“Compare and contrast the aims and reception of two exhibitions: Rabindranath Tagores paintings in 1930 and The other story in 1989. In the light of this comparison, do you think that significant shifts in attitude towards cultural differences and art took place between 1930 and 1989.”

The evaluation of the arts made by colonized people and their descendants has been coloured by the way in which views of cultural difference were developed by European colonizers. These arts have been interpretated in a different way by the artists and historians.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonized peoples cultures and peoples themselves were treated by the European colonizers not only as different but different and inferior. They were not valued like people from other European countries, as different merely in terms of language and history yet the same in their equal status as human consciousnesses.

Artists and critics working at the end of the nineteenth century used the term primitive to distinguish supposedly civilized European societies from other societies and cultures that were considered less civilized….(short extract)