Searching lines and the quest for indigenous in Abstraction: Worlding of Klee and the Indian Moderns

Abstractionism and Conceptualism as an influence was seen in the years of the 1940s and 1960s. These two can be attributed to the post-colonialism in India. There was an attempt to locate the endogenous through the local practices and the exogenous through the structural affinities of the west. There was a resistance to academic naturalism which was propagated by the Art schools established by the Britishers in colonial India. Thus, attempts to decolonize the art practice found its ground in abstraction which was leaning on the indigenous, through the symbols of Tantric practices, mingling with Cubist, and Expressionist understanding of abstraction. What becomes important is the translation of different cross-cultural forms that needed the indigenous cultural frame. The 1922 Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta is that which contributes to the pictorial turn already, from the narrative heritage of the indigenous modern in the works of Abanindranath and his students to that of abstraction in Gaganendranath. Paul Klee along with Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, and Johannes Itten participated in this exhibition from the West.


Klee’s interest in the near east, his trip to Egypt, and the attraction of the spatial two-dimensional aspects of hieroglyphs excited him as an artist. He encountered Arabic and Islamic visuality during his trip to Tunisia which emphasized the twodimensionality and flatness – the defining features of abstraction. Peg Delamater in The Art Bulletin traces the Indian references of Klee’s works like in the Der Wilde Mann, and The Adventures of the young girl made based on Klee’s writings and the author’s own reading and contextualization of these works in the discourse of their contemporary times. Exhibitions like Orientalism Delacroix to Klee at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and The Carpet of memory in Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern puts forth the non-western sources of Klee’s works. The presence of worlding through reciprocality, crosscultural conversations that are visible in Klee’s works and the absorption of it, and its local repositioning through the Indian art practices since the 1960s become the focus here.