552 BULLETIN DECEMBER 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 4
shared religious ideology, symbolic systems,
iconography, and aesthetics (p. 229). The
pictographic books were not language de-
pendent but "carried a symbol system that
was easily comprehended by anyone trained
in its visual conventions and grammar, re-
gardless of the language spoken. . . . The
painted codices were the active carriers of
translingual signs and the transethnic ideol-
ogy that they recorded. Their very mobility
helped to integrate and spread a single divi-
natory ideology throughout central Mexico"
(p. 230).
The shared iconography, the many cog-
nate almanacs, the very sameness speak to a
broad system of interaction, what Donald
Robertson called, perhaps too grandly but
insightfully, the International Style. The in-
clusion in the Maya Codex Madrid of cos-
mograms structured like those of central
Mexico (and reminiscent of the Fejérváry-
Mayer cosmogram) and the inclusion in the
Maya Codex Dresden of Mexican gods rein-
force Boone s argument for the dispersion
of Mexican ideology (p. 234).
Cycles of Time and Meaning is focused quite
specifically, and in great detail, on deter-
mining the canons of production and inter-
pretation of the central Mexican divinatory
and ritual books and in defining the gen-
eral operational principles of the almanacs.
In this wide-reaching, comprehensive study
of the divinatory manuscripts, Boone's pre-
cise delineation and explication of the var-
ied structures of divinatory manuscripts cre-
ate taxonomies that make the complex
orderly, clear, and comprehensible as a sys-
tem. Boone informs and enlivens this classi-
ficatory approach with thorough readings of
the imagery drawn from her own extensive
research and knowledge and from sixteenth-
century European chroniclers and noted
modern Western scholars. In drawing on
the work of ethnographers who research
modern indigenous practices and ethnohis-
torians such as James Lockhart, a specialist
in the early colonial Nahua people and the
Náhuatl language, to inform both the read-
ings and the underlying principles, Boone
introduces the indigenous voice, thought,
and expression. In doing so, she draws in-
structive parallels between the grammar and
syntax of religious pictorial writing and
Náhuatl and Nahua culture.
In her concluding remarks, Boone makes
an apt analogy between the divinatory paint-
ings as a religious language and modern
graphic expressions of scientific thought:
Like the various notational and model-
ing systems used in science—the charts,
graphs, diagrams, and algebraic and
other notational systems—they [the divi-
natory paintings] were intended to re-
veal the structure and functioning of the
cosmos in all its complexities. Their pur-
pose was to give form to that which is
invisible, to depict and express what is
fundamentally unrepresentable. . . . The
imagery operates not in terms of the lan-
guage spoken by their users but through
conformity to the presuppositions, rules,
and protocols that govern this vistial sys-
tem. The pictography in the books of
fate was its own culturally grounded dis-
course, its own graphic language, one
that crossed ethnic, linguistic, and politi-
cal borders, (p. 238)
Cycles of Time and Meaning is an extraordi- Gramscian relations between power and
nary project that comprehensively synthe-
sizes many lifetimes of scholarly work on the ter's next book, on art in India between
esoteric ancient central Mexican divinatory
manuscripts. Boone's masterful treatment of study we have of that period.^ It is especially
this complex material significantly provides
new insights into the very aspects of it that
have been so controversial. The extensive
use of tables, charts, diagrams, and the a p
pendix of content summaries and diagrams
of all the divinatory manuscripts will be in-
valuable to serious scholar and casual
reader alike. In my opinion. Cycles of Time
and Meaning is an instant classic, and
Boone's comprehensive approach, new in-
terpretations, and meticulous scholarship
will certainly spur new research and new
debates.
ELLEN T. BAIRD is professor of art kistoTy at
the University of Illinois at Chicago [Department
of Art History, 935 West Harrison Street,
University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, III.
60607-7039].
Notes
1. Boone's publications on this topic are too nu-
merous to list. In particular, see Elizabeth Hill
Boone, "Introduction; Writing and Recording
Knowledge," in Writing without Wards: Alternative
Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, ed.
Boone and Walter D. Mignolo (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1994), 3-26; and Stories
in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs
and Mixtees (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2000).
2. As Boone explains (p. 12), the Mesoamerican
painted books in the indigenous tradition are
referred to as "codices"; this applies both to
books painted before the arrival of Europeans
and to colonial manuscripts that are only par-
tially pictorial but are derived from the native
tradition.
