To Pick Up a Brush

Abstract

This article reads anew Gieve Patel's important 1985 essay ‘To Pick up a Brush’, entering into dialogue with the rich conversations among twentieth-century Indian artists Patel unfolds. Rather than focus solely on the generation after Partition and Independence in 1947, and rather than further intensify attention on artists of the past two decades, the period of ‘long-1980s’ anchors both Patel's text and this one. As such, the article revisits Patel's provocations to invite us to join him in a double-take, one that might enable a new narrative of later twentieth-century art and criticism on the subcontinent.