Colours in Motion

This article investigates the reception and representation of the Colour Field artist, Natvar Bhavsar (b 1934), and his paintings in art historical and critical discourses. It argues that American art discourse continues to misinterpret the proposals made by Asian American artists like Bhavsar because it maintains categories and narratives of Abstract Expressionism devised by nationalist critics from the 1950s and 1960s. An alternative analytic framework is then proposed in this article based on the understanding that Modernism was practiced globally and that modern artists identified themselves and their practice of abstraction as transnational. With these two conditions of transnationalism structuring this study, Bhavsar, as an Asian American artist, is represented in a more accurate manner. The racial and ethnic identities of the artist are not viewed as the originating cause of the work, but as one of several vectors of influence that are woven into his practice

Aesthetics · Art · Ethnic group · Field (mathematics · Literature · Modernism (music · Narrative · Nationalism · Painting · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · Sociology · Structuring · Transnationalism · Visual arts · Anthropology · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Law