The project “Intersections & Interventions. Barwe & Klee” (2023-26) is a collaboration between the Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan / Pune, the Zapurza Museum of Art & Culture Pune and the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland. It brings two artists and their artistic as well as pictorial and pedagogical ideas into an exciting dialogue: Prabhakar Barwe (1936-1995), artist of the second wave of Indian modernism based in Maharashtra, and Paul Klee (1879-1940), a Swiss-German modern artist and teacher at the Bauhaus School in the 1920s in Germany.
What kind of dialogue can be achieved between two artists who had never met and who lived in distant geographies and different decades of the 20th century? Given that Paul Klee preceded Prabhakar Barwe and is known to have been an inspiration for him, there is the temptation to frame their connection as a chronological narrative. In this narrative, Barwe's works and ideas could be seen as mere derivatives of Klee's – a perspective commonly found in early accounts of global modernism. According to this view, Western modernism, particularly in Europe and in the United States of America, is regarded as the birthplace of Modern Art, while any modernist movements outside the West are considered mere imitations. However, the rise of transcultural perspectives in art history has since opened up new approaches in curation and research, for example, on the seminal exhibition "Bauhaus in Calcutta" from 1922, its reconstruction at Bauhaus Dessau in 2013 and on the exhibition of the Bengal School of Art in Berlin back in 1923. Here, linear timelines give way to more complex fields of context and influences. Another example are studies that explore Klee’s exposure to Indian literature. Drawing on these historical and contemporary efforts, engaging Barwe’s and Klee‘s work in dialogue is an important contribution to rethinking the canon of Western and Indian art history and pedagogy, with a joint aim of decolonising both art history and artistic practices. As such, "Intersections & Interventions: Barwe & Klee" views the moments of inspiration between Barwe and Klee not as a matter of source and imitation, but as powerful tools of transmission and global encounters of artistic ideas.
