The Creative Circuit

The series of five lectures revolves around certain issues relating to modern art, particularly modern Indian art. The attempt is to open up the issues and see them in a broader perspective, hoping that any discussion this may elicit will enlarge our understanding of the modern art situation—such as modernity, eclecticism, nostalgia—which have entered our vocabulary, and which lends themselves to reinterpretation today. Some of the questions addressed are as follows: What concept does a modern artist or critic have of current art activity? How does a modern artist react to his environment and cultural inheritance? Under what perceptions or illusions or emotional urges does he work? And what general norms of achievement can we think of in the highly heterogeneous art scene of today? K. G. Subramanyan draws upon his considerable experience as a practising artist and theoritician to present a series of probing discussions which engage with contemporary art concerns from a modern Indian perspective. The Living Tradition: K. G. Subramanyan studies the attempts of several thinkers and artists in the last century—including Havell, Coomaraswamy, Okakura, Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Rabindranath Tagore—to identify, interpret or steer clear of an Indian artistic tradition, to show how some of them had defined a growth structure of several levels of activity interacting with each other at one time, as well as a variable succession of these over time.