KASINING ESSAYS by Arnaldo de Tondo

  Essay 48. MODERN-TRADITIONALIST TRAILBLAZER RAJESH KUMAR YADAV's art had, at first glance, departed far from traditional Indian painting. That's easy to see, because Yadav's recent works used not only pop artist Andy Warhol's favorite composition device - repeating images - but also the abstract expressionists' very modern drip and splatter technique combined with collages. What makes Yadav's art distinct from Warhol's are the subjects of those repeating images. While Warhol appropriated pictures of western celebrities and commodities, Yadav chose commonplace elements like light bulbs and heads of what I identified as Hindu priests or "pandits". My observation though of a gulf separating Yadav's paintings from traditional Indian painting seems to be at variance with Yadav's view of his art. Yadav claimed that his "work comes from the deep connection with the art of India". But perhaps, what Yadav means by deep connection is that...

Essay 47. EAST MEETS WEST The first line of Rudyard Kipling's poem, "The Ballad of East and West" goes like this: "Oh East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet...". Well, that could be true, in other human endeavors perhaps - but not in art. An early example of the apparent blending of East and West in art was the surge in popularity of "Japonisme" among Western artists, mostly French, during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Japonisme was the term used to describe a style in art that was markedly influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. The Post-Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh was one of those much influenced by Japonisme as shown by the linearity and graphic quality of his paintings, his adoption of Japanese composition devices like asymmetry, and his employment in the latter part of his short career of an intense full-color palette.  The outward flow of influence was reversed in the succeeding years when Asian ar...