PhD Candidate Ayesha Matthan publishes online essay on MoMA post: notes on art in a global context.
Matthan’s essay “Laboring and Learning: Live Models and Art Education at the Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, in the Long 20th Century” analyzes 20th-century photographs from Bombay’s Sir J. J. School of Art, highlighting the haunting relationship between labor, art, and the body. Examining works by Homai Vyarawalla, Foy Nissen, and Raghubir Singh from the 1930s to the 1990s, the author traces four phases: late colonial nationalism, deindustrialization (marked by the 1982–83 textile strike), the rise of the Shiv Sena, and 1990s neoliberal reform.
Unlike earlier colonial studies that commodified named artisans photographing unnamed laborers, these images reveal a stark valorization of art over labor. Live models, who were often displaced migrant workers, posed beside plaster casts of Greek sculptures, embodying a dissonant colonial pedagogy that elevated Eurocentric ideals while disembodying and romanticizing “native types.”
JJ, founded in 1857 to train migrants, instead cultivated an elite, upper-caste class of “gentleman artists.” The photographs capture models as spectral, devalued specimens. Together, these images narrate how colonial knowledge entrenched hierarchies, reducing labor to a disposable resource, even as models and students occasionally subverted the gaze. Matthan concludes that JJ’s pedagogical inertia contrasted with the city’s chronic unrest, disempowerment of the urban poor, and the neoliberalization of its economy.
post is The Museum of Modern Art’s online resource devoted to art and the history of modernism in a global context. It is the public face of Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP), a cross-departmental, internal research program at MoMA that fosters the multiyear study of art histories outside North America and Western Europe.
