Surface, Depth, Bewilderment: Propositions for thinking about the feminine in the paintings of Mughal India
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09 Jan
11 Jan
2023
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Islamic Aesthetics
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Molly Emma Aitken
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Image: Two women sharing a quiet moment, Polier Album, I 4597 fol 39v, Late Mughal, 40 x 28 cm, Museum fur Islamische Kunst, Berlin
Paintings are objects in relief. They are textured by paper, brush strokes, burnishing, and pigments ground to different consistencies. They bear thick dots of white, thin lac glazes, precious metal leaf, sometimes betel wings adhered to their surfaces. Here they glisten; there they are velvety. Hindustani poets, north and south, liked to imagine paintings to be like women and women to be like paintings. They took inspiration from how painters confounded skin with pigment, hunggold on ears of paint, and let translucent washes drift across bellies of color to be confused with veils that might be lifted. These lectures are about feminine beauty as image as paint as illusion in paintings of pre colonial north India and the Deccan. Feminine beauty was an expressive medium for artists of the Mughal era, and paintings of beautiful women invite us to think in fresh ways about what painting meant and enabled for people in Mughal times. The course moves from surface into depth and from insight into bewilderment. What we think we are holding when we hold paintings of women slips from our grasp. This is a class about unknowing what we think we know, and in the end, it is about women and also not about women at all. It is about the art of being human.
Duration -
January 9, 10, 11, 2023
Timing: 6:15 - 8:30 PM
Fees
Rs. 3,000 ((For student discounts registrations kindly email info@jp-india.org))
Registrations Closed
Molly Emma Aitken
Molly Emma Aitken is an Associate Professor in the Art History Department at The Graduate Center, CUNY and the Art Department at CUNY’s City College of New York. Her publications include When Gold Blossoms: Indian Jewelry from the Susan L. Beningson Collection (London: Asia Society and Philip Wilson Publishers, 2004), and The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), which won CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey award in 2011 and the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2012. She has drafted most of a co-authored monograph on the classical Indian heroine or nayika in Mughal, Deccan and Rajput painting and poetry with a professor of early modern Hindi literature at Columbia University, Allison Busch (1969-2019). Aitken is currently working on two manuscripts. One, tentatively titled, We Are All Women is about gender, eros and play in Mughal painting; the second, with the working title In the Sisterhood of Images, is a memoir in art history. Aitken has been travelling to India for research since 1992 when she apprenticed for a year to renowned Mughal and Rajput painting master Bannu ji. She misses being a painter; the experience of making still colours all of her scholarships.