Getty Book on KCS Paniker’s “Written Pictures” Explores the Artist’s Influences in a Postcolonial World
An important figure in 20th-century Indian modernism, Paniker took inspiration from Paul Klee to make an art entirely his own
Modernism in Relation
KCS Paniker’s Written PicturesAuthor
Rebecca M. Brown
Body Content
KCS Paniker is a canonical figure in India’s 20th-century modernism.
He was principal of the Madras School of Art and founder of one of the world’s longest-standing artists’ communities. Yet, even within India, he remains a marginal figure, positioned at the periphery of a dominant art world centered in the north. He is best known for his Words and Symbols series (1963–77), which calls on us to reconsider how knowledge is produced and disseminated in a postcolonial, decolonizing world. These “written pictures”—paintings filled with symbols, tables, equations, and illegible scribbles—invite decoding, only to undermine the pursuit of wholeness or stable meaning.
Paniker famously called Paul Klee his “guru.” In Modernism in Relation: KCS Paniker’s Written Pictures (Getty Research Institute, $65), art historian Rebecca M. Brown explores the depths and meaning of that relationship, moving beyond tracing influence and derivation to embrace a fuller sense of artistic relation across geography and time. Featuring over 100 stunning illustrations, many published for the first time in high-quality color, this volume explores the dynamic, twisting currents of modernism, tracing how Paniker navigated its waters on his own terms—abandoning prescriptions for what modern art should be or what Indian modernism should look like. The book reveals a maker seeking new creative languages, challenging ways of knowing, and exploring the unpredictable, ever-changing nature of relation.
Endorsements
“This is not just a monograph on KCS Paniker, but a book that offers a lens onto the history of modern Indian art and its conversation with global modernism. At once poetic, it also narrates the cultural politics of the time while centering Paniker’s oeuvre and its aesthetics.”
— Parul Dave Mukherji, Dean, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University
“Rebecca M. Brown’s book is a close and searching look at one body of work by one artist—KCS Paniker’s capacious, intriguingly cryptic ‘Words and Symbols’ series of paintings, made in Madras in the 1960s and 1970s—and an ambitious demonstration of seeing ‘Modernism in Relation’. Brown places Paniker’s paintings in relation to questions of writing and color, to his publishing and archiving, and to artists near and far, with special emphasis on Paniker’s conversation with the Swiss German prewar modernist Paul Klee. As Brown, reflecting on the form of her project, writes, ‘Critically astute monographs allow for a rich, complex unfolding of ideas, readings of works of art, and the underpinnings of art historical method.’”
— Annie Bourneuf, Professor, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
“In this searching and deeply self-aware book, Rebecca Brown offers a probing account of what she calls the ‘errant archive’ of KCS Paniker—a body of work that resists neat organization yet insists on being remembered. Moving across his painting, publishing, and institution-building practices with rare critical intimacy, she illuminates how Paniker wove a distinctly South Indian cultural and intellectual sensibility into the very foundations of modern Indian art.”
— Saloni Mathur, Professor of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles
Modernism in Relation
KCS Paniker’s Written Pictures$65/£55