Practice Questions & Answers :: AMCAT

 In poetry in its higher reaches is more philosophical than history, because it presents the memorable types of men and things apart from non-meaning circumstances, so, in its primary substance and texture poetry is more philosophical than prose because it is nearer to our immediate experience. Poetry breaks up the trite conceptions designated by current wards into the sensuous qualities out of which those conceptions were originally put together. We name what we conceive and believe in, not what we see; things, not images; souls, not voices and silhouettes. This naming, with the whole education of the senses which it accompanies, subserves the uses of life; in order to tread, our way through the labyrinth of objects which assaults us, we must make a great selection in our sensuous experience; half of what we see and hear we must pass over as insignificant, while we piece out the other half with such an ideal complement as is necessary to turn it into a fixed and well-ordered conception of the world. This labor of apperception and understanding, this selling of the material meaning of experience, is enshrined in our workday language arid ideas; ideas which are literally poetic in the sense that 'they are 'made' for every conception in an adult mind is a fiction), but which are at the same time prosaic because they are made economically, by abstraction, and for use. When the child of poetic genius, who has learned this intellectual and utilitarian language in the cradle, goes afield and gathers for himself the aspects of nature, he begins to. encumber his mind with the many living impressions which the intellect rejected, and which the language of the intellect can hardly convey; he labors with his nameless burden of perception, and wastes himself in aimless impulses of emotion and revere, until finally the method of some art offers a vent to his inspiration, or to such part of it as can survive the test of time and the discipline of expression. The poet retains by nature the innocence of the eye, or recovers it easily; he disintegrates the fictions of common perception into their sensuous elements, gathers thee again into chance groups as the accidents of his environment or the affinities of his temperament may conjoin them ; and this wealth of sensation and this freedom of fancy, which make an extraordinary ferment in his ignorant heart, presently bubble over into some kind of utterance. The fullness and sensuousness of such effusions bring them nearer to our actual perceptions, than common discourse could come; yet they may easily seem remote, overloaded, and obscure to those accustomed to think entirely in symbols, and never to be interrupted in the algebraic rapidity of their thinking by a moment's pause and examination of heart, nor ever to plunge for a moment into that torrent of sensation and imagery over which the bridge of prosaic associations habitually carries us safe and dry to some conventional act. How slight that bridge commonly is, how much an affair of trestle and wire, we can hardly conceive until we have trained ourselves to an extreme sharpness of introspection. But psychologists have discovered, what laymen generally will confess, that we hurry by the procession of over mental images as we do by the traffic of the street, intent on business, gladly forgetting the noise and movement of the scene, and looking only for the corner we would turn or the door we would enter in our alert rest moment the depths of the soul are still dreaming; the real world stands drawn in bare outline against a background of chaos and unrest. Our logical thoughts dominate experience only as the parallels and meridians make a checkerboard of the sea. 'they guide our voyage without controlling the waves, which toss forever in spite of our ability to ride over them to our chosen ends. Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled. Out of the neglected riches of this dream, the poet fetches his wares. He dips into the chaos that underlies the rational shell of the world and brings up some superfluous image, some emotion dropped by the way, and reattaches it to the present object; he reinstates things unnecessarily, he emphasizes things ignored, he paints it again into the landscape the tints which the intellect has allowed to fade from it. If he seems sometimes to obscure a fact, it is only because he is restoring an experience. The first element which the intellect rejects in forming its ideas of things is the emotion which accompanies the perception, and this emotion is the first thing the poet restores. He stops at the image because he stops to enjoy. He wanders· into the bypaths of association because the bypaths are delightful The love of beauty which made him give measure and cadence to his words, the love of harmony which made him rhyme them, reappear in his imagination and make him select there also the material that is itself beautiful, or capable of assuming beautiful forms. The link that binds together the ideas, sometimes so wide apart, which his wit assimilates, is most often the link of emotion; they have in common some element of the beauty or of horror.

 One of the criteria by which we judge the vitality of style of painting is its ability to renew itself-its responsiveness to the changing nature and quality of experience, the degree of conceptual and formal innovation that it exhibits. By this criterion, it would appear that the practice of abstractionism has failed to engage creatively with the radical change in human experience in recent decades. It has, seemingly, been unwilling to re-invent itself in relation to the systems of artistic expression and. viewers' expectations that have developed under the impact of the mass media.
The judgment that abstractionism has slipped into 'inertia gear' is gaining endorsement, not only among discerning viewers and practitioners of other art forms but also among painters themselves. Like their companions elsewhere in the world, abstractionists in India are asking themselves an overwhelming question today: Does abstractionism have a future? The major crisis that abstractionists face is that of revitalizing their picture surface.; few have improvised any solutions beyond the ones that were exhausted by the 1970s. Like all revolutions, whether in politics or in art, abstractionism must now confront its moment of truth: having begun life as a new and radical pictorial approach to experience, it 'has become an entrenched orthodoxy itself. Indeed, when viewed against a historical situation in which a variety of subversive, interactive and richly hybrid forms are available to the art practitioner, abstractionism assumes the remote and defiant air of an aristocracy that has outlived its age; trammeled by formulaic conventions yet buttressed by a rhetoric of sacred mystery, it seems condemned to being the last citadel of the self-regarding 'fine art' tradition, the last hurrah of painting for painting's sake.
The situation is further complicated in India by the circumstances in which an indigenous abstractionism came into prominence here during the 1960s'. From the beginning, it was propelled by the dialectic between two motives, one revolutionary and the other conservative - it was inaugurated as an act of emancipation from the dogmas of the nascent Indian nation-state, when art was officially viewed as an indulgence at worst, and at best, as an instrument for the celebration of the republic's hopes and aspirations. Having rejected these dogmas, the pioneering abstractionists also went on to reject the various figurative styles associated with the Santiniketan circle and others. In such a situation, abstractionism was a revolutionary move. It led art towards the exploration of the subconscious mind, the spiritual quest and the possible expansion of consciousness. Indian painting entered into a phase of self-inquiry, a meditative inner space where cosmic symbols and non-representational images ruled. Often, the transition from figurative idioms to abstractionist ones took place within the same artist.
