MODERN INDIAN ART

• By the mid and late nineteenth century, art schools were established in major cities like Lahore, Calcutta (now, Kolkata), Bombay (now, Mumbai) and Madras (now, Chennai). These art schools tended to promote traditional Indian crafts, and academic and naturalist art that reflected Victorian tastes.
•  Even the Indian crafts, which received support, were the ones based on European taste and the demands made by its market.
•  It was against this colonial bias that nationalist art emerged, and the Bengal School of Art, as nurtured by Abanindranath Tagore and E. B. Havell, was a prime example.
•  India’s first nationalist art school, Kala Bhavana, was set up in 1919 as part of the newly established Visva-Bharati University in Shantiniketan, conceptualised by poet Rabindranath Tagore.
•  Gaganendranath Tagore used the language of Cubism to create a unique style of his own. His paintings of mysterious halls and rooms were made with vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines, which were quite different from the Cubist style of famous artist Pablo Picasso, who invented the style using geometrical facets.
• Rabindranath Tagore turned to visual art quite late in life. While writing poems, he would often make patterns out of doodles and develop a unique, calligraphic style out of crossed-out words. Some of these were turned into human faces and landscapes, which floated captivatingly in his poems. His palette was limited to black, yellow ochre, reds and browns. However, Rabindranath created a small visual world that was a complete departure from the more elegant and delicate style of the Bengal School, which often drew inspiration from Mughal and Pahari miniatures along with Ajanta frescoes.
• Nandalal Bose in 1921–1922 joined the Kala Bhavana. His training under Abanindranath Tagore made him familiar with nationalism in art.
• Shantiniketan had a large population of the Santhal tribe on its outskirts, and these artists often painted and made sculptures based on them. Apart from this, themes from literary sources also interested them.
•  Benode Behari Mukherjee was drawn to the lives of medieval saints. On the Walls of Hindi Bhavana in Shantiniketan, he made a mural called Medieval Saints, in which he charts the history of medieval India through the lives of Tulsi Das, Kabir and others, and focuses on their humane teachings. Ramkinkar Baij was an artist given to the celebration of nature. His art reflects his everyday experiences. Almost all his sculptures and paintings are created as a response to his environment. For instance, his Santhal Family made as an outdoor sculpture within the Kala Bhavana compound, turned the daily activity of a Santhal family setting out for work into a larger than a life-size piece of art.
• Besides, it was made out of modern material like cement mixed with pebbles, held in shape with the help of a metal armature. His style was in sharp contrast with works of earlier sculptors like D. P. Roy Choudhury, who had used academic realism to celebrate the labour of the working classes, in The Triumph of Labour.
• Amrita Sher-Gil was trained in Paris and had first-hand experience in European modern art trends, such as Impressionism and post–Post-Impressionism. After deciding to make India her base, she worked to develop art with Indian themes and images. Amrita Sher-Gil assimilated miniature and mural traditions of Indian art with European modernism.

1. Modern Ideologies and Political Art in India

• The humanitarian crisis compelled many artists to reflect on their role in society. In 1943, under the leadership of Prodosh Das Gupta, a sculptor, a few young artists formed the Calcutta Group, which included Nirode Mazumdar, Paritosh Sen, Gopal Ghose and Rathin Moitra. The group believed in an art that was universal in character and free from older values.
•  Seeing abject poverty around them and the plight of people in villages and cities, many young artists in Calcutta were drawn to socialism, especially Marxism. This modern philosophy, which was taught by Karl Marx in the mid–nineteenth century in the West, asked important questions about the class difference in society and appealed to these artists.
• Chittoprasad and Somnath Hore, the two political artists of India, found printmaking to be a strong medium to express these social concerns. With printmaking, it is easier to produce multiple numbers of artworks and reach out to more people. Chittoprasad’s, etching linocuts and lithographs showed the deplorable condition of the poor. It is not surprising that he was asked by the Communist Party of India to travel to villages worst affected by the Bengal Famine and make sketches. These were later published as pamphlets under the name, Hungry Bengal, much to the annoyance of the British.

