Aryaman Kakkar's Archive

Introduction  With the artistic revolution of 20th Century India, the floodgates of artistic passion and innovation opened and flooded the sub-continent with their enthralling beauty. With that came artwork that could not be ignored by art historians and critics. Despite holding invaluable cultural importance, Indian artwork in the 1900’s was considered ‘decorative’ and ‘derivative’ by historians worldwide, partially due to the colonial factors and agenda influencing and downplaying the importance of such artwork in our freedom struggle. Yet all that changed in the 1990’s when Indian art was recognised for the works of genius they are considered today. Born 1995, the commercial market for Indian Art has seen great climbs and falls, persevering, catering to its collectors and artists for the last twenty-five years. Since the turn of the millenium, the industry has led to the establishment of certain norms and unsaid courtesies which lovers of art - artists, collectors, galleries, an...

Introduction We grow up in a time where stories of survival, sacrifice, and blood-painted borders are told in quiet living rooms, in opulent halls that were built up from the remains of golden nightingales. Once a proud empire, the Indian subcontinent was a breadcrumb of its former glory when the British finally departed from our shores in 1947. Yet, their colonisation did not end there. In the advent of their Western Civilisation, our cultural heritage was pillaged and reduced to a commercial world, with our art having decidedly no meaning in the eyes of the Redcoat conquerors. In the wake of the freedom movement, the visual arts in the Indian subcontinent witnessed revolutions of style, identity, and rebellion. With the likes of  Rabindranath Tagore and Amrita Sher-Gil at its forefront, Indian Art of the 20th century was seen as ‘derivative’ when embracing our historical heritage and ‘hypocritical’ when making space for Western influences. Historians and critics held this double-...