At the same time, Indian abstractionists have rarely committed themselves wholeheartedly to a non-representational idiom. They have been preoccupied with the fundamentally metaphysical project of aspiring to the mystical-holy without altogether renouncing the symbolic. This has been sustained by a hereditary reluctance to give up the murti, the inviolable iconic form, which explains why abstractionism is marked by the conservative tendency to operate with images from the sacred repertoire of the past. Abstractionism thus entered India as a double-edged device in a complex cultural transaction. Ideologically, it served as an internationalist legitimization of the emerging revolutionary local trends. However, on entry, it was conscripted to serve local artistic preoccupations - a survey of indigenous abstractionism will show that its most obvious points of affinity with European and American abstract art were with the more mystically oriented of the major sources of abstractionist philosophy and practice, for instance, the Kandinsky-Klee school. There have been no takers for Malevich's Suprematism, which militantly rejected both the artistic forms of the past and the world of appearances, privileging the new-minted geometric symbol as an autonomous sign of the desire for infinity. Against this backdrop, we can identify three major abstractionist idioms in Indian art. The first develops from a love of the earth, and assumes the form of a celebration of the self's dissolution in the cosmic panorama; the landscape is no longer a realistic transcription of the scene but is transformed into a visionary occasion for contemplating the cycles of decay and regeneration. The second idiom phrases its departures from the symbolic and archetypal device as invitations to heightened planes of awareness. Abstractionism begins with the establishment or dissolution of the motif, which can be drawn from diverse sources, including the hieroglyphic tablet, the Sufi meditation dance or the Tantric diagram. The third idiom is based on the lyric play of forms guided by a gesture or allied with formal improvisations like the assemblage. Here,sometimes, the line dividing abstract image from patterned design or quasi-random expressive marking may blur. The flux of forms can also be regimented through the poetics of pure color arrangements, Vector-diagrammatic spaces, and gestural design. In this genealogy, some pure lines of descent follow their logic to the inevitable point of extinction, others engage in cross-fertilization, and yet others undergo mutation to maintain their energy. However, this genealogical survey demonstrates the wave at its crests, those points where the metaphysical and the painterly have been fused in images of abiding potency, ideas sensuously ordained rather than fabricated programmatically to a concept. It is equally possible to enumerate the troughs where the two principles do not come together, thus arriving at a very different account. Uncharitable as it may sound, the history of Indian abstractionism records a series of attempts to avoid the risks of abstraction by resorting to an overt and near-generic symbolism, which many Indian abstractionists embrace when they find themselves bereft of the amalgamative energy to negotiate the union of metaphysics and painterliness. Such symbolism falls into a dual trap: it succumbs to the pompous vacuity of pure metaphysics when the burden of intention is passed off as justification; or then it is desiccated by the arid formalism of pure painterliness, with delight in the measure of chance or pattern guiding the execution of a painting. The ensuing conflict of purpose stalls the progress of abstractionism in an impasse. The remarkable Indian abstractionists are precisely those who have overcome this and addressed themselves to the basic elements of their art with a decisive sense of independence from prior models. In their recent work, we see the logic of Indian abstractionism pushed almost to the furthest it can be taken. Beyond such artists stands a lost generation of abstractionists whose work invokes a wistful, delicate beauty but stops there. Abstractionism is not a universal language; it is an art that points up the loss of a shared language of signs in society. And yet, it affirms the possibility of its recovery through the effort of awareness. While its rhetoric has always emphasized a call for new forms of attention, the abstractionist practice has tended to fall into a complacent pride in its own incomprehensibility; a complacency fatal in an ethos where vibrant new idioms compete for the viewers' attention. Indian abstractionists ought to really return to basics, to reformulate and replenish their understanding of the nature of the relationship between the painted image and the world around it. But will they abandon their favorite conceptual habits and formal conventions, if this becomes necessary?

 One of the criteria by which we judge the vitality of style of painting is its ability to renew itself-its responsiveness to the changing nature and quality of experience, the degree of conceptual and formal innovation that it exhibits. By this criterion, it would appear that the practice of abstractionism has failed to engage creatively with the radical change in human experience in recent decades. It has, seemingly, been unwilling to re-invent itself in relation to the systems of artistic expression and. viewers' expectations that have developed under the impact of the mass media.
The judgment that abstractionism has slipped into 'inertia gear' is gaining endorsement, not only among discerning viewers and practitioners of other art forms but also among painters themselves. Like their companions elsewhere in the world, abstractionists in India are asking themselves an overwhelming question today: Does abstractionism have a future? The major crisis that abstractionists face is that of revitalizing their picture surface.; few have improvised any solutions beyond the ones that were exhausted by the 1970s. Like all revolutions, whether in politics or in art, abstractionism must now confront its moment of truth: having begun life as a new and radical pictorial approach to experience, it 'has become an entrenched orthodoxy itself. Indeed, when viewed against a historical situation in which a variety of subversive, interactive and richly hybrid forms are available to the art practitioner, abstractionism assumes the remote and defiant air of an aristocracy that has outlived its age; trammeled by formulaic conventions yet buttressed by a rhetoric of sacred mystery, it seems condemned to being the last citadel of the self-regarding 'fine art' tradition, the last hurrah of painting for painting's sake.
The situation is further complicated in India by the circumstances in which an indigenous abstractionism came into prominence here during the 1960s'. From the beginning, it was propelled by the dialectic between two motives, one revolutionary and the other conservative - it was inaugurated as an act of emancipation from the dogmas of the nascent Indian nation-state, when art was officially viewed as an indulgence at worst, and at best, as an instrument for the celebration of the republic's hopes and aspirations. Having rejected these dogmas, the pioneering abstractionists also went on to reject the various figurative styles associated with the Santiniketan circle and others. In such a situation, abstractionism was a revolutionary move. It led art towards the exploration of the subconscious mind, the spiritual quest and the possible expansion of consciousness. Indian painting entered into a phase of self-inquiry, a meditative inner space where cosmic symbols and non-representational images ruled. Often, the transition from figurative idioms to abstractionist ones took place within the same artist.
At the same time, Indian abstractionists have rarely committed themselves wholeheartedly to a non-representational idiom. They have been preoccupied with the fundamentally metaphysical project of aspiring to the mystical-holy without altogether renouncing the symbolic. This has been sustained by a hereditary reluctance to give up the murti, the inviolable iconic form, which explains why abstractionism is marked by the conservative tendency to operate with images from the sacred repertoire of the past. Abstractionism thus entered India as a double-edged device in a complex cultural transaction. Ideologically, it served as an internationalist legitimization of the emerging revolutionary local trends. However, on entry, it was conscripted to serve local artistic preoccupations - a survey of indigenous abstractionism will show that its most obvious points of affinity with European and American abstract art were with the more mystically oriented of the major sources of abstractionist philosophy and practice, for instance, the Kandinsky-Klee school. There have been no takers for Malevich's Suprematism, which militantly rejected both the artistic forms of the past and the world of appearances, privileging the new-minted geometric symbol as an autonomous sign of the desire for infinity. Against this backdrop, we can identify three major abstractionist idioms in Indian art. The first develops from a love of the earth, and assumes the form of a celebration of the self's dissolution in the cosmic panorama; the landscape is no longer a realistic transcription of the scene but is transformed into a visionary occasion for contemplating the cycles of decay and regeneration. The second idiom phrases its departures from the symbolic and archetypal device as invitations to heightened planes of awareness. Abstractionism begins with the establishment or dissolution of the motif, which can be drawn from diverse sources, including the hieroglyphic tablet, the Sufi meditation dance or the Tantric diagram. The third idiom is based on the lyric play of forms guided by a gesture or allied with formal improvisations like the assemblage. Here,sometimes, the line dividing abstract image from patterned design or quasi-random expressive marking may blur. The flux of forms can also be regimented through the poetics of pure color arrangements, Vector-diagrammatic spaces, and gestural design. In this genealogy, some pure lines of descent follow their logic to the inevitable point of extinction, others engage in cross-fertilization, and yet others undergo mutation to maintain their energy. However, this genealogical survey demonstrates the wave at its crests, those points where the metaphysical and the painterly have been fused in images of abiding potency, ideas sensuously ordained rather than fabricated programmatically to a concept. It is equally possible to enumerate the troughs where the two principles do not come together, thus arriving at a very different account. Uncharitable as it may sound, the history of Indian abstractionism records a series of attempts to avoid the risks of abstraction by resorting to an overt and near-generic symbolism, which many Indian abstractionists embrace when they find themselves bereft of the amalgamative energy to negotiate the union of metaphysics and painterliness. Such symbolism falls into a dual trap: it succumbs to the pompous vacuity of pure metaphysics when the burden of intention is passed off as justification; or then it is desiccated by the arid formalism of pure painterliness, with delight in the measure of chance or pattern guiding the execution of a painting. The ensuing conflict of purpose stalls the progress of abstractionism in an impasse. The remarkable Indian abstractionists are precisely those who have overcome this and addressed themselves to the basic elements of their art with a decisive sense of independence from prior models. In their recent work, we see the logic of Indian abstractionism pushed almost to the furthest it can be taken. Beyond such artists stands a lost generation of abstractionists whose work invokes a wistful, delicate beauty but stops there. Abstractionism is not a universal language; it is an art that points up the loss of a shared language of signs in society. And yet, it affirms the possibility of its recovery through the effort of awareness. While its rhetoric has always emphasized a call for new forms of attention, the abstractionist practice has tended to fall into a complacent pride in its own incomprehensibility; a complacency fatal in an ethos where vibrant new idioms compete for the viewers' attention. Indian abstractionists ought to really return to basics, to reformulate and replenish their understanding of the nature of the relationship between the painted image and the world around it. But will they abandon their favorite conceptual habits and formal conventions, if this becomes necessary?

 One of the criteria by which we judge the vitality of style of painting is its ability to renew itself-its responsiveness to the changing nature and quality of experience, the degree of conceptual and formal innovation that it exhibits. By this criterion, it would appear that the practice of abstractionism has failed to engage creatively with the radical change in human experience in recent decades. It has, seemingly, been unwilling to re-invent itself in relation to the systems of artistic expression and. viewers' expectations that have developed under the impact of the mass media.
The judgment that abstractionism has slipped into 'inertia gear' is gaining endorsement, not only among discerning viewers and practitioners of other art forms but also among painters themselves. Like their companions elsewhere in the world, abstractionists in India are asking themselves an overwhelming question today: Does abstractionism have a future? The major crisis that abstractionists face is that of revitalizing their picture surface.; few have improvised any solutions beyond the ones that were exhausted by the 1970s. Like all revolutions, whether in politics or in art, abstractionism must now confront its moment of truth: having begun life as a new and radical pictorial approach to experience, it 'has become an entrenched orthodoxy itself. Indeed, when viewed against a historical situation in which a variety of subversive, interactive and richly hybrid forms are available to the art practitioner, abstractionism assumes the remote and defiant air of an aristocracy that has outlived its age; trammeled by formulaic conventions yet buttressed by a rhetoric of sacred mystery, it seems condemned to being the last citadel of the self-regarding 'fine art' tradition, the last hurrah of painting for painting's sake.
The situation is further complicated in India by the circumstances in which an indigenous abstractionism came into prominence here during the 1960s'. From the beginning, it was propelled by the dialectic between two motives, one revolutionary and the other conservative - it was inaugurated as an act of emancipation from the dogmas of the nascent Indian nation-state, when art was officially viewed as an indulgence at worst, and at best, as an instrument for the celebration of the republic's hopes and aspirations. Having rejected these dogmas, the pioneering abstractionists also went on to reject the various figurative styles associated with the Santiniketan circle and others. In such a situation, abstractionism was a revolutionary move. It led art towards the exploration of the subconscious mind, the spiritual quest and the possible expansion of consciousness. Indian painting entered into a phase of self-inquiry, a meditative inner space where cosmic symbols and non-representational images ruled. Often, the transition from figurative idioms to abstractionist ones took place within the same artist.
At the same time, Indian abstractionists have rarely committed themselves wholeheartedly to a non-representational idiom. They have been preoccupied with the fundamentally metaphysical project of aspiring to the mystical-holy without altogether renouncing the symbolic. This has been sustained by a hereditary reluctance to give up the murti, the inviolable iconic form, which explains why abstractionism is marked by the conservative tendency to operate with images from the sacred repertoire of the past. Abstractionism thus entered India as a double-edged device in a complex cultural transaction. Ideologically, it served as an internationalist legitimization of the emerging revolutionary local trends. However, on entry, it was conscripted to serve local artistic preoccupations - a survey of indigenous abstractionism will show that its most obvious points of affinity with European and American abstract art were with the more mystically oriented of the major sources of abstractionist philosophy and practice, for instance, the Kandinsky-Klee school. There have been no takers for Malevich's Suprematism, which militantly rejected both the artistic forms of the past and the world of appearances, privileging the new-minted geometric symbol as an autonomous sign of the desire for infinity. Against this backdrop, we can identify three major abstractionist idioms in Indian art. The first develops from a love of the earth, and assumes the form of a celebration of the self's dissolution in the cosmic panorama; the landscape is no longer a realistic transcription of the scene but is transformed into a visionary occasion for contemplating the cycles of decay and regeneration. The second idiom phrases its departures from the symbolic and archetypal device as invitations to heightened planes of awareness. Abstractionism begins with the establishment or dissolution of the motif, which can be drawn from diverse sources, including the hieroglyphic tablet, the Sufi meditation dance or the Tantric diagram. The third idiom is based on the lyric play of forms guided by a gesture or allied with formal improvisations like the assemblage. Here,sometimes, the line dividing abstract image from patterned design or quasi-random expressive marking may blur. The flux of forms can also be regimented through the poetics of pure color arrangements, Vector-diagrammatic spaces, and gestural design. In this genealogy, some pure lines of descent follow their logic to the inevitable point of extinction, others engage in cross-fertilization, and yet others undergo mutation to maintain their energy. However, this genealogical survey demonstrates the wave at its crests, those points where the metaphysical and the painterly have been fused in images of abiding potency, ideas sensuously ordained rather than fabricated programmatically to a concept. It is equally possible to enumerate the troughs where the two principles do not come together, thus arriving at a very different account. Uncharitable as it may sound, the history of Indian abstractionism records a series of attempts to avoid the risks of abstraction by resorting to an overt and near-generic symbolism, which many Indian abstractionists embrace when they find themselves bereft of the amalgamative energy to negotiate the union of metaphysics and painterliness. Such symbolism falls into a dual trap: it succumbs to the pompous vacuity of pure metaphysics when the burden of intention is passed off as justification; or then it is desiccated by the arid formalism of pure painterliness, with delight in the measure of chance or pattern guiding the execution of a painting. The ensuing conflict of purpose stalls the progress of abstractionism in an impasse. The remarkable Indian abstractionists are precisely those who have overcome this and addressed themselves to the basic elements of their art with a decisive sense of independence from prior models. In their recent work, we see the logic of Indian abstractionism pushed almost to the furthest it can be taken. Beyond such artists stands a lost generation of abstractionists whose work invokes a wistful, delicate beauty but stops there. Abstractionism is not a universal language; it is an art that points up the loss of a shared language of signs in society. And yet, it affirms the possibility of its recovery through the effort of awareness. While its rhetoric has always emphasized a call for new forms of attention, the abstractionist practice has tended to fall into a complacent pride in its own incomprehensibility; a complacency fatal in an ethos where vibrant new idioms compete for the viewers' attention. Indian abstractionists ought to really return to basics, to reformulate and replenish their understanding of the nature of the relationship between the painted image and the world around it. But will they abandon their favorite conceptual habits and formal conventions, if this becomes necessary?

 One of the criteria by which we judge the vitality of style of painting is its ability to renew itself-its responsiveness to the changing nature and quality of experience, the degree of conceptual and formal innovation that it exhibits. By this criterion, it would appear that the practice of abstractionism has failed to engage creatively with the radical change in human experience in recent decades. It has, seemingly, been unwilling to re-invent itself in relation to the systems of artistic expression and. viewers' expectations that have developed under the impact of the mass media.
The judgment that abstractionism has slipped into 'inertia gear' is gaining endorsement, not only among discerning viewers and practitioners of other art forms but also among painters themselves. Like their companions elsewhere in the world, abstractionists in India are asking themselves an overwhelming question today: Does abstractionism have a future? The major crisis that abstractionists face is that of revitalizing their picture surface.; few have improvised any solutions beyond the ones that were exhausted by the 1970s. Like all revolutions, whether in politics or in art, abstractionism must now confront its moment of truth: having begun life as a new and radical pictorial approach to experience, it 'has become an entrenched orthodoxy itself. Indeed, when viewed against a historical situation in which a variety of subversive, interactive and richly hybrid forms are available to the art practitioner, abstractionism assumes the remote and defiant air of an aristocracy that has outlived its age; trammeled by formulaic conventions yet buttressed by a rhetoric of sacred mystery, it seems condemned to being the last citadel of the self-regarding 'fine art' tradition, the last hurrah of painting for painting's sake.
The situation is further complicated in India by the circumstances in which an indigenous abstractionism came into prominence here during the 1960s'. From the beginning, it was propelled by the dialectic between two motives, one revolutionary and the other conservative - it was inaugurated as an act of emancipation from the dogmas of the nascent Indian nation-state, when art was officially viewed as an indulgence at worst, and at best, as an instrument for the celebration of the republic's hopes and aspirations. Having rejected these dogmas, the pioneering abstractionists also went on to reject the various figurative styles associated with the Santiniketan circle and others. In such a situation, abstractionism was a revolutionary move. It led art towards the exploration of the subconscious mind, the spiritual quest and the possible expansion of consciousness. Indian painting entered into a phase of self-inquiry, a meditative inner space where cosmic symbols and non-representational images ruled. Often, the transition from figurative idioms to abstractionist ones took place within the same artist.
At the same time, Indian abstractionists have rarely committed themselves wholeheartedly to a non-representational idiom. They have been preoccupied with the fundamentally metaphysical project of aspiring to the mystical-holy without altogether renouncing the symbolic. This has been sustained by a hereditary reluctance to give up the murti, the inviolable iconic form, which explains why abstractionism is marked by the conservative tendency to operate with images from the sacred repertoire of the past. Abstractionism thus entered India as a double-edged device in a complex cultural transaction. Ideologically, it served as an internationalist legitimization of the emerging revolutionary local trends. However, on entry, it was conscripted to serve local artistic preoccupations - a survey of indigenous abstractionism will show that its most obvious points of affinity with European and American abstract art were with the more mystically oriented of the major sources of abstractionist philosophy and practice, for instance, the Kandinsky-Klee school. There have been no takers for Malevich's Suprematism, which militantly rejected both the artistic forms of the past and the world of appearances, privileging the new-minted geometric symbol as an autonomous sign of the desire for infinity. Against this backdrop, we can identify three major abstractionist idioms in Indian art. The first develops from a love of the earth, and assumes the form of a celebration of the self's dissolution in the cosmic panorama; the landscape is no longer a realistic transcription of the scene but is transformed into a visionary occasion for contemplating the cycles of decay and regeneration. The second idiom phrases its departures from the symbolic and archetypal device as invitations to heightened planes of awareness. Abstractionism begins with the establishment or dissolution of the motif, which can be drawn from diverse sources, including the hieroglyphic tablet, the Sufi meditation dance or the Tantric diagram. The third idiom is based on the lyric play of forms guided by a gesture or allied with formal improvisations like the assemblage. Here,sometimes, the line dividing abstract image from patterned design or quasi-random expressive marking may blur. The flux of forms can also be regimented through the poetics of pure color arrangements, Vector-diagrammatic spaces, and gestural design. In this genealogy, some pure lines of descent follow their logic to the inevitable point of extinction, others engage in cross-fertilization, and yet others undergo mutation to maintain their energy. However, this genealogical survey demonstrates the wave at its crests, those points where the metaphysical and the painterly have been fused in images of abiding potency, ideas sensuously ordained rather than fabricated programmatically to a concept. It is equally possible to enumerate the troughs where the two principles do not come together, thus arriving at a very different account. Uncharitable as it may sound, the history of Indian abstractionism records a series of attempts to avoid the risks of abstraction by resorting to an overt and near-generic symbolism, which many Indian abstractionists embrace when they find themselves bereft of the amalgamative energy to negotiate the union of metaphysics and painterliness. Such symbolism falls into a dual trap: it succumbs to the pompous vacuity of pure metaphysics when the burden of intention is passed off as justification; or then it is desiccated by the arid formalism of pure painterliness, with delight in the measure of chance or pattern guiding the execution of a painting. The ensuing conflict of purpose stalls the progress of abstractionism in an impasse. The remarkable Indian abstractionists are precisely those who have overcome this and addressed themselves to the basic elements of their art with a decisive sense of independence from prior models. In their recent work, we see the logic of Indian abstractionism pushed almost to the furthest it can be taken. Beyond such artists stands a lost generation of abstractionists whose work invokes a wistful, delicate beauty but stops there. Abstractionism is not a universal language; it is an art that points up the loss of a shared language of signs in society. And yet, it affirms the possibility of its recovery through the effort of awareness. While its rhetoric has always emphasized a call for new forms of attention, the abstractionist practice has tended to fall into a complacent pride in its own incomprehensibility; a complacency fatal in an ethos where vibrant new idioms compete for the viewers' attention. Indian abstractionists ought to really return to basics, to reformulate and replenish their understanding of the nature of the relationship between the painted image and the world around it. But will they abandon their favorite conceptual habits and formal conventions, if this becomes necessary?

