This essay examines the interface between the indexical and the gestural, through the practice of early twentieth-century painters active in the Bombay Presidency and adjoining princely states such as Kolhapur and Aundh. It draws upon archival materials such as biographies, memoirs, and photographs documenting artists at work in the studio, as well as remains of posed photographs that were produced as aide-mémoire for paintings. It throws light on the fraught place of photography as aesthetic practice in the art academy, its association with colonial protocols of scientific accuracy, capture and control, and its use to construct suggestive representational hybrids of the anatomical and the painterly outside the academy. The article explores patterns of patronage and of the use of photography in the practices of art production, publication, and exhibition, looking, in particular, at the role of the photographic basis of the portrait painting, and how photography became a supplement to “life-study” or the practice of drawing from nude models. The gendered politics of this interface, between artist, technology, and female model is a recurrent thread of analysis, drawing on critical debates that were published in Marathi periodicals of the time. The article explores the braiding of technologies in artistic practice in different sites, from the academy and the artist’s studio through to publication and exhibition in galleries, and illustrated magazines. While the essay considers a number of artists, including Ravi Varma, Durandhar, and Thakur Singh, it focuses, in particular, on Baburao Painter for his engagement with photography and painting in a career which traversed theater, painting, photography, and film production.
Aesthetic Delusions: An Investigation into the Role of Rapid Visual Adaptation in Aesthetic Practice
