Partha Mitter

Partha Mitter Hon.D.Litt.(Courtauld Institute, London), FRSA, Emeritus Professor University of Sussex, Adjunct Research Professor Carleton University, Member, Wolfson College Oxford, is a historian of art and culture, specialising in the reception of Indian art in the West, as well as in modernity, art and identity in India, and more recently in global modernism. He read history at London University and did his doctorate with E. H. Gombrich (1970). He began his career as Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge (1968-69) and Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge (1970-74). In 1974 he joined Sussex as a Lecturer in Indian History, retiring in 2002 as Professor in Art History. Mitter was Radhakrishnan Lecturer at All Souls College, Oxford in 1992. He has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; and CASVA, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. He was Getty Visiting Professor at Bogazici University, Istanbul in 2011. In 2000 he was invited by the Indian Government to set up the School of Art and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.  He has been working with the Bauhaus Foundation in Berlin and Dessau since 2009, including the exhibition, Bauhaus Imaginista held at various sites around the world, including Kyoto and Berlin, in 2019.

His publications include Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art(Clarendon Press, Oxford 1977; Chicago University Press, paperback 1992; Oxford University Press, New Delhi 2013); Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850-1922, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1994); Indian Art,Oxford Art History Series (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2002); The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde – 1922-1947 (Reaktion Books, London, and Oxford University Press, New Delhi 2013), and Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery”, Art Bulletin, Vol. XC, No.1, December 2008, 531-574 (pages refer to my lead essay, four responses and my concluding reply).