Essay
I’ve Been Here…
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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Essay
Museuming Modern Art NGMA: The Indian Case-Study
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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Essay
Dr. Sanjoy Kumar Mallik on Dr. Klaus Fischer’s Essay on The Calcutta Group
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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Essay
Latika Gupta on Richard Bartholomew’s Essay on Delhi Shilpi Chakra’s Tenth Annual Exhibition
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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Essay
Dr. Alka Pande on Richard Bartholomew’s Essay on Ram Kinkar’s Show at NGMA
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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Essay
Madhu Jain on Richard Bartholomew’s Essay on Ram Kumar’s Exhibition
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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Gopal Mirchandani on Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni’s Foreword to the Catalogue of Jehangir Sabavala
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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Essay
Sophia Powers on K. G. Subramanyan’s Essay in the Catalogue of Benode Mukherjee’s Retrospective
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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Suruchi Khubchandani on ‘The Place of Art in Indian Industry’ by Bhabani Churn Law
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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Veeranganakumari Solanki on ‘Life and Letters—Chasing Shadows’ by Adib
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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