Word: modernism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...delight: gods and maharajahs gambol with busty dancing girls, rendered in golds, greens and russets by delicate, squirrel-tail brushes. But the standouts are the paintings of otherworldly subjects, works unlike any others produced in India at the time. Three Aspects of the Absolute, from 1823, is a startlingly modern triptych, with a plain gold panel to evoke the Absolute, followed by two others on which a holy man is depicted merging with the divine essence through yoga. Created by a Rajasthani artist named Bulaki, it jives uncannily with a contemporary aesthetic. The paint - real gold - hums with a depth...
...Botanical Gardens at Kew - makes up the "India Landscape," part of the British Museum's "Indian Summer," a five-month celebration of Indian culture. The exhibition's centerpiece is "Garden and Cosmos," a collection of 54 bold 17th and 19th century paintings from the courts of Jodhpur, in the modern-day state of Rajasthan. Never before seen in Europe, the pictures draw on Rajasthani artists' varied approaches to color and form as well as the miniature techniques of the Mughals. While some subjects are classic - scenes from the Ramayana, or maharajahs daintily sniffing roses in marble palaces - the most spectacular...
...everyone sees the Rothko comparison as a compliment. A Hindustan Times column sniffed that it is a patronizing "reflex of lost Empire" to praise ancient Indian painters through the works of modern Western ones. "The British Museum is a robber's cave and testimonial to the 'engulf and devour' Western worldview that Asia and Africa know intimately to their considerable cost," the column continued. True, the British Museum and Kew Gardens were founded in the 1750s, when Britain bestrode the world. But in a year when a Bollywood-style movie triumphed at the Oscars, when pundits have taken to warning...
...creatures: an Alaska original, raised and ripened in an environment remote, extreme, unfamiliar - and free. A land of self-invention, where no one bats an eye at a mom-deckhand-governor-whatever-comes-next. Ever since John McCain introduced his running mate last year, Palin has been like a modern-day version of the captive specimens hauled back to Europe by explorers of old. Like Squanto in London, she speaks the language - if not always the idiom - of the audiences she fascinates. But she remains, on some level, unknowable...
...region is captured in a recent plan to bulldoze much of Kashgar's historic Old City - an atmospheric, millennia-old warren of mosques and elaborate mud-brick houses - and replace it with a tourist-oriented theme park version, resettling its Uighur population (who were not consulted) in "modern" housing miles away from the city...