In the Mood: Exhibiting Udaipur’s Paintings of Place
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01 May
2023
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Curatorial Processes
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Various Scholars
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Image: A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, November 19, 2022-May 14, 2023, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Presented in collaboration with The City Palace Museum in Udaipur administered by The Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation. Photo: Colleen Dugan.
Around 1700, artists in Udaipur (a court in northwest India) began creating immersive paintings that express the moods (bhava) of the city’s palaces, lakes, and mountains. These large works and their emphasis on lived experience constituted a new direction in Indian painting. With dazzling paintings on paper and cloth—many on public view for the first time—the exhibition A Splendid Land reveals the environmental, political, and emotional contexts in which the new genre emerged. It explores the unique visual strategies that artists developed to communicate emotions, depict places, and celebrate water resources.
The exhibition is organized as a journey that begins at Udaipur’s centre and continues outward: first its lakes and lake palaces, then to the city, onward to the surrounding countryside, and finally to the cosmos. A side trip immerses visitors in the emotions surrounding the monsoon, the annual rains so crucial to Mewar’s prosperity. Throughout, a soundscape by the renowned filmmaker Amit Dutta invites audiences to fully sense—and not just see—the moods of these extraordinary places and paintings.
Online Platform: ZOOM
Duration -
May 1, 2023
Timing: 6:30 - 8:00 PM IST
Registrations Closed
Debra Diamond
Dr. Debra Diamond is Elizabeth Moynihan Curator for South and Southeast Asian Art at the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. She is currently re-cataloguing paintings in the collection, working on an international loan exhibition for 2022, A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, and designing a digital component for an exhibition of Persian and Mughal painting, Writing My Truth: The Mughal Emperor Babur. Her most recent exhibition, Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice Across Asia (2017), was accompanied by the publication of Paths to Perfection, the museums’ first handbook of its Buddhist collections, and an app exploring Tibetan sacred spaces. She received her PhD in south Asian art history from Columbia University (2000). Dr. Diamond has curated numerous exhibitions at the Sackler Gallery, including Worlds within Worlds: Imperial Paintings from India and Iran (2012); In the Realm of the Buddha (2010); Facing East: Portraits from Asia (2006); Perspectives: Simryn Gill (2006); Autofocus: Raghubir Singh’s Way into India (2003); and the re-installation of Arts of the Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayas at the Freer.
Dipti Khera
Dipti Khera is associate professor in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. As a scholar of early modern South Asia, with interdisciplinary training in art history, museum anthropology, and architecture, her research and teaching integrate longue durée perspectives and Indian Ocean and Eurasian geographies. Along with specializing in paintings, books, letters, and maps made in northern and western India, she has published on the crafting of colonial taste and foregrounded vernacular objects that reveal global art history's blind spots in narrating stories of mobility, power, and emotional entanglements. A co-edited volume for Journal18 (December 2021), "The 'Long' Eighteenth-Century?” considers from which vantage points, whether local, regional, or transregional, is the eighteenth century long, and to what ends we deploy such visual and material microhistories. Her book The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2020) received the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in Indian Humanities (American Institute of Indian Studies), and was shortlisted for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award (College Art Association), BASAS Book Prize (British Association for South Asian Studies), and Kenshur Prize (Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies). A recent co-edited catalogue, A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur (Hirmer Publications, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2022) accompanies the co-curated exhibition currently on view at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, Washington DC.