In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Rakhee Balaram (State University of New York at Albany / Clark Fellow) questions the historiography concerning Rabindranath Tagore’s art to open up new questions about the historical avant-garde and its limits. This lecture looks to South America and Japan to think about the genesis of Tagore’s drawings and paintings, which were exhibited in Paris in the wake of the celebrated African and Oceanic exhibition in Paris in 1930. Balaram draws on scientific, economic and legal discourses, and both cross-cultural analysis and popular culture to examine Tagore’s erasures, drawings, and paintings, which offer revolutionary perspectives on current debates in the field. 

Rakhee Balaram is associate professor of global art and art history at State University of New York at Albany where she specializes in modern and contemporary art. Balaram has published two books, Counterpractice: Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Art of French Feminism (Manchester University Press, 2022) and a co-edited volume on modern and contemporary South Asian art, 20th-Century Indian Art (Thames & Hudson, 2022), which was named a Financial Times Book of the Year. In spring 2024, Balaram will be a Scholar-in-Residence at INHA (Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art) in Paris. At the Clark, she will work on a book on two canonical Indian artists, Amrita Sher-Gil and Rabindranath Tagore.

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.

Image: Rabindranath Tagore at his exhibition at the Galerie Pigalle, Paris, 1930