2. The Progressive Artists Group of Bombay and the Multifaceted Indian Art

• In Bombay, another set of artists formed a group, called The Progressives in 1946. Francis Newton Souza was the outspoken leader of the group, which included M. F. Husain, K. H. Ara, S. A. Bakre, H. A. Gade and S. H. Raza. Souza wanted to question the conventions that had prevailed in art schools.
• For him, modern art stood for a new freedom that could challenge the traditional sense of beauty and morality. However, his experimental works were focused mainly on women, whom he painted as nudes, exaggerating their proportions and breaking the standard notions of beauty M. F. Husain, on the other hand, wanted to make the modern style of painting understandable in the Indian context.
• For example, he would paint using Western expressionist brush strokes with bright Indian colours. He not only drew from Indian mythology and religious sources but also from the style of miniature paintings, village crafts and even folk toys

3. Abstraction-a new trend

• While Husain largely remained a figurative artist, S.H. Raza moved in the direction of abstraction. It is not surprising then that landscape was a favourite theme for this artist. His colours ranged from bright to soft, modulated monochromes.
• If Husain used the figurative language of modern art to show Indian themes, Raza made a similar claim with abstraction. Some of his paintings draw from old mandalas and yantra designs and even use Bindu as a symbol of oneness from Indian philosophy. Later, Gaitonde, too, pursued abstraction, while artists like K. K. Hebbar, S. Chavda, Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta and Krishen Khanna would keep moving between abstractions and figurative
• Abstraction was important for many sculptors like Piloo Pochkhanawala and printmakers like Krishna Reddy.
• In South India, K. C. S. Paniker, who later went on to establish Cholamandalam,
• an artist village near Madras, pioneered abstraction. He showed by imbibing artistic motifs from Tamil and Sanskrit scripts, floor decorations and rural crafts that abstraction has a long history in India Sculptors like Amarnath
• Sehgal struck a balance between abstraction and figurative and created wiry sculptures as in Cries Unheard. In the case of Mrinalini Mukherjee, her works tilted more towards abstraction when she took up the innovative medium of hemp fibre, as in Vanshri.
• Many Indian artists and critics grew worried about their imitation of modern art from the West and felt the need to establish an Indian identity in their art. In the 1960s, Biren De and G. R. Santosh in Delhi and K. C. S. Paniker in Madras moved in this direction when they turned to the past and local artistic traditions to create unique Indian abstract art. This style became successful in the West and later in India and came to be known as Neo-Tantric art because of its use of geometrical designs seen in traditional diagrams for meditation or yantras K. C. S. Paniker, on the other hand, made use of diagrams, scripts and pictograms that he saw in his region and evolved out of them a style, which was both modern and unique.
•  In that sense, eclecticism, in which an artist borrowed ideas from many sources, became an important feature of many Indian modernists, of which Ram Kumar, Satish Gujral, A. Ramachandran and Meera Mukherjee are some examples.
•  Since the time of the Bombay Progressive Artist’s Group, artists began to write their own manifestos or writings, in which they declared the main aims of their art and how it differed from others.
•  In 1963, another group was formed under the leadership of J. Swaminathan, named Group 1890. Swaminathan also wrote a manifesto for the group, in which the artists claimed to be free from any ideology. It included artists, such as Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Jyoti Bhatt, Ambadas, and Jeram Patel, and sculptors like Raghav Kaneria and Himmat Shah. It was a short-lived movement but impacted the next generation of artists, especially, those associated with the Cholamandalam School near Madras.

4. Tracing the Modern Indian Art 

• Modern art in India may have drawn some ideas from the West but it differed from it significantly. Modern Indian art is that modernity and colonialism were closely connected. Nationalism was not only a political movement that arose following the Indian Revolt of 1857 but it gave rise to cultural nationalism.
•  Ideas like swadeshi in art were held by art historians like Ananda Coomaraswamy around the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It meant that we cannot understand Indian modernism as a blind imitation of the West

The New Figurative Art and Modern Art From the 1980s

• Since the 1970s, many artists began to move towards the use of figures and stories that are easy to recognize. Perhaps, this was a way to express their concern towards social problems, following the Indo-Pakistan war in 1971 and the birth of Bangladesh.
•  While K. G. Subramanyan, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Bhupen Khakar in Baroda started using storytelling in their paintings, Jogen Chowdhury,
• Bikash Bhattacharjee and Ganesh Pyne in West Bengal, too, painted the social problems that disturbed them. they, too, explored old miniature paintings and popular art forms like calendars and folk art to be able to paint stories that could be understood by the larger public Figures of people and animals could be seen in the work of printmakers like Jyoti Bhatt – (Devi), Laxma Goud (Man Woman, Tree) and Anupam Sud (Of Walls) as a way to show conflict between men and women in a world full of social inequality.
•  Arpita Singh, Nalini Malani, Sudhir Patwardhan and others turned their attention to the plight of people living in big cities. Many of these modern artists painted Such urban problems and tried to see the world from the eyes of the oppressed.
• In the 1980s, an important departure in this attitude can be seen in the Baroda Art School, which came up in the late 1950s. There was a change in the way artists began to take interest in their immediate surroundings. Many artists became aware of their role as citizens in a democracy and social and political concerns found a place in the artistic production of this period Gulam Mohammed Sheikh would paint the busy lanes of the old bazaar in Baroda while invoking a medieval town in Sienna and the style of Italian painters like the Lorenzetti brothers.
• G. Subramanyan, Sheikh’s teacher and a founding member of the Baroda Art School was interested in mural art or art on large public buildings, which can be seen by everyone. He was attracted to the technique of sand casting, which was known to local Rajasthani artists. From them, he learned how to create Large-scale relief sculptures by repeating the basic unit of shape
• Bhupen Khakhar painted the local barber or watch repairer with the same earnestness as he painted the experiences of queer men and their struggle with middle-class morality.

New Media Art From 1990s

• The art form that was increasingly seen as contemporary was installation However, it was more dependent on technology and it is, therefore, not surprising that most of the early installation artists came from big cities — Nalini Malani from Mumbai and Vivan Sundaram from Delhi.  However, their subject matter was grim and thought-provoking.
• A new technique called ‘photorealism’, which was used by Atul Dodiya in Bapu at Rene Block Gallery, New York. Many younger artists used oil or acrylic to paint in the manner of a photograph or television screen. T. V. Santosh and Shibu Natesan used photorealism to comment on communal violence on one hand and at the same time, gave us a glimpse of the new look that cities had acquired with India’s technological advancements
• Sheba Chachi, Ravi Agarwal and Atul Bhalla, among others, photographed those, who lived on the margins of our society, whom we do not notice much in our day-to-day life women ascetics, queer people, and so on. Often, they would express their concern about ecology like pollution of rivers and urban congestion. Photography and video have inspired many contemporary artists

5. Lives of the Medieval Saints

• The Lives of Medieval Saints, a mural in Hindi Bhavana, Shantiniketan, was created by Benode Behari Mukherjee around the eve of India’s Independence from Colonial rule, during 1946–1947.
• The mural employs the technique of fresco buono and covers almost 23 metres of the entire upper half of the three walls of the room. Mukherjee skillfully reminds us of the syncretic and tolerant tradition of Indian life as found in the teachings of great Bhakti poets like Ramanuja, Kabir, Tulsidas, Surdas and others

Mother Teresa

• This painting by M. F. Husain of the saintly figure, Mother Teresa, belongs to the 1980s. It is painted in a style typical of this artist, who created a new language of modern Indian art.
• The figure of the faceless Mother appears several times, each time holding a baby with a lot of attention given to the hand.
•  The central figure of the seated Mother has a grown-up man lying on her lap horizontally.
• This speaks of the artist’s familiarity with European art, especially, the famous sculpture of Italian Renaissance master, Michelangelo’s Pieta.

Haldi Grinder

Amrita Sher-Gil painted Haldi Grinder in 1940. This was when she sought inspiration from India’s idyllic rural scene. Such a scene, depicting Indian women busy in a traditional activity of grinding dry turmeric, had to be painted in Indian style. It is not surprising that she used bright, saturated pigments to paint this work

Fairy Tales From Purvapalli

• This is a painting using water and oil colours on an acrylic sheet and was created by K. G. Subramanyan in 1986.
• This is the work of the prolific writer, scholar, teacher and art historian, who draws inspiration from his familiarity with different art traditions from India and the world.
• The title refers to his home in Purvapalli, a locality in Shantiniketan, from where his imagination seems to be travelling all around the world.
• His imaginary landscape consists of a strange world, in which birds and animals rub shoulders with humans.
• There are unusual trees that grow feathers in place of leaves. This style of painting is sketchy and colours are applied in quick brush strokes. The palette remains earthy ochres, greens and browns.

