Eye on India: Words on Water

This Saturday, I attended the opening event of the Eye on India Festival, held at Stanford. Knowing nothing more than what I saw on a poster around campus for the event, I was expecting a literary panel on Indian stories and literarure, contemporary or historical. In actuality, I attended a lecture given by Dan Herwitz, professor of Art History at the University of Michigan, on his family's connection to Indian paintings in the 1960-80s. Although the event was far from what I'd imagined and completely unrelated to narrative theory as we've discussed in class, it succeeded in making contemporary Indian art (something I've never thought much about) into a lesson about history, personality, and the changing direction of the modern world. The general lessons learned apply just as well to written works as to painted ones. I will venture to say that the narrative decision to tell the story of Indian art through anecdote rather than employing the traditional analytic-abstract framework of art history made the event much more enjoyable (it didn't hurt that Herwitz was a good storyteller) and informative.

The lecture, which ran about an hour long, began with some background information about how Herwitz came to be involved with Indian art. His parents, both Jewish art collectors, made several trips to India and fell in love with the culture. At the time, the audience was told, Indian art was a very small culture with almost no global presence. Artists who wanted to exhibit their work for sale themselves had to sit with piles of coins at the front of galleries, to prevent people from coming in and stealing their work right off the walls and being able to provide change in the off chance that someone would want to purchase a piece. Seeing the market in this state actually held appeal for Herwitz’s parents, who were looking for an unexplored niche of the art world to call their own and, in the mid-1960s, a semi-political movement to attach themselves to.

He then recounted how they found their favorite artists and slowly became patrons to many, including Husain, Raza, and Tyeb Mehta. Their works broke from the trend among Indian art to follow in the stylistic footsteps of British landscape paintings, choosing instead to embrace the dynamism at the heart of life in India. Herwitz made the interesting remark that his parents, living in New York, felt that the buzz of Indian life reminded them of their American hometown, and so sought to capture some of that essence in the art they collected. They also chose to eschew abstract works, preferring instead figure paintings that paid homage to the ancient tradition in a modern fashion. By 1990, Indian art had finally emerged on the global art scene and the Herwitz family collection lent many pieces to major museums across the globe.

Overall, the story as a whole effectively aligned the trajectories of a pair of art dealers, Indian artists on the rise, and the Indian art market as a whole, making the tale both personal and historical. What was unclear to me even at the end, however, was why this story was being told at this time. I admit I didn’t have time to stay for what followed the lecture, but the event seemed without any context. Regardless, I was struck by his narrative as a whole, particularly his assertion that the rise of Indian art is an anachronism. In our modern, connected world, no simple narrative outlining the rise of art in developing nations can be drawn, simply because the web of connections and set of possible influences is incredibly incomprehensibly vast. Although this may hold true for painting more so than writing (visual language is universal whereas written language is not), the general argument makes me wonder how the future of the novel will unfold.