Modernism doesn't belong to the West alone

Even as one gets tired of arguing that science and the scientific method do not belong to the West, however much they may have flourished there lately, it is refreshing to get someone from the West acknowledge that even in the world of Art, the West cannot claim to hold any monopoly on significant movements such as modernism! How I wish I had been able to go see this exhibition of Nandalal Bose's art in person (when it was in San Diego last spring), which apparently "delivers the significant news that..."

...modernism wasn’t a purely Western product sent out like so many CARE packages to a hungry and waiting world. It was a phenomenon that unfolded everywhere, in different forms, at different speeds, for different reasons, under different pressures, but always under pressure. As cool and above-it-all as modern may sound, it was a response to emergency.

...

He [Nandalal Bose] spoke of the sketches as a form of seeing. His long-nurtured habit of carrying paper and pens wherever he went suggests a form of yoga. With their formal deftness and avidity of detail, the drawings are his most engaging and personal body of work.

...

The Philadelphia show, which will travel to India, immerses us, wonderfully, in both that life and that time. And it reminds us that every Museum of Modern Art in the United States and Europe should be required, in the spirit of truth in advertising, to change its name to Museum of Western Modernism until it has earned the right to do otherwise.

[From Indian Modernism Via an Eclectic, Elusive Artist]

And if you are able to go, make sure to also catch another smaller exhibit there on "Multiple Modernities: India, 1905-2005".