For much of the last century, the international art world treated South Asian art as a category apart. Museums mounted occasional exhibitions, auction houses staged specialist sales and collectors pursued a relatively small canon of modern masters. Recognition existed, but it was compartmentalised. Works by artists such as M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza and S.H. Raza were admired without being fully integrated into the broader history of modern and contemporary art.
That distinction is beginning to disappear. South Asian art is no longer being presented merely as a regional tradition deserving periodic attention. Instead, it is increasingly entering the mainstream institutions, commercial markets and scholarly debates that shape global culture. London’s unusually crowded programme of South Asian exhibitions this summer illustrates the shift, but the forces driving it are international. Museums from New York to Singapore are expanding their collections, collectors across the Gulf and East Asia are becoming more influential, and curators are increasingly treating South Asia as an essential part of the story of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art.
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to editor@madrascourier.com
