Bangalore is now seen as the third major art centre in India along with New Delhi and Mumbai: a city with scarcely an art market, or long history of professional modern art practice and few galleries. The Phantom Lady looks at the vibrant alternative art scene in the city...
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Galleries are the places where a work of art is presented in a supposedly neutral context for aesthetic appreciation in tranquility. In this ideal/idealistic definition what we fail to recognize is the ideological role of the galleries and their premises that comes to play a major role in the production of meanings, values and paradigms of monetary exchanges.
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In a country where art has been a part of life since earliest days of civilisation, professionally run art galleries came into existence post-independence.
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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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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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