Haut de Cagnes, 1951
Sayed Haider Raza
Asia Society
In a grandiose mansion in the Indian city of Kolkata in 1922, European and Indian modernism first met. There, 250 art works hung on the walls. Watercolors by Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee sat next to Cubist works from Gaganendranath Tagore and figurative works from Sunayani Devi, displaying the parallel trajectories of the movement. The Indian artists were, in their broader context, rebels who had rejected the academic art styles that were pushed by British colonial art schools across the country. Modernism, in India, was tied up with dismantling colonialism. As legendary Indian art critic Geeta Kapur noted in her 2020 book of essays, When Was Modernism, “the modern, occurring in tandem with anti-colonial struggles, is deeply politicized and carries with it the potential for resistance.”
When India became autonomous and partitioned in 1947, modernism in the country entered another phase, linked to the Progressive Artists’ Group (P.A.G.), which was founded in Bombay on the very day of independence. The group’s members took different formal approaches from each other, yet they were tied together by a search for authentic Indian expression that valued indigenous craft and made use of the country’s diverse iconographic repertoire.
Woman and four horses, 1976
M.F. Husain
Museum of Art & Photography
The striking aesthetic choices and principles of these groups resonated with others, such as Gulammohammed Sheikh and Jagdish Swaminathan, who engaged with a modernist spirit.
These are 10 Indian modernist artists from the 20th century you need to know.
M.F. Husain
B. 1915, Pandharpur, India. D. 2011, London
Arguably the most famed of India’s modernists, M.F. Husain was a founding member of Bombay collective P.A.G. The short-lived collective sought to communicate India’s new political reality by merging historic Indian influences with Euro-American avant-garde techniques. At this time, Husain was new to exhibiting his work, having spent his early career creating vast cinema billboards for Bombay’s burgeoning film industry and painting on the side.
His early paintings, like Untitled (Gram Yatra) (1954), that recently sold for a record-breaking $13.75 million, are full of the energetic thrill of these advertisements. At nearly 14 feet long, the painting, split into 13 vignettes showing scenes of daily rural life, uses Cubist techniques and a Klee-esque color palette—often bold and contrasting—to capture the spirit of his country. This style and approach to subject matter, combining a range of Indian symbology and cultural references, would become his visual language. As Husain said in one of his last interviews with The Guardian, “I’ve wanted to celebrate this composite culture.”
S.H. Raza
B. 1922, Mandla, India. D. 2016, New Delhi
Satpura, Serigraph on Paper, 2008
Sayed Haider Raza
Gallery Kolkata
S.H. Raza, a co-founder of the P.A.G, embraced several gestural and abstract styles throughout his career, which began in Bombay (now known as Mumbai). While living in the city, he experimented with finding a new direction to represent Indian art, using watercolors to depict the urban sprawl with expressionistic strokes. After his relocation to Paris in the 1950s for a scholarship at École Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts, his practice shifted as he absorbed artistic influences from artists including Van Gogh and Cézanne.
Raza spent most of his life in France, where he won the high profile Prix de la Critique from the French Government and found inspiration in European and American art movements. Yet India was integral to his painting, even if its influence wasn’t always obvious. His images were influenced by his childhood living in the remote forested area of Madhya Pradesh as well as the cosmological traditions of India more generally. This is particularly clear in his signature spiritual abstract geometric paintings, which he developed in the 1980s.
Raza’s shapes were chosen as a reference to aspects of Indian cosmology, particularly Tantrism. In this exploration of spiritualism, he is most known for the use of the circle, a form which is related to the bindu symbol, considered in Hindu thought as the point of all creation. Rasa noted in a 1985 artist statement that the motif “is charged with latent forces aspiring for fulfilment.”
F.N. Souza
B. 1924, Saligao, India. D. 2002, Mumbai .
Untitled (Lovers), 1989
Francis Newton Souza
Grosvenor Gallery
Rebellious and outspoken, F.N. Souza was the leading voice of the P.A.G. