Paintings of Abanindranath Tagore
Paintings of Abanindranath Tagore is a book on Abanindranath Tagore's paintings by art historian R. Siva Kumar. It is widely considered as a landmark book in the Indian art scene that brings together a large corpus of Abanindranath's work for the first time. It fulfils a glaring lacuna in the picture of this master of modern Indian art. In the books R. Siva Kumar states, 'The social space that Abanindranath narrativized as an artist-flaneur is thus the subject of the Orientalist artist/writer read from the obverse. He reclaims the colonial subjects' right to narrate their stories that was arrogated to themselves by the colonial rulers and perpetuated by presenting their readings as 'objective'. Abanindranath reasserts this right by recasting the Nights (Arabian Nights), a text central to the Orientalist representation of the East, by urging us to read his act of imagination contrapuntally with the text authenticated by the Orientalist.' Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951) is a singular figure in Modern Indian Art. Having arrived on the Indian art scene with the first wave of nationalism, he was seen as father figure of nationalist art and modernism. Along with E. B. Havell, Coomaraswamy, Sister Nivedita and other nationalists he brought an attitudinal