PARTHA MITTER
The Triumph of Modernism: India's
Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922-1947 the 1922 Bauhaus exhibition at Calcutta
London: Reaktion Books, 2007. 271 pp.;
100 color ills., 50 b/w. $45.00
Partha Mitter is the most established scholar
of modern South Asian art working in West-
ern academia, and this book continues his
Art Bulletin Vol 90, no. 4 (Dec 2008)
extended prpject of documenting the devel-
opment of art in South Asia since the mid-
nineteenth century. A student of E. H.
Gombrich, his first work. Much Maligned
Monsters, examined Etiropean responses to
Indian (Hindu and Buddhist) art from the
Renaissance to the early twentieth century.
In this work published in 1977, around the
same time as Edward Said's Orientalism, Mit-
ter had pursued a similar argument of mis-
recognition. but without foregrounding the
theoretical armature of Eoucauldian and
knowledge that informed Orientalism. Mit-
1850 and 1922, is the most comprehensive
detailed on the rise of the Bengal school of
painting, the first self-consciously nationalist
school that rejected academic illusionism in
favor of a flattened picture plane, with its
technical and aesthetic modes developed
from Mogul miniatures, Japanese watercolor
wash techniques, and Art Nouveau. This
Orientalist mode of painting was themati-
cally tied to Indian mythology and history.
Mitter's strength consists of his mastery of
detailed and close readings of artists in rela-
tion to institutions, which the present study
continues by examining the period between
1922 and 19'47, when Bengal school Orien-
talist historicism had become well estab-
lished in many art schools across India.
However, academic painting made a come-
back, and modernism also made inroads
into a diverse and polycentric Indian art
scene. Bengal remained an important art
center, but increasingly, modern artists be-
gan working in Lahore, Bombay, and other
sites as well. Moreover, a concern with prim-
itivism also surfaced powerfully, especially in
the work of Bengal-based artists. The larger
framework of the book can be characterized
as tracing the complex interplay between
Orientalism,' academicism, primitivism, and
modernism. Mitter also considers the impor-
tance and role of patronage—both Indian
and colonial—in shaping the kind of work
that was possible. This book does not seek
to advance a singular or overarching thesis
but maps specific artists and institutional
trajectories. It introduces the work of many
artists who are not normally part of the dis-
cussion on modern art in India, thereby en-
abling a fuller, more complex picture to
emerge.
The Triumph of Modernism is divided into
four chapters. A brief first chapter ("The
Eormalist Prelude") analyzes the impact that
had on the development of modernism in
India. The show introduced the works of
I
Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and other art-
ists to India,! which had until now only
"feasted on Alma-Tademas and Lord Leigh-
tons" (p. 17). While the subject of modern-

ism and the avant-garde had come up occa-
sionally in print before 1922, the force of
the exhibition constituted an attack on aca-
demic painting and oti the Orientalist his-
toricism of the Bengal school. During the
1920s and 1930s, the cosmopolitan ideas of
the celebrated poet Rabindranath Tagore
played a decisive role, especially in Bengal.
Tagore, a persistent critic of nationalism,
had founded an influential university at the
village of Santiniketan where artists were
encouraged to undertake alternative, experi-
mental works based on the local, rather than
on the self-consciously national. Through
her writing and teaching, the Viennese art
historian Stella Kramrisch—whom Tagore
had hired in 1919 to teach at Santiniketan—
also played an important part in explicating
the critical meanings of international mod-
ernism to India. Gaganendranath Tagore,
beginning in 1922, produced Cubist works
that are among the first modernist paintings
in India; they are examined in this chapter.
But the thrust of modernist painting soon
shifted. Mitter notes, "Though radical in its
formal innovations, early Cubism was less
radical politically than, say, certain expres-
sions of non-objective art" (p. 12). Cubism
proved to be "merely a passing phase in In-
dia" (p. 27), superseded by the develop-
ment of primitivism in India.
In chapter 2 ("The Indian Discourse of
Primitivism"), Mitter's exploration of primi-
tivism in modern Indian art, primarily dur-
ing the 1930s and 1940s, is possibly the
most important methodological insight of
the book. Here primitivism is characterized
broadly, not simply in its "formal or stylistic
aspects" (p. 34) but as a deeper modality
that informs the work of abstract painters
such as Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich,
and Kandinsky via their exposure to Indian
philosophies and Theosophy, among other
sources. The Indian turn to primitivist mod-
ernism comes from a recognition of its criti-
cal potential in fashioning an alternative to
the "teleological certainty of modernity"
(p. 35). The celebration of the freedom and
spontaneity of folk and tribal India in much
of this work must be contrasted with the
striking absence of the urban in Indian art
during this period. In this manner, primitiv-
ism, which provided an oblique critique of
the British colonial project, must also be
situated in a complex relation to Mahatma
Gandhi's valorization of rural and peasant
India. Mitter realizes that primitivism was
"replete with ambiguities and contradic-
tions" (p. 33), which is precisely what al-
lowed Indian painters and sculptors to re-
code it during the 1920s and 1930s as a
trope of freedom. Nevertheless, the turn to
primitivism did not produce a singular ex-
pression; instead, it needs to be understood
as a flexible conception characterizing In-
dian art of the period. The most important
artists working in India at the time inflected
primitivism in diverse ways.
