson cites one list from Geeta Kapur: “Zen Buddhism, Islamic
architecture, Sufi poetry, Persian calligraphy, and a poetics drawn from
nature or, rather, from a culturally favoured geography – desert horizon,
the moon’s life cycle, the Arabian Sea connecting the shores of India and
Arabia. Also modern technology, precision instruments, elegant cars and
heavy cameras, all of which she handled at ease.” But that’s not all. In
her soulful *Elegy For An Unclaimed Beloved: Nasreen Mohamedi 1937-1990* –
it is in Glenbarra Art Museum’s elegant exhibition catalogue – Kapur adds
even more references and allusions: *vacana* poetry, Ananda Coomaraswamy,
Abelard and Heloise, Camus, Malevich and Klee and on and on.
>From the same catalogue, I liked Emilia Terraciano’s refreshingly focused
approach: “Mohamedi’s drawings are the result of careful perceptual
translations of her immediate environment.” She accurately roots this
artist in hard-edged “commitment to abstraction” acknowledging how “that
emerged against the grain of contemporary trends within the Indian context.
In this respect, her work continues to complicate and unsettle categories
within Indian art history.”
Here, of course, is another refraction of the tragedy of the Indian art
world in the 21st century, which spills over with ersatz “glamour” and the
social anxieties of the newly rich, but backs up the hype with almost
nothing of value: nearly zero scholarship, broken authentication, legions
of crooks, and the absence of even the minimal level of connoisseurship
required to cleanse its own fraudulence. In this miasma of mediocrity,
neck-deep in fakes, anyone can say anything. Which brings us directly to
Goa’s own V.S. Gaitonde, another toweringly great abstractionist, who
provides an uncanny doppelgänger to Mohamedi, not least because their
ouevres keep on being subjected to the most ludicrous flights of
critical/theoretical fantasy. There’s an unmistakable symmetry between
their art practices and commercial revivals. The best way to understand one
is alongside the other.
In her outstanding 2016 book *Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde: Sonata of Solitude*,
Meera Menezes describes one of the crucial seedbeds of the
transdisciplinary modernist impulse in India, after the Progressive
Artist’s Group “gradually disbanded"- “In the early 1950s, the art scene
[in postcolonial Bombay] received a fillip with the establishment of the
Jehangir Art Gallery and the Bhulabhai Memorial Institute.” The first one
still flourishes. The latter was “a nerve centre where the variegated
strands of artistic creativity conjoined to spark new ideas and energise
both the Bombay art scene and the artists contributing to it.”
Menezes vividly describes how “an old, two-storey family home was
partitioned to offer much-needed studio space to Gaitonde and the other
artists who worked there – Dashrath Patel, M. F. Husain, Prafulla Joshi,
Madhav Satwalekar, Homi Patel, graphic designers Ralli Jacob and his wife,
ceramic artist Perin, and sculptors Adi Davierwala and Piloo Pochkhanawala.
Later, Tyeb Mehta’s wife, Sakina, ran a little bookshop on the verandah…It
was here that director Ebrahim Alkazi ran his theatre unit’s School of
Dramatic Art and where Ravi Shankar established the Kinnara School of
Music…There were apparently no
