World Painting, 1990-2000: Theoretical and Political Problems

Speaker: James Elkins
Discussant: Girish Shahane

November 3, 4, and 5, 2003 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Modern painting poses extremely difficult problems for art history because it is divided into a mainstream, the sequence that begins with Manet or Cézanne and continues through Picasso and abstraction, and a large number of regional and national schools. Many countries have famous painters who are nevertheless hardly known in Western Europe or North America. Theories of success and failure in modernism, together with philosophies of modernist painting, are mainly products of the West, so that modernist painting is divided between the main sequence and many “marginal,” belated, derivative, or otherwise, devalued works. One of the most important projects for a global art history is to find a way to write inclusively and sympathetically about a wide range of modernist practices.

November 3, 2003
Lecture I: Major Theories of Success and Failure in 20th Century Painting.

November 4, 2003
Lecture II: How is It Possible to Write About the World’s Painting?

November 5, 2003
Lecture III: Rethinking Art Historical Terms.