One of the most significant modern art-
ists of twentieth-century India, Amrita Sher-
Gil, who has been compared with Erida
Kahlo, is discussed in the first section of
chapter 1? Born in Budapest in 1913 of a
Hungarian mother and a father who was a
Sikh landowner from the Punjab, Sher-Gil
had trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in
Paris and moved to India in 1934, evolving
a modernist style of painting based on Euro-
pean art—including that of Paul Gauguin
and Hungarian Post-Impressionism—her
engagement with the ancient Indian murals
at Ajanta, and Indian miniature painting.
Her sense of an "indefinable melancholy"
(p. 57) of Indian village life affords an apt
description of many of her important paint-
ings. Despite her death at the age of twenty-
eight in Lahore in 1941, the independent
strength of her art, her uninhibited and bo-
hemian lifestyle, and her controversial pub-
lic attacks on the Bengal school and on
Bombay-based academicism (p. 54) proved
to be of lasting influence on the trajectory
of modernism in South Asia.
The second section of chapter 2 focuses
on the art of the Nobel Prize-winning au-
thor Rabindranath Tagore, unique in the
corpus of early- and mid-twentieth-century
Indian art. Tagore's primitivist, childlike
drawings and paintings—recalling Surrealist
explorations of the psyche—express the de-
sire of the poet to transcend language in
moving toward a tmiversalist culttiral cosmo-
politanism. Tagore is also a key figure by
virtue of his founding of the alternative uni-
versity at Santiniketan, which became a site
where artists further explored primitivist
motifs, creating murals based on the Indian
past and the tribal present. Here Mitter
briefly looks at key artists working at San-
tiniketan from the early 1920s onward, espe-
cially Nandalal Bose, Benodebehari Mukher-
jee (also transcribed as Mukhopadhyaya),
and the sculptor Ramkinkar Baij, who ex-
perimented with flinging liquid cement and
aggregates on metal armatures to build up
roughly textured figurative sculptures of
tribal Santhal groups, exemplifying their
energy and freedom.* The legacy of Santini-
ketan remained salient decades after this
period, as it was relayed by artist and theo-
rist K. G. Subramanyan into the Baroda
school, which emerged as an important site
for modern Indian art during the 1960s and
1970s.
A third section in chapter 2 looks at the
career of Jamini Roy, who appropriated the
sweeping curvaceous lines of Kalighat popu-
lar drawings and the hieratic frontality of
folk art, infused by his admiration for Byz-
antine art. Mitter argues for Roy's turn to
the values of honesty and integrity of the
folk as a "political act" in the late colonial
Art Bulletin Vol 90, no. 4 (Dec 2008)
BOOK REVIEWS: DADl ON MITTER 553
period (p. 113). His later arrangement of
collaboratively producing affordable work
under his signature and his deployment of
nonarchival rural materials are among the
most interesting problematizations of the
institutional distinctions between the de-
mand for artistic originality and the ano-
nymity of craft practices.
Chapter 3 ("Naturalists in the Age of
Modernism") looks at the reemergence of
academicism in the production of a number
of artists based in Calctitta, Lahore, Bom-
bay, Andhra, Mysore, and Madras. But natu-
ralism, far from being a single movement,
was also multiply refracted and had diverse
causes and trajectories. Bombay became
known as an important center for academic
naturalism in the late nineteenth centui-y,
and its art school further reinforced natural-
ism under the leadership of principal Glad-
stone Solomon (1918-1936). Calcutta, how-
ever, remained a site of struggle between
the Orientalists and the naturalists for many
years. Ai tists were drawn to naturalism for a
variety of reasons. Hemendranath Mazum-
dar, known for his paintings of the female
figure characterized by the "wet sari effect"
(p. 133), was a critic of Orientalist histori-
cism and considered European academicism
as an aesthetic advance over the ancient
Ajanta murals. The socially oriented sculp-
tor Deviprosad Roy Chowdhaiy created pow-
erful Rodinesque sculpttiral ensembles cele-
brating labor, workers, and subaltern figures
informed by a Romantic appreciation of
struggle and the rise of socialist and Marxist
ideas in India during the mid-1930s. Reveal-
ingly, Chowdhaiy is perhaps the only artist
in this study (apart from Caganendranath
Tagore) to have engaged with aspects of
urban experience, which are othenvise glar-
ingly absent in Indian art of this period.
