The project “Intersections & Interventions. Barwe & Klee” (2023-25) is a collaboration between the Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan / Pune, the Zapurza Museum Pune and the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland. It wants to bring two artists and their artistic as well as theoretical/pedagogical ideas into an exciting dialogue: Prabhakar Barwe (1936-1995), a painter of the second wave of Indian modernism based in Maharashtra, and Paul Klee (1879-1940), a Swiss-German modernist painter and teacher at the Bauhaus School in the 1920s in Germany.
The idea for this dialogue draws from the fact that in the second half of the 20th century, Klee’s work was introduced to various Indian art school and audiences, especially also to the region of Maharashtra and Barwe, and served as a source of inspiration. The project wants to explore this connection and tap deeper into the affinities and differences between Barwe’s and Klee’s works, their contexts of respective art schools, as well as Indian and German modernism in general. Through these explorations, the project aims to continue the art historian approach of encounter. By emphasizing shared artistic languages and differences in the respective cultural and national contexts and by framing modernism and abstractionism as global phenomena, it challenges stories of singular influence. This approach of encounter was and is being established through transcultural research and exhibitions like “Bauhaus in Calcutta” in 1922 and its reconstruction at Bauhaus Dessau in 2013. Through drawing on these historical and contemporary efforts, bringing Klee’s and Barwe’s work in dialogue is an important contribution to re-thinking the canon of Western and Indian art history and pedagogy towards a joint aim of decolonizing art history and artistic practices.
The starting point of this project is the translation of selected writings of Barwe into German and of Klee into Marathi for the first time in history, in order to offer deeper knowledge exchange with cultural interaction. These translations will tie into a diverse program (2024-2025) of events, workshops and exhibitions both local in Pune/ Maharashtra and internationally. This will allow to identify affinities and differences in Klee’s and Barwe’s work and ideas around how they used abstractionism for both spiritual exploration of form and shaping of identities, as well as the experiments with materials and design.
A core aim of the program is to contribute to an academic as well as practical support for emerging artists and scholars. Further institutions and partners are being brought into the project in order to devise an extensive program of research, engagement and experimentation.