 One of the criteria by which we judge the vitality of style of painting is its ability to renew itself-its responsiveness to the changing nature and quality of experience, the degree of conceptual and formal innovation that it exhibits. By this criterion, it would appear that the practice of abstractionism has failed to engage creatively with the radical change in human experience in recent decades. It has, seemingly, been unwilling to re-invent itself in relation to the systems of artistic expression and. viewers' expectations that have developed under the impact of the mass media.
The judgment that abstractionism has slipped into 'inertia gear' is gaining endorsement, not only among discerning viewers and practitioners of other art forms but also among painters themselves. Like their companions elsewhere in the world, abstractionists in India are asking themselves an overwhelming question today: Does abstractionism have a future? The major crisis that abstractionists face is that of revitalizing their picture surface.; few have improvised any solutions beyond the ones that were exhausted by the 1970s. Like all revolutions, whether in politics or in art, abstractionism must now confront its moment of truth: having begun life as a new and radical pictorial approach to experience, it 'has become an entrenched orthodoxy itself. Indeed, when viewed against a historical situation in which a variety of subversive, interactive and richly hybrid forms are available to the art practitioner, abstractionism assumes the remote and defiant air of an aristocracy that has outlived its age; trammeled by formulaic conventions yet buttressed by a rhetoric of sacred mystery, it seems condemned to being the last citadel of the self-regarding 'fine art' tradition, the last hurrah of painting for painting's sake.
The situation is further complicated in India by the circumstances in which an indigenous abstractionism came into prominence here during the 1960s'. From the beginning, it was propelled by the dialectic between two motives, one revolutionary and the other conservative - it was inaugurated as an act of emancipation from the dogmas of the nascent Indian nation-state, when art was officially viewed as an indulgence at worst, and at best, as an instrument for the celebration of the republic's hopes and aspirations. Having rejected these dogmas, the pioneering abstractionists also went on to reject the various figurative styles associated with the Santiniketan circle and others. In such a situation, abstractionism was a revolutionary move. It led art towards the exploration of the subconscious mind, the spiritual quest and the possible expansion of consciousness. Indian painting entered into a phase of self-inquiry, a meditative inner space where cosmic symbols and non-representational images ruled. Often, the transition from figurative idioms to abstractionist ones took place within the same artist.
At the same time, Indian abstractionists have rarely committed themselves wholeheartedly to a non-representational idiom. They have been preoccupied with the fundamentally metaphysical project of aspiring to the mystical-holy without altogether renouncing the symbolic. This has been sustained by a hereditary reluctance to give up the murti, the inviolable iconic form, which explains why abstractionism is marked by the conservative tendency to operate with images from the sacred repertoire of the past. Abstractionism thus entered India as a double-edged device in a complex cultural transaction. Ideologically, it served as an internationalist legitimization of the emerging revolutionary local trends. However, on entry, it was conscripted to serve local artistic preoccupations - a survey of indigenous abstractionism will show that its most obvious points of affinity with European and American abstract art were with the more mystically oriented of the major sources of abstractionist philosophy and practice, for instance, the Kandinsky-Klee school. There have been no takers for Malevich's Suprematism, which militantly rejected both the artistic forms of the past and the world of appearances, privileging the new-minted geometric symbol as an autonomous sign of the desire for infinity. Against this backdrop, we can identify three major abstractionist idioms in Indian art. The first develops from a love of the earth, and assumes the form of a celebration of the self's dissolution in the cosmic panorama; the landscape is no longer a realistic transcription of the scene but is transformed into a visionary occasion for contemplating the cycles of decay and regeneration. The second idiom phrases its departures from the symbolic and archetypal device as invitations to heightened planes of awareness. Abstractionism begins with the establishment or dissolution of the motif, which can be drawn from diverse sources, including the hieroglyphic tablet, the Sufi meditation dance or the Tantric diagram. The third idiom is based on the lyric play of forms guided by a gesture or allied with formal improvisations like the assemblage. Here,sometimes, the line dividing abstract image from patterned design or quasi-random expressive marking may blur. The flux of forms can also be regimented through the poetics of pure color arrangements, Vector-diagrammatic spaces, and gestural design. In this genealogy, some pure lines of descent follow their logic to the inevitable point of extinction, others engage in cross-fertilization, and yet others undergo mutation to maintain their energy. However, this genealogical survey demonstrates the wave at its crests, those points where the metaphysical and the painterly have been fused in images of abiding potency, ideas sensuously ordained rather than fabricated programmatically to a concept. It is equally possible to enumerate the troughs where the two principles do not come together, thus arriving at a very different account. Uncharitable as it may sound, the history of Indian abstractionism records a series of attempts to avoid the risks of abstraction by resorting to an overt and near-generic symbolism, which many Indian abstractionists embrace when they find themselves bereft of the amalgamative energy to negotiate the union of metaphysics and painterliness. Such symbolism falls into a dual trap: it succumbs to the pompous vacuity of pure metaphysics when the burden of intention is passed off as justification; or then it is desiccated by the arid formalism of pure painterliness, with delight in the measure of chance or pattern guiding the execution of a painting. The ensuing conflict of purpose stalls the progress of abstractionism in an impasse. The remarkable Indian abstractionists are precisely those who have overcome this and addressed themselves to the basic elements of their art with a decisive sense of independence from prior models. In their recent work, we see the logic of Indian abstractionism pushed almost to the furthest it can be taken. Beyond such artists stands a lost generation of abstractionists whose work invokes a wistful, delicate beauty but stops there. Abstractionism is not a universal language; it is an art that points up the loss of a shared language of signs in society. And yet, it affirms the possibility of its recovery through the effort of awareness. While its rhetoric has always emphasized a call for new forms of attention, the abstractionist practice has tended to fall into a complacent pride in its own incomprehensibility; a complacency fatal in an ethos where vibrant new idioms compete for the viewers' attention. Indian abstractionists ought to really return to basics, to reformulate and replenish their understanding of the nature of the relationship between the painted image and the world around it. But will they abandon their favorite conceptual habits and formal conventions, if this becomes necessary?

 One of the criteria by which we judge the vitality of style of painting is its ability to renew itself-its responsiveness to the changing nature and quality of experience, the degree of conceptual and formal innovation that it exhibits. By this criterion, it would appear that the practice of abstractionism has failed to engage creatively with the radical change in human experience in recent decades. It has, seemingly, been unwilling to re-invent itself in relation to the systems of artistic expression and. viewers' expectations that have developed under the impact of the mass media.
The judgment that abstractionism has slipped into 'inertia gear' is gaining endorsement, not only among discerning viewers and practitioners of other art forms but also among painters themselves. Like their companions elsewhere in the world, abstractionists in India are asking themselves an overwhelming question today: Does abstractionism have a future? The major crisis that abstractionists face is that of revitalizing their picture surface.; few have improvised any solutions beyond the ones that were exhausted by the 1970s. Like all revolutions, whether in politics or in art, abstractionism must now confront its moment of truth: having begun life as a new and radical pictorial approach to experience, it 'has become an entrenched orthodoxy itself. Indeed, when viewed against a historical situation in which a variety of subversive, interactive and richly hybrid forms are available to the art practitioner, abstractionism assumes the remote and defiant air of an aristocracy that has outlived its age; trammeled by formulaic conventions yet buttressed by a rhetoric of sacred mystery, it seems condemned to being the last citadel of the self-regarding 'fine art' tradition, the last hurrah of painting for painting's sake.
