FROM CRAFTSMANSHIP TO COMMERCIAL ART

Positioning itself in the early decades of the 20th century in Bengal, the lecture will track a critical transition in the vocation of ‘design’ in colonial India from the realm of handicrafts and the artisanal arts to a new social space of middle class training and practice. It will reflect on the way the skills of designing comes to occupy a new median space between those of ‘fine arts’ and ‘crafts’ within the structures of art pedagogy, and the way a new figure of the professional designer emerges in these years in the early guise of the commercial artist.
 

TAPATI GUHA-THAKURTA is an art-historian, Professor in History and the current Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). Her two main books are The Making of a New 'Indian' Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal (Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Columbia University Press, and Permanent Black, 2004).
 
 
This talk is in relation to the exhibition ‘Come-In: Interior Design as a Contemporary Art Medium in Germany’, on view at the NGMA till December 16, 2016