Whirlpool

This was a print made by India’s celebrated printmaker Krishna Reddy in 1963. It is a captivating composition created out of various shades of blues. Each colour blends into the other to create a powerful web of design. It is the result of a new technique in printmaking that he developed along with a well-known printmaker, Stanley William Hayter, in the famous studio called ‘Atelier 17’. This method came to be known as ‘viscosity printing’, in which different colours are applied on the same metal printing plate. Each colour is mixed with linseed oil in varied concentrations to ensure that colours do not run into each other

Childern 

• This is a graphic print on paper done with monochromatic etching with aquatint made by Somnath Hore (1921–2006) in 1958. The experience of the Bengal Famine of 1943 left a lasting impression on him. His early sketches and drawings were spot and life drawings of hapless victims of the famine, suffering and dying peasants, sick and infirm destitute, and portraits of men, women, children and animals.
• These line drawings, which followed representational contours and tonal devices, were seldom adopted. In this etching, images of children were taken from the experience of the famine of 1943, which was etched in his memory. This is a close-knit composition with five standing figures, having no background, perspective or surrounding the situation as the figures are talking to themselves

Devi

• This is an etching on paper made by Jyoti Bhatt (1934) in 1970In this print, the pictorial image of Devi is re-cast and re-contextualized with a linear drawing of the frontal face of a woman, folk motifs and patterns.
• The portrait of Devi is centrally placed as an iconic image. The two-dimensionality of words and motifs around the portrait expresses the Tantric philosophy, evoking the power of self-evolution and self-involution, seeing reality as the intertwining dynamic and static principle of Shakti. Bhatt also made artworks like Kalpvruksha, Self-Portrait, Forgotten Monuments, Sita’s Parrot, Still Life with Two Lamps etc.

Of Walls

• This is an etching made from a zinc plate and printed on paper made by Anupam Sud in 1982.
• The absence of a face gives it a brooding and sad expression. The painting depicts the figure of a lonely woman seated on the pavement before a dilapidated wall.
• In the foreground, we only get a glimpse of the lower part of a poor man sleeping on the ground, contrasting with the clothed woman, and adding to the sadness of the print.

6. Rural South Indian Man-Woman

This is an etching print on paper made by Laxma Goud. The work is a combination of highly ornate contours, a realistic depiction of the peasants and a gentle stylization that gives a touch of puppets to the figures represented in the print.

This print is line-based and coloured. Some of his other artworks are Woman, Man, Landscape of Turkey, Untitled, Xiyan China, etc.

Triumph of Labour

This is an open-air large-scale sculpture in bronze made by Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhury (1899–1975). It was installed at Marina Beach, Chennai, on the eve of the Republic Day in 1959. It shows four men trying to move a rock, rendering the importance and contribution of human labour in nation-building.

It is an image of labour against the elements of nature, a well-known romantic subject of the nineteenth century. Chowdhury loved to dwell on the strong musculature of his workers, revealing their bones, veins, flesh, etc. He portrayed the extreme physical effort of loosening a massive, immovable rock

Santhal Family 

This is an open-air large-scale sculpture created by Ramkinker Baij in 1937. It is made out of metal armature and cement mixed with pebbles, and placed in the compound Of Kala Bhavana, Shantiniketan, India’s first national art school.

 It shows a scene of a Santhal man, carrying his children in a double basket joined by a pole, and his wife and dog walking alongside. Perhaps, it speaks of the family migrating from one region to another, carrying all their frugal possessions

Cries Unheard

This is a sculpture in bronze made by Amarnath Sahgal in 1958. Although the artist only uses abstraction, in which three figures are stick-like and shown in flat rhythmical planes, it is easy to understand them as a family husband, wife and child. They are shown flinging their arms above and crying out for help in vain.

Ganesha

This is a sculpture in oxidized copper made by P. V. Janakiram in 1970 and is in the collection of NGMA, Delhi. He used sheets of copper to create pictorial sculptures as free-standing forms and ornamented their surface with linear elements. The image of Ganesha, crafted frontally, lends an important indigenous character to cave and temple sculpture. In this sculpture, Ganesha is playing vina, a musical instrument. 

The sculpture is conceived in terms of linear silhouettes instead of emphasis on three-dimensionality, despite its volume. Rhythm and growth are incorporated through lyrical stylisation. It is also an amalgamation of folk and traditional craftsmanship

Vanshri

This artwork was created by Mrinalini Mukherjee in 1994. She uses an unusual material to make this sculpture. She uses hemp fibre, a medium she experimented with from the early 1970s. Going by the intricate way, she has knotted together and woven a complex shape out of jute fibre. It has a face with an inward expression and protruding lips, and above all, a powerful presence of natural divinity out of jute fibre.