Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prize winning Bengali poet and polymath, is an eminent figure in the history and culture of modern India. As the Indian Independence Movement grew in the early twentieth century, Tagore used his renown to establish a university in the rural community of Santiniketan: Visva-Bharati, “where the world meets in a single nest.” All of Tagore’s efforts — artistic, educational, and social — were informed by a universalist philosophy that he developed based on the Upanishads. Tagore’s philosophy facilitated unity between all creation, including harmony between the peoples of humanity and between humanity and the natural world. The architecture of Santiniketan is a tangible manifestation of Tagore’s philosophy. Designed under his direction by his associates Nandalal Bose, Rathindranath Tagore, and Surendranath Kar, Tagore’s residences at Santiniketan, in particular the houses Udayan and Shyamali, illustrate Tagore’s universalism in two primary ways. The designs unify a diverse set of traditions within a Modernist framework, and provide for maximum interaction between indoor and outdoor spaces. Udayan is a synthesis of Indian, Japanese, Javanese, and European designs, finding commonalities in the traditions through abstraction and modern materials. Shyamali also draws from a variety of influences and, in service to a connection between man and nature, the design blurs the boundaries between indoors and outdoors by using the natural material of mud. The architecture of Santiniketan, because it is a product of Tagore’s unique values, does not fit easily within the major trends of Modernist architecture in India or beyond. It is best evaluated as a single thread in the contrapuntal nature of Modernism.

Héritier de l’universalisme humaniste de Rabindranath Tagore par sa formation à Śāntiniketan en Inde, le ditpère de l’art moderne birman Bagyi Aung Soe (1923/24–1990) se consacra à figurer les réalités ultimes enfonction des enseignements bouddhiques. Pour ce faire, il mit au point un langage pictural qu’il baptisa lapeinture « manaw maheikdi dat » qui signifie la création artistique par la culture mentale. Ses référencesvisuelles, variant de la physique à l’ésotérisme bouddhique, de la culture populaire à la poésie, comprennent toutce qui fut à sa portée intellectuelle et spirituelle dans la Birmanie socialiste militaire de 1962 à 1988. Soninsistance sur la somme des héritages propres à cet espace-temps, de même que son dépassement descloisonnements conceptuels selon les disciplines, les frontières nationales ou les divisions chronologiques, exigeun récit conçu au regard des significations contextuelles, un récit adapté et affranchi du modèle prétendumentinternational de l’art euraméricain. Afin de proposer un récit sur comment il compta rendre manifestel’insaisissable selon les circonstances propres au contexte de sa vie, nous mettons l’accent sur les conditionsaccueillant la genèse et la diffusion de cette production artistique dite « la plus moderne de l’art moderne » enraison de sa dimension transnationale et transhistorique. À partir d’une sélection parmi plus de quatre milleoeuvres et de centaines de témoignages écrits et oraux recueillis, nous examinons non seulement la fabrication decette peinture qui reste aussi non étudiée en Birmanie qu’inconnue de la scène internationale, mais aussi lesmanières dont nous pouvons la lire et la voir. / A student at Rabindranath Tagore’s ashram in Śāntiniketan, India, Myanmar’s “father of modern art” BagyiAung Soe (1923/24–1990) embraced his Indian gurus’ concept of art and the artist. In the spirit of the laureate’shumanist universalism, he strove to picture Buddhist teachings. His signature idiom christened “manawmaheikdi dat”, which has yet to be studied in Myanmar and is virtually unknown at the international level, reliedon meditation to achieve advanced mental power in order to picture the most elemental components of allphenomena, and its visual references included all that was possibly accessible under socialist rule in Burma(1962–1988). With little regard for artistic conventions and categorisations according to discipline, nation andchronology, Aung Soe drew from the sum of artistic, intellectual and spiritual traditions defining his space andtime, varying from quantum physics to esoteric Buddhism, from popular culture to poetry. The nature of hisapproach, method and subject matter, coupled with his country’s exceptional circumstances, demands a newnarrative of art that is unfettered by the assumptions inherent to the purportedly international framework ofEuramerican modern art. Focusing on the contextual significances of the genesis and reception of manawmaheikdi dat painting, this dissertation examines the making, the reading and the seeing of this pictoriallanguage whose transnational and transhistorical dimension renders it “the most modern of modern art”. Basedon a selection of the artist’s works and writings, as well as witnesses of his life and practice, we attempt a storyof how he pictured and made manifest the formless on his own terms.