Chapter 4 ("Contested Nationalism: The
New Delhi and India House Murals") en-
compasses the creation of two mural
projects in the context of imperial patron-
age and rivalry between Bombay and Cal-
cutta artists. The first part looks at mural
commissions for the Imperial Secretariat at
the new capital city of New Delhi in 1929,
which was awarded to Bombay artists as a
result of Solomon's extensive work with his
students and his lobbying. Here we learn
about the work of Samuel Eyzee-Rahamin, a
senior artist who also worked on the murals.
Fyzee-Rahamin had trained earlier with
John Singer Sargent, but later in his career
had "converted" to a flattened Orientalist
style influenced by Ajanta, deploying it in
his murals of Hindu and Muslim allegories
at the Secretariat North Block. However, at
the India House in London in 1931, four
Bengali artists were selected to execute the
second group of murals. Mitter's careful
tracking of the genesis of the murals pro-
vides us with a very good understanding of
554 BULLETIN DECEMBER 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 4
the role of imperial patronage and the man-
ner in which it oriented training in art
schools and the careers of artists in an oth-
erwise increasingly nationalist era. The de-
tailed stoiy of the mural prodtiction defies
any simple causal understanding of the rela-
tion between art and nationalism.
While many of the artists and schools
have been examined earlier in separate
studies published mainly in India, Mitter
lticidly brings together developments of this
era, which are difficult to map out due to
shifting paths and the lack of a dominant
style. A time line detailing political develop-
ments, artworks, and regions would have
further assisted the reader in sorting out
the trajectories traced in the book. A reader
might also be strtick by the absence of key
artists such as Abanindranath Tagore and
Abdurrahman Chughtai, who remained ac-
tive dtiring the period under sttidy, but they
have been disctissed in Mitter's earlier
work.^ Nor is the role of other centers, stich
as Lahore, fully elaborated here, but per-
haps this is inevitable in a book of such a
wide sweep.
Most notably. The Triumph of Modemism
lacks a developed theoretical framework,
which is exemplified in the highly abbrevi-
ated prologtie and epilogue. A deeper eii-
gagement with critical and postcolonial the-
ory might have enabled Mitter to address at
least two methodological issues. The first
pertains to the relation between European
modernism and Indian art. Mitter is well
aware of the problem of characterizing In-
dian modern art as derivative of Europe.
Indeed, the prologue is subtitled "The Pi-
casso Manqué Syndrome," referring to how
William Rubin, in his influential exhibition
on modernism and primitivism at the Mu-
seum of Modern Art in 1984, sought to
downplay the formal infltience of African
art on Pablo Picasso and others by terming
it an "affinity" (stiggesting psychological ef-
fect rather than morphological borrowing
or "influence"). Nevertheless, Mitter himself
deploys "affinity" and even "elective affinity"
to mark the way artists in Europe and India
adopted primitivism in sympathy with a glo-
bally emerging critique of materialism, but
without subjecting these terms to the cri-
tique offered by Simon Gikandi, for exam-
ple." Mitter proposes other potentially valu-
able concepts, such as "virttial cosmopolis,"
"global primitivism," and "critical moder-
nity," but all are introduced only in passing.
