Following Indiarsquo;s independence in 1947; Indian artists creating modern works of art sought to maintain a local idiom; an ldquo;Indiannessrdquo; representative of their newly independent nation; while connecting to modernism; an aesthetic then understood as both universal and presumptively Western. These artists depicted Indiarsquo;s precolonial past while embracing aspects of modernismrsquo;s pursuit of the new; and they challenged the Westrsquo;s dismissal of non-Western places and cultures as sources of primitivist imagery but not of modernist artworks. In Art for a Modern India; Rebecca M. Brown explores the emergence of a self-conscious Indian modernismmdash;in painting; drawing; sculpture; architecture; film; and photographymdash;in the years between independence and 1980; by which time the Indian art scene had changed significantly and postcolonial discourse had begun to complicate mid-century ideas of nationalism.Through close analyses of specific objects of art and design; Brown describes how Indian artists engaged with questions of authenticity; iconicity; narrative; urbanization; and science and technology. She explains how the filmmaker Satyajit Ray presented the rural Indian village as a socially complex space rather than as the idealized site of ldquo;authentic Indiardquo; in his acclaimed Apu Trilogy; how the painter Bhupen Khakhar reworked Indian folk idioms and borrowed iconic images from calendar prints in his paintings of urban dwellers; and how Indian architects developed a revivalist style of bold architectural gestures anchored in Indiarsquo;s past as they planned the Ashok Hotel and the Vigyan Bhavan Conference Center; both in New Delhi. Discussing these and other works of art and design; Brown chronicles the mid-twentieth-century trajectory of Indiarsquo;s modern visual culture.
#2426009 in eBooks 2005-03-14 2005-01-02File Name: B003BVJ9D4
Review
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. well-informed but could have dug deeperBy Michael LewynThis fact-filled book profiles three suburbs whose developers sought to be innovative: Irvine near Los Angeles. Columbia between Baltimore and Washington. and the Woodlands near Houston. These suburbs. mostly built in the 1960s/70s/80s. attempted to improve upon typical suburbia in various ways: Irvine by promoting multifamily housing. Columbia by promoting racial integration. and Woodlands by trying to prevent pollution-creating water runoff. As Forsyth points out. these suburbs were successful in many ways: they made money for their developers. and their residents are at least as contented as those of other places.However. these suburbs turned out not to be all that revolutionary in some ways; for example. all three became just as car-dependent as typical suburbs. Was this inevitable? Forsyth does point out that these suburbs had lots of cul-de-sacs (which tends to impair walkability by making people go out of their way to reach destinations). She also notes that the suburbs werent significantly less compact than new urbanist suburbs being built at the time of the book. But at the time of the book. those suburbs were so new that perhaps they werent the best basis for comparison.A more informative discussion would have compared the book to the not-so-car-dependent railroad suburbs of New York. Philadelphia and Washington. Had Forsyth done so. she would have noted how spread out the three "new towns" she profiles were; for example. these suburbs she profiles have densities of 3500-5000 people per square mile. more than many suburbs but fewer than many railroad suburbs such as Bronxville. New York (6700 people per square mile) or Arlington. Va. (over 8.000 per square mile). In addition. one major difference between these three suburbs and railroad suburbs is distance from other transit-oriented areas: these suburbs were all quite far from regional downtowns. while the most transit oriented suburbs are "inner ring" suburbs bordering central cities.
