Rethinking Raja Ravi Verma

Speaker: Geeta Kapur

January 5, 1995 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Geeta Kapur is an art critic and has written extensively on modern Indian art. Her recent work, extending to cinema and larger issues of cultural criticism, is included in her forthcoming book titled When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. She has curated exhibitions and lectured in India and abroad, she is a founder editor of the Journal of Arts and Ideas. Presently she is an ICHR Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.

The lecture deals with representational dilemmas of the artist with reference to the emerging norms of cultural nationalism through the 19th century. More specifically it deals with pictorial options coming in the wake of modernisation, and the hybrid image that appears on the scene transmuting over the decades into a series of avatars. The lecture tries to reposition Ravi Varma so that he is seen to be making up a professional artist-identity of considerable distinction, even as a pan-Indian genre of the most popular variety is under way through his very initiative. Finally, the lecture focuses on the iconography of women devised by Ravi Varma especially as this features in a resplendent group portrait titled Galaxy.