Moreover, Mitter does not clearly distin-
gtiish his usage of "modernism" from the
"avant-garde" or develop an analytic termi-
nology to situate differences between for-
malism and socially engaged practices,
which would have afforded him a more inci-
sive evaluation of the varieties of naturalism,
for example. More pertinently, it might
have led Mitter to consider emerging art in
Bombay and Calcutta during the late 1930s
and 1940s more seriously; these legacies
(along with the examples of Sher-Gil and
the Santiniketan artists) were pursued after
1947 rather than those of naturalism and
historicized official murals. From the mid-
1930s on, many Indian intellectuals became
engaged with internationalist socialist and
progressive ideas. Mitter cogently states, "In
the 1940s, the last decade of the empire,
the differences between the primitivists and
their adversaries began to fuse as artists,
writers, and intellectuals were drawn into
the vortex of war, famine, and peasant re-
volts in the dying empire. The art of this
decade reflected less colonial anxieties than
global anti-fascist resistance" (p. 227), but
the rise of modernism in Bombay from the
late 1930s and of progressive and Mai-xist
themes in Calcutta during the early 1940s is
tinfortunately summarized in only one para-
graph in the epilogue. While the Progres-
sive Artists Group in Bombay—which held
its first exhibition in 1948—is considered
the most prominent, fully modernist group
of painters, modernist currents in opposi-
tion to academicism were active in Bombay
earlier by groups such as the Young Turks,
which held its first exhibition in 1941.'^
More puzzling, given Mitter's strength and
interest in the modern art of Bengal, is the
omission of the Calcutta Group (1943-53),
whose founding coincided with the Bengal
Famine, an event that politicized many art-
ists. The works of Chittaprasad and Zainul
Abedin on the famine, for example, were
supported by the Communist Party but were
subject to suppression by the British.* More
attention to the 1940s might have altered
our understanding regarding the play of
forces in the later period between the Brit-
ish and the Indians, the national and the
global, modernism and academicism, and
aestheticism and political commitment.
Nevertheless, Mitter's book is a valuable
contribtition to our understanding of this
period, exploring the contradictions of late
colonial India, where facets of the world
appeared to be both stable and dissolving.
The British had begun the planning of the
entire neoclassical capital city of New Delhi
before World War I, which was completed
in 1929 and meant to signify the durability
of British rule, but the independence of In-
dia came only a few years later. Judicious
and balanced, with beautiful illtistrations of
hard-to-find artworks, Mitter's sttidy can be
useful as a textbook in mid-level courses on
modern art; the first two chapters (on for-
malism and primitivism) are especially im-
portant for broadening our understanding
of modernism beyond the trappings of exist-
ing narrow canonical frameworks. It may
also be noted that tmtil now, no academic
press in the United States has managed to
publish a single book on modern South
Asian art, so the work under review (pub-
lished in London but distributed in the
Art Bulletin Vol 90, no. 4 (Dec 2008)
United States by the University of Chicago
Press) is especially welcome.
I
IF TIK H A R D A|D I is assistant professor of art
history and visual studies at Comell University
[Department of'History of Art and Visual
Studies, Cornell^ university, GM08 Goldwin
Smith Hall, Ithaca, N.Y. 14853].
Notes ¡
1. Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History
of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977).
2. Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial
India, 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
3. Geeta Kapur "Body as Gesture: Women Artists
at Work," in jVWi«! Was Modemism: Essays on
ContemporarylCidtural Practice in India (New
Delhi: Tulika, 2000), 3-60,
4. Santiniketan: 'The Making of a Contextual Modem-
ism; Rabindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Benode-
behari Mukheijee, Ramkinkar Baij (New Delhi:
National Galleiy of Modern Art, 1997).
5. Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India.
6. Simon Gikandi, "Picasso, Africa, and the Sche-
mata of Difference," Modernism/modernity 10,
no. 3 (2003); 455-80.
7. Chaitanya Sambrani, "The Progressive Artists'
Group," in Indian Art: An Overvietv, ed. Gayatri
Sinha (New ¡Delhi: Rupa, 2003); and
Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern In-
dian Art: The Progressives (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
t
8. Sanjoy Mallik, "hnpulses of the 1940s," in
Sinha, Indian Art: An Overview, 80-95.
HILARY BALLON AND KENNETH
I
T. JACKSON, EDS.
Robert Moses and the Modem City: The
Transformation of New York
New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. 304 pp.;
55 color ills., 200 b/w. $50,00
Cities are made and unmade in many ways.
They may be designated by fiat on a flat
plain as an imperial capital, such as Xi'an,
occupied for millennia, and then within a
generation skyrocket in poptilation and be
utterly reconfigured for modern life, with
the artifacts of empire encased in glass for
tourists. They may start as a colonial outpost
fixed astride a river to assure a stable com-
mercial circuit between, say. North Ameri-
can animal skins and urban markets in Eu-
rope. One day, the river might overtake its
own banks and inundate the city, destroying
it, while the entire world looks on; New Or-
leans comes to mind. They may, by virtue of
natural geography, remain settlements for
centuries and then be transformed with a
plan, a conceptual tool that anticipates and
directs change in, ideally, predictable ways,
Thtis was Miletus gridded in the fifth cen-
tury BCE to serve afterward as a model for
numerous Roman cities but, after more