Title: International Reception of Mithila Paintings and Heroization :
Abstract: Derived from Maithil practices and festivals and assumed to protect the household, the Madhubani Paintings spread since the 1960s India and abroad. Transferred on paper order to be commercialized, they undergo important changes. I will focus on the reception history of Mithila paintings through two Western mediators, who each declared themselves to be the discoverers of these paintings: one is British, William Archer (1907- 1979); the other French, Yves Vequaud (1938-2000). They bear witness to an international reception which underlines a particular aspect of the worldwide connected and shared histories of Bihar.
After being appointed officer of the Indian Civil Service Bihar, Archer publishes 1949 the article “Maithil Painting”. This is a first moment the reception history of these paintings. His writings show a universal aesthetic, based on psychoanalyze, surrealism and an organic vision of art.
The hippie “counter-culture” renews enchanted orientalist and romantic visions of a South Asian universe presumed to be spiritual, pantheist and sensorial. Followed on the heels of the sixties, indophily appears a particularly favourable, moment - or kairos - the reception of Maithil works. It parallels the internationalization of its actors: Erika Moser Schmitt Germany, Tokio Hasegawa Japan, Raymond and Naomi Owens as well as David Szanton United States and Yves Vequaud France. The writings of the latter mingled an aptitude to capture the “air du temps” with a real interest India and adhered to the values of the counter-culture. He is today mostly known for his essays on Mithila paintings. The Mithila Art is published 1976, then translated 1977 into English and German. In 1974, he co-directed the documentary Mithila. During a period of about ten years, he exhibited his collection of Mithila paintings France and abroad (in particular Paris, Musee de l’Homme, Musee des arts Decoratifs...).
In 1970, Vequaud discovered the Mithila paintings New-Delhi thanks to the museologist Ratna Fabri. He remained India for two years, went to Madhubani and met some village painters. In his writings, the Maithil women painters are presented as charismatic figures, between holiness and genius. In 1973, Sita Devi “appears to him as a saint”, withdrawn from the world, “in a inner-peace and trust refuge which nothing could disturb. From the author’s standpoint, the talent of these painters, neo-tantric muses presumed to create only when a yogic state, is compared with that of an exorcist. This vision of the prophetic artist, fluctuating between the christic figure of the saviour and the holy icon, also bears witness to the transformation of the status of the artist since the 19th Century the West and to the appearance of a ”vocational regime” (Nathalie Heinich). These charismatic figures call to mind the appearance of a conception of the artist as the author of innovative works, and living a singular life. Like Braque and Rouault, the Maithil women painters would so be transformed into figures of legend, likely to guide the work of their followers their efforts to become an artist. These prophetic artists would become a modern incarnation of holiness. In 1968, Yves Vequaud describes Mozart and Van Gogh as saints, whose example overwhelms. From his standpoint, the prophetic Maithil artists are devoid of the overwhelming heroization that affects Western artists. They would correspond to his promotion of creative spontaneity and a present freed from the burden of the past, quest of eternal moments.
In Yves Vequaud’s conception, the women painters swing between an ideal of devout humility and religious immortality. In 1973, Sita Devi is described as the one who “knew all the honours” and yet remained “humble and loving”. From the westernized standpoint of Vequaud, the artistic success of Maithil painters may be explained by their desire for singularity and timelessness their results. This involves both the personalization of means, namely the invention of new paths, as well as the depersonalization of the ends of the success, namely the creation of objects crystallizing values recognized beyond the author. This contingency was traditionally reserved for saints and heroes.
His admiration for these artists assumed an almost devotional character. Following the example of the canonization of Western art, Yves Vequaud established a relationship between the Maithil pictorial phenomenon and a religious phenomenon, the neo-tantrism. His behaviour was almost that of a believer. He set up his exhibitions with a nearly sacerdotal and proselytizing diligence. His hermeneutics of the works is almost theological. The conditions which the paintings were produced has been neglected. The art of Mithila is described as a (wedding) liturgy ; the paintbrush becomes the tool of prayer. The biographies of the painters appear as a “golden legend”. Nevertheless, these exegeses underline the effective ritual dimension of these paintings. Maithil art became the sphere onto which he projected the expectations traditionally assumed by the religion. It is no longer the instrument, but the object of the sacralization. Sanctified with the admiration of Yves Vequaud, the painters were not “acknowledged by the ecclesiastical authorities”: it concords with the informal religiosity of the author. He thus put forward an essentialized vision of Mithila paintings. Perhaps it represented also an attempt to sublimate his own artistic failures by projecting onto fantasized painters an imaginary solution to a melancholy situation: giving up novelistic publications, whether due to lack of inspiration or to editorial refusals. His neo-tantric vision of Mithila paintings resulted from the kairos of the hippie phase previously evoked.
Yet 1994 India Served and Observed, the memoirs posthumously published by William Archer and his spouse, Mildred, put forward a fanciful account about the discovery of Mithila paintings, marked with a Flower Power sensitivity : it stays in-between the construction of a storytelling and an aesthetic emotion, which is a posteriori inflamed. To seize the proclaimed strong and valued discourses of the moment on South-Asia is equivalent to a re-enchantment of Archer’s writings. This work builds itself resonance with Vequaud’s one. Thus this new narrative about the discovery of Mithila paintings, the meeting with the paintings and the painters is described as simultaneously exalted and distanced, but sublimated by aesthetic emotion. A narrative play takes shape wavering between desire and repression. According to their words, in these murals we somehow electrically met.
I will analyzed what extent these idealized works and their women heroized figures could be situated the social context of the “counter-culture” and the hippie movement, foreseeing the globalization of Mithila paintings the 1990s : since then some maithil artists free themselves from categories of gender, caste and local belonging. The appearance of painters men Mithila, motivated particular by the prospect of profits, polls gender categories associated to a practice for a long time exclusively feminine. Simultaneously some researchers deconstruct this essentialized tradition. They expound Archer’s and Vequaud's interpretations as an hegemonic discourse constituted from masculine canons.