Thames & Hudson have just published his large book, The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century, which includes a  section on Khakhar. In this informal talk ,  Timothy Hyman will present Khakhar as a liberator from many modern taboos - both aesthetic and sexual.

Linda Nochlin on The World New Made
Both wonderfully concrete in detail and wide-ranging in scope, Timothy Hyman’s The World New Made constructs a new and convincing scenario for the history of 20th-century painting.  Rejecting the straitjacket of modernist theory and the rigid model of abstraction, the author, himself a painter as well as an art historian, posits the neglected realm of figure painting as the important vehicle of modernity in the recent past, reinterpreting the work of well-known artists like Chagall, Leger, Kahlo and Guston  as well as reviving the careers of neglected ones like Ken Kiff, Bhupen Khakhar or Ida Applebroog.  A keen visual intelligence, human warmth and intellectual commitment mark his project:  needless to say, the well-chosen and beautifully reproduced illustrations do much to support the author’s provocative text.

Timothy Hyman is a painter (elected RA in 2011).He was lead curator for the Tate's Stanley Spencer retrospective in 2001; in 2003 ,Thames & Hudson published his monograph on Sienese Painting (an admiration he shared with Khakhar and several other Indian painters).

The video of this lecture can be viewed on YouTube.