THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN ASIAN AND WESTERN ART, 20TH-21ST CENTURIES

The Calcutta Group, founded in 1943, was the first Indian artistic movement, long before the creation of the Bombay Progressive Artist's Group in 1947, which aspired to be a part of the International Modernity's movements. Close to the intellectuals of the Bengal Progressive Writers' and Artists' Association and interested by the formal and aesthetic innovations of the European avant-garde, the artists of the Group were engaged in the search for new artistic theories. Their aesthetic and political orientations were exposed in a manifesto, titled The Calcutta Group that was published in Calcutta in 1949. This article describes how the ideological orientations and the art productions of the main members of the Group build a kind of cultural melting pot in which were negotiated complex interfaces between Western modernity and local creativity. The circulating information and ideas and also the traffic condition of fine-art reproductions are of key importance in this article. The specific relationship of the members of this Group with the ideas and the forms of Western modernity, and that of the local artistic traditions was structured on the margins of colonial and governmental institutions, through the international network of the Marxists cultural associations (developed during the 1920s and 1930s) in a context of rapid exchanges that took place in India due to World War II.