The situation is further complicated in India by the circumstances in which an indigenous abstractionism came into prominence here during the 1960s'. From the beginning, it was propelled by the dialectic between two motives, one revolutionary and the other conservative - it was inaugurated as an act of emancipation from the dogmas of the nascent Indian nation-state, when art was officially viewed as an indulgence at worst, and at best, as an instrument for the celebration of the republic's hopes and aspirations. Having rejected these dogmas, the pioneering abstractionists also went on to reject the various figurative styles associated with the Santiniketan circle and others. In such a situation, abstractionism was a revolutionary move. It led art towards the exploration of the subconscious mind, the spiritual quest and the possible expansion of consciousness. Indian painting entered into a phase of self-inquiry, a meditative inner space where cosmic symbols and non-representational images ruled. Often, the transition from figurative idioms to abstractionist ones took place within the same artist.
At the same time, Indian abstractionists have rarely committed themselves wholeheartedly to a non-representational idiom. They have been preoccupied with the fundamentally metaphysical project of aspiring to the mystical-holy without altogether renouncing the symbolic. This has been sustained by a hereditary reluctance to give up the murti, the inviolable iconic form, which explains why abstractionism is marked by the conservative tendency to operate with images from the sacred repertoire of the past. Abstractionism thus entered India as a double-edged device in a complex cultural transaction. Ideologically, it served as an internationalist legitimization of the emerging revolutionary local trends. However, on entry, it was conscripted to serve local artistic preoccupations - a survey of indigenous abstractionism will show that its most obvious points of affinity with European and American abstract art were with the more mystically oriented of the major sources of abstractionist philosophy and practice, for instance, the Kandinsky-Klee school. There have been no takers for Malevich's Suprematism, which militantly rejected both the artistic forms of the past and the world of appearances, privileging the new-minted geometric symbol as an autonomous sign of the desire for infinity. Against this backdrop, we can identify three major abstractionist idioms in Indian art. The first develops from a love of the earth, and assumes the form of a celebration of the self's dissolution in the cosmic panorama; the landscape is no longer a realistic transcription of the scene but is transformed into a visionary occasion for contemplating the cycles of decay and regeneration. The second idiom phrases its departures from the symbolic and archetypal device as invitations to heightened planes of awareness. Abstractionism begins with the establishment or dissolution of the motif, which can be drawn from diverse sources, including the hieroglyphic tablet, the Sufi meditation dance or the Tantric diagram. The third idiom is based on the lyric play of forms guided by a gesture or allied with formal improvisations like the assemblage. Here,sometimes, the line dividing abstract image from patterned design or quasi-random expressive marking may blur. The flux of forms can also be regimented through the poetics of pure color arrangements, Vector-diagrammatic spaces, and gestural design. In this genealogy, some pure lines of descent follow their logic to the inevitable point of extinction, others engage in cross-fertilization, and yet others undergo mutation to maintain their energy. However, this genealogical survey demonstrates the wave at its crests, those points where the metaphysical and the painterly have been fused in images of abiding potency, ideas sensuously ordained rather than fabricated programmatically to a concept. It is equally possible to enumerate the troughs where the two principles do not come together, thus arriving at a very different account. Uncharitable as it may sound, the history of Indian abstractionism records a series of attempts to avoid the risks of abstraction by resorting to an overt and near-generic symbolism, which many Indian abstractionists embrace when they find themselves bereft of the amalgamative energy to negotiate the union of metaphysics and painterliness. Such symbolism falls into a dual trap: it succumbs to the pompous vacuity of pure metaphysics when the burden of intention is passed off as justification; or then it is desiccated by the arid formalism of pure painterliness, with delight in the measure of chance or pattern guiding the execution of a painting. The ensuing conflict of purpose stalls the progress of abstractionism in an impasse. The remarkable Indian abstractionists are precisely those who have overcome this and addressed themselves to the basic elements of their art with a decisive sense of independence from prior models. In their recent work, we see the logic of Indian abstractionism pushed almost to the furthest it can be taken. Beyond such artists stands a lost generation of abstractionists whose work invokes a wistful, delicate beauty but stops there. Abstractionism is not a universal language; it is an art that points up the loss of a shared language of signs in society. And yet, it affirms the possibility of its recovery through the effort of awareness. While its rhetoric has always emphasized a call for new forms of attention, the abstractionist practice has tended to fall into a complacent pride in its own incomprehensibility; a complacency fatal in an ethos where vibrant new idioms compete for the viewers' attention. Indian abstractionists ought to really return to basics, to reformulate and replenish their understanding of the nature of the relationship between the painted image and the world around it. But will they abandon their favorite conceptual habits and formal conventions, if this becomes necessary?

 One of the criteria by which we judge the vitality of style of painting is its ability to renew itself-its responsiveness to the changing nature and quality of experience, the degree of conceptual and formal innovation that it exhibits. By this criterion, it would appear that the practice of abstractionism has failed to engage creatively with the radical change in human experience in recent decades. It has, seemingly, been unwilling to re-invent itself in relation to the systems of artistic expression and. viewers' expectations that have developed under the impact of the mass media.
The judgment that abstractionism has slipped into 'inertia gear' is gaining endorsement, not only among discerning viewers and practitioners of other art forms but also among painters themselves. Like their companions elsewhere in the world, abstractionists in India are asking themselves an overwhelming question today: Does abstractionism have a future? The major crisis that abstractionists face is that of revitalizing their picture surface.; few have improvised any solutions beyond the ones that were exhausted by the 1970s. Like all revolutions, whether in politics or in art, abstractionism must now confront its moment of truth: having begun life as a new and radical pictorial approach to experience, it 'has become an entrenched orthodoxy itself. Indeed, when viewed against a historical situation in which a variety of subversive, interactive and richly hybrid forms are available to the art practitioner, abstractionism assumes the remote and defiant air of an aristocracy that has outlived its age; trammeled by formulaic conventions yet buttressed by a rhetoric of sacred mystery, it seems condemned to being the last citadel of the self-regarding 'fine art' tradition, the last hurrah of painting for painting's sake.
The situation is further complicated in India by the circumstances in which an indigenous abstractionism came into prominence here during the 1960s'. From the beginning, it was propelled by the dialectic between two motives, one revolutionary and the other conservative - it was inaugurated as an act of emancipation from the dogmas of the nascent Indian nation-state, when art was officially viewed as an indulgence at worst, and at best, as an instrument for the celebration of the republic's hopes and aspirations. Having rejected these dogmas, the pioneering abstractionists also went on to reject the various figurative styles associated with the Santiniketan circle and others. In such a situation, abstractionism was a revolutionary move. It led art towards the exploration of the subconscious mind, the spiritual quest and the possible expansion of consciousness. Indian painting entered into a phase of self-inquiry, a meditative inner space where cosmic symbols and non-representational images ruled. Often, the transition from figurative idioms to abstractionist ones took place within the same artist.
