This brief essay on India’s National Gallery of Modern Art traces the early years of the institution from when it was set up in 1954. It was an important site for the art world as much as for the newly independent nation state declaring its commitment to modernity.
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The Calcutta Group was an artist’s collective that came together in 1943. From the early phase of the modern in Indian art this collective was involved in negotiating the issue of identifying a visual language (mostly in formal/ stylistic terms) that would neither succumb to the art school brand academism nor the prevalent alternative of the so-called ‘Bengal School’ patterns.
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Year 2010: Arguably the art capital of the country,Delhi has a plethora of art institutions. Artists studios,commercial galleries and even public spaces like malls now function as the locus of art making and display.
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Ram Kinkar Baij, a towering figure excavated the concerns of a world inhabited by people who at that point in Indian history lived in luminal spaces.
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As suggested by Nam June Paik, that ‘noise’ occurred in two-way communication, and mistranslation was also a way of delivering messages. Within this system, Paik gave equal importance to both the role of the sender and that of the receiver.
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It is refreshingly educativeto read art criticism that isalmost half a century old.Richard Bartholomew’scatalogue essay in 1961 onRam Kumar’s paintingsreveals the extent to whichthe late critic puts himselfinto the picture. The essayalmost reads like a letterto the painter—both in itsrather personal tone andslightly rambling and self indulgentnature.
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When I visited the gala opening of JehangirSabavala’s well curated retrospective at the NGMA in Mumbai one winter evening in 2005, I came to witness, all at once, a life time of works by the octogenarian artist which I eventually reviewed.
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Whatever happened to the Bengal School? There is an extensive literature devoted to the development and apex of Orientalist art movement, which began around the turn of the last century and stretched into the 1920s, but very little significant analysis of how the movement“petered out” and why.
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Reversing the debate of ‘cultural subversion’ and instances of derivations of non-western artist from international avant-garde, BC Law in 1942 article, applauds the revival of such objects of Indian art in ‘Art in Industry’ exhibition that have been a source of inspiration and reverence to masses and business community of the west.
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Akbar Padamsee returned from Paris to Mumbai in 1954, after four years to have his first solo exhibition. On May 2, 1954, Padamsee was arrested under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code for not complying with the orders of the Vigilance Department of the CID to remove the two “obscene” paintings Lovers I and Lovers II from his exhibition.
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