Memorial Lecture

Abstract Mountains, Sacred Cities: Modern Art in South Asia

Thursday, February 26. 6:30 p.m.

Recital Hall, Center for the Arts, Towson University

1 Fine Arts Drive, Towson, MD 21204

In the 1940s and 1950s, artists in South Asia often turned to the world around them, painting bucolic village scenes as well as poignant images of those who suffered in the famines and political upheavals of these decades. Often, these artists also develop an abstract mode, one in which the human body only distantly guides the composition, or only a hint of horizon line or cityscape remains. This talk by Dr. Rebecca M. Brown (Professor of the History of Art and Chair of the Museum Studies and Cultural Heritage Management programs at Johns Hopkins University) situates the art of the Nepali artist Lain Singh Bangdel within a wider artistic and political conversation across South Asia in the latter half of the twentieth century. What is at stake for artists during this period as they grapple with the new geopolitical realities of a postwar globe? How do they bring religious imagery and a sense of the sacred into their work? What might modernism mean in this context? This lecture honors the legacy of the late John G. Ford who valued beauty and the sacred, and never stopped exploring.

Rebecca M. Brown is Professor of the History of Art and Chair of the Museum Studies and Cultural Heritage Management programs at Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in art, architecture, and visual culture of the eighteenth century to the present, with particular expertise in South Asia. She has published numerous articles, three books, and seven co-edited volumes. She is currently thinking with the southern Indian painter KCS Paniker (1911–77), tracing his errant journey to unfold a language of painting in the 1960s and 1970s.