At the same time, Indian abstractionists have rarely committed themselves wholeheartedly to a non-representational idiom. They have been preoccupied with the fundamentally metaphysical project of aspiring to the mystical-holy without altogether renouncing the symbolic. This has been sustained by a hereditary reluctance to give up the murti, the inviolable iconic form, which explains why abstractionism is marked by the conservative tendency to operate with images from the sacred repertoire of the past. Abstractionism thus entered India as a double-edged device in a complex cultural transaction. Ideologically, it served as an internationalist legitimization of the emerging revolutionary local trends. However, on entry, it was conscripted to serve local artistic preoccupations - a survey of indigenous abstractionism will show that its most obvious points of affinity with European and American abstract art were with the more mystically oriented of the major sources of abstractionist philosophy and practice, for instance, the Kandinsky-Klee school. There have been no takers for Malevich's Suprematism, which militantly rejected both the artistic forms of the past and the world of appearances, privileging the new-minted geometric symbol as an autonomous sign of the desire for infinity. Against this backdrop, we can identify three major abstractionist idioms in Indian art. The first develops from a love of the earth, and assumes the form of a celebration of the self's dissolution in the cosmic panorama; the landscape is no longer a realistic transcription of the scene but is transformed into a visionary occasion for contemplating the cycles of decay and regeneration. The second idiom phrases its departures from the symbolic and archetypal device as invitations to heightened planes of awareness. Abstractionism begins with the establishment or dissolution of the motif, which can be drawn from diverse sources, including the hieroglyphic tablet, the Sufi meditation dance or the Tantric diagram. The third idiom is based on the lyric play of forms guided by a gesture or allied with formal improvisations like the assemblage. Here,sometimes, the line dividing abstract image from patterned design or quasi-random expressive marking may blur. The flux of forms can also be regimented through the poetics of pure color arrangements, Vector-diagrammatic spaces, and gestural design. In this genealogy, some pure lines of descent follow their logic to the inevitable point of extinction, others engage in cross-fertilization, and yet others undergo mutation to maintain their energy. However, this genealogical survey demonstrates the wave at its crests, those points where the metaphysical and the painterly have been fused in images of abiding potency, ideas sensuously ordained rather than fabricated programmatically to a concept. It is equally possible to enumerate the troughs where the two principles do not come together, thus arriving at a very different account. Uncharitable as it may sound, the history of Indian abstractionism records a series of attempts to avoid the risks of abstraction by resorting to an overt and near-generic symbolism, which many Indian abstractionists embrace when they find themselves bereft of the amalgamative energy to negotiate the union of metaphysics and painterliness. Such symbolism falls into a dual trap: it succumbs to the pompous vacuity of pure metaphysics when the burden of intention is passed off as justification; or then it is desiccated by the arid formalism of pure painterliness, with delight in the measure of chance or pattern guiding the execution of a painting. The ensuing conflict of purpose stalls the progress of abstractionism in an impasse. The remarkable Indian abstractionists are precisely those who have overcome this and addressed themselves to the basic elements of their art with a decisive sense of independence from prior models. In their recent work, we see the logic of Indian abstractionism pushed almost to the furthest it can be taken. Beyond such artists stands a lost generation of abstractionists whose work invokes a wistful, delicate beauty but stops there. Abstractionism is not a universal language; it is an art that points up the loss of a shared language of signs in society. And yet, it affirms the possibility of its recovery through the effort of awareness. While its rhetoric has always emphasized a call for new forms of attention, the abstractionist practice has tended to fall into a complacent pride in its own incomprehensibility; a complacency fatal in an ethos where vibrant new idioms compete for the viewers' attention. Indian abstractionists ought to really return to basics, to reformulate and replenish their understanding of the nature of the relationship between the painted image and the world around it. But will they abandon their favorite conceptual habits and formal conventions, if this becomes necessary?

 One of the criteria by which we judge the vitality of style of painting is its ability to renew itself-its responsiveness to the changing nature and quality of experience, the degree of conceptual and formal innovation that it exhibits. By this criterion, it would appear that the practice of abstractionism has failed to engage creatively with the radical change in human experience in recent decades. It has, seemingly, been unwilling to re-invent itself in relation to the systems of artistic expression and. viewers' expectations that have developed under the impact of the mass media.
The judgment that abstractionism has slipped into 'inertia gear' is gaining endorsement, not only among discerning viewers and practitioners of other art forms but also among painters themselves. Like their companions elsewhere in the world, abstractionists in India are asking themselves an overwhelming question today: Does abstractionism have a future? The major crisis that abstractionists face is that of revitalizing their picture surface.; few have improvised any solutions beyond the ones that were exhausted by the 1970s. Like all revolutions, whether in politics or in art, abstractionism must now confront its moment of truth: having begun life as a new and radical pictorial approach to experience, it 'has become an entrenched orthodoxy itself. Indeed, when viewed against a historical situation in which a variety of subversive, interactive and richly hybrid forms are available to the art practitioner, abstractionism assumes the remote and defiant air of an aristocracy that has outlived its age; trammeled by formulaic conventions yet buttressed by a rhetoric of sacred mystery, it seems condemned to being the last citadel of the self-regarding 'fine art' tradition, the last hurrah of painting for painting's sake.
The situation is further complicated in India by the circumstances in which an indigenous abstractionism came into prominence here during the 1960s'. From the beginning, it was propelled by the dialectic between two motives, one revolutionary and the other conservative - it was inaugurated as an act of emancipation from the dogmas of the nascent Indian nation-state, when art was officially viewed as an indulgence at worst, and at best, as an instrument for the celebration of the republic's hopes and aspirations. Having rejected these dogmas, the pioneering abstractionists also went on to reject the various figurative styles associated with the Santiniketan circle and others. In such a situation, abstractionism was a revolutionary move. It led art towards the exploration of the subconscious mind, the spiritual quest and the possible expansion of consciousness. Indian painting entered into a phase of self-inquiry, a meditative inner space where cosmic symbols and non-representational images ruled. Often, the transition from figurative idioms to abstractionist ones took place within the same artist.
At the same time, Indian abstractionists have rarely committed themselves wholeheartedly to a non-representational idiom. They have been preoccupied with the fundamentally metaphysical project of aspiring to the mystical-holy without altogether renouncing the symbolic. This has been sustained by a hereditary reluctance to give up the murti, the inviolable iconic form, which explains why abstractionism is marked by the conservative tendency to operate with images from the sacred repertoire of the past. Abstractionism thus entered India as a double-edged device in a complex cultural transaction. Ideologically, it served as an internationalist legitimization of the emerging revolutionary local trends. However, on entry, it was conscripted to serve local artistic preoccupations - a survey of indigenous abstractionism will show that its most obvious points of affinity with European and American abstract art were with the more mystically oriented of the major sources of abstractionist philosophy and practice, for instance, the Kandinsky-Klee school. There have been no takers for Malevich's Suprematism, which militantly rejected both the artistic forms of the past and the world of appearances, privileging the new-minted geometric symbol as an autonomous sign of the desire for infinity. Against this backdrop, we can identify three major abstractionist idioms in Indian art. The first develops from a love of the earth, and assumes the form of a celebration of the self's dissolution in the cosmic panorama; the landscape is no longer a realistic transcription of the scene but is transformed into a visionary occasion for contemplating the cycles of decay and regeneration. The second idiom phrases its departures from the symbolic and archetypal device as invitations to heightened planes of awareness. Abstractionism begins with the establishment or dissolution of the motif, which can be drawn from diverse sources, including the hieroglyphic tablet, the Sufi meditation dance or the Tantric diagram. The third idiom is based on the lyric play of forms guided by a gesture or allied with formal improvisations like the assemblage. Here,sometimes, the line dividing abstract image from patterned design or quasi-random expressive marking may blur. The flux of forms can also be regimented through the poetics of pure color arrangements, Vector-diagrammatic spaces, and gestural design. In this genealogy, some pure lines of descent follow their logic to the inevitable point of extinction, others engage in cross-fertilization, and yet others undergo mutation to maintain their energy. However, this genealogical survey demonstrates the wave at its crests, those points where the metaphysical and the painterly have been fused in images of abiding potency, ideas sensuously ordained rather than fabricated programmatically to a concept. It is equally possible to enumerate the troughs where the two principles do not come together, thus arriving at a very different account. Uncharitable as it may sound, the history of Indian abstractionism records a series of attempts to avoid the risks of abstraction by resorting to an overt and near-generic symbolism, which many Indian abstractionists embrace when they find themselves bereft of the amalgamative energy to negotiate the union of metaphysics and painterliness. Such symbolism falls into a dual trap: it succumbs to the pompous vacuity of pure metaphysics when the burden of intention is passed off as justification; or then it is desiccated by the arid formalism of pure painterliness, with delight in the measure of chance or pattern guiding the execution of a painting. The ensuing conflict of purpose stalls the progress of abstractionism in an impasse. The remarkable Indian abstractionists are precisely those who have overcome this and addressed themselves to the basic elements of their art with a decisive sense of independence from prior models. In their recent work, we see the logic of Indian abstractionism pushed almost to the furthest it can be taken. Beyond such artists stands a lost generation of abstractionists whose work invokes a wistful, delicate beauty but stops there. Abstractionism is not a universal language; it is an art that points up the loss of a shared language of signs in society. And yet, it affirms the possibility of its recovery through the effort of awareness. While its rhetoric has always emphasized a call for new forms of attention, the abstractionist practice has tended to fall into a complacent pride in its own incomprehensibility; a complacency fatal in an ethos where vibrant new idioms compete for the viewers' attention. Indian abstractionists ought to really return to basics, to reformulate and replenish their understanding of the nature of the relationship between the painted image and the world around it. But will they abandon their favorite conceptual habits and formal conventions, if this becomes necessary?

 The economic transformation of India is one of the great business stories of our time. As stifling government regulations have been lifted, entrepreneurship has flourished, and the country has become a high-powered center for information technology and pharmaceuticals. Indian companies like Infosys and Wipro are powerful global players, while Western firms like G.E. and I.B.M. now have major research facilities in India employing thousands. India's seemingly endless flow of young, motivated engineers, scientists, and managers offering developed-world skills at developing-world wages is held to be putting American jobs at risk, and the country is frequently heralded as the next economic superpower. But India has run into a surprising hitch on its way to superpower status: its inexhaustible supply of workers is becoming exhausted. Although India has one of the youngest workforce on the planet, the head of Infosys said recently that there was an acute shortage of skilled manpower, and a study by Hewitt Associates projects that this year salaries for skilled workers will rise fourteen and a half per cent, a sure sign that demand for skilled labor is outstripping supply.How is this possible in a country that every year produces two and a half million college graduates and four hundred thousand engineers? Start with the fact that just ten per cent of Indians get any kind of post-secondary education, compared with some fifty per cent who do in the U.S. Moreover, of that ten per cent, the vast majority go to one of India's seventeen thousand colleges, many of which are closer to community colleges than to four-year institutions. India does have more than three hundred universities, but a recent survey by the London Times Higher Education Supplement put only two of them among the top hundred in the world. Many Indian graduates therefore enter the workforce with a low level of skills. A current study led by Vivek Wadhwa, of Duke University, has found that if you define 'engineer' by U.S. standards, India produces just a hundred and seventy thousand engineers a year, not four hundred thousand. Infosys says that, of 1.3 million applicants for jobs last year, it found only two per cent acceptable.There was a time when many economists believed that post-secondary education didn't have much impact on economic growth. The really important educational gains, they thought, came from giving rudimentary skills to large numbers of people (which India still needs to doat least thirty per cent of the population is illiterate). They believed that, in economic terms, society got a very low rate of return on its investment in higher education. But lately that assumption has been overturned, and the social rate of return on investment in university education in India has been calculated at an impressive nine or ten per cent. In other words, every dollar India puts into higher education creates value for the economy as a whole. Yet India spends roughly three and a half per cent of its G.D.P. on education, significantly below the percentage spent by the U.S., even though India's population is much younger, and spending on education should be proportionately higher.The irony of the current situation is that India was once considered to be over educated. In the seventies, as its economy languished, it seemed to be a country with too many engineers and Ph.D.s working as clerks in government offices. Once the Indian business climate loosened up, though, that meant companies could tap a backlog of hundreds of thousands of eager, skilled workers at their disposal. Unfortunately, the educational system did not adjust to the new realities. Between 1985 and 1997, the number of teachers in India actually fell, while the percentage of students enrolled in high school or college rose more slowly than it did in the rest of the world. Even as the need for skilled workers was increasing, India was devoting relatively fewer resources to producing them.Since the Second World War, the countries that have made successful leaps from developing to developed status have all poured money, public and private, into education. South Korea now spends a higher percentage of its national income on education than nearly any other country in the world. Taiwan had a system of universal primary education before its phase of hyper growth began. And, more recently, Ireland's economic boom was spurred, in part, by an opening up and expansion of primary and secondary schools and increased funding for universities. Education will be all the more important for India's well-being; the earlier generation of so-called Asian Tigers depended heavily on manufacturing, but India's focus on services and technology will require a more skilled and educated workforce.India has taken tentative steps to remedy its skills famine the current government has made noises about doubling spending on education, and a host of new colleges and universities have sprung up since the mid-nineties. But India's impressive economic performance has made the problem seem less urgent than it actually is, and allowed the government to defer difficult choices. (In a country where more than three hundred million people live on a dollar a day, producing college graduates can seem like a low priority.) Ultimately, the Indian government has to pull off a very tough trick, making serious changes at a time when things seem to be going very well. It needs, in other words, a clear sense of everything that can still go wrong. The paradox of the Indian economy today is that the more certain its glowing future seems to be, the less likely that future becomes.