ABSTRACT
The impact of the Bauhaus in Europe and North America in respect of architecture, art and design is very well documented and is the subject of a large and continuing literature. Controversy, however, still surrounds the position of the Bauhaus in the history of twentieth-century architecture and art, and it has its detractors as well as its avid supporters. It is widely felt that the 1922 exhibition marked the beginning of the avant-garde, the first phase of modernism in India, a period that lasted essentially until Indian independence in 1947. In Japan, modernism, and its successor post-modernism, seems to have provided a confirmation of what were believed to be already existing cultural traits, while providing a new visual vocabulary for expressing them in a modernist and hence internationalist form. Modernism and an internationalism outside of the colonial stand, then, in a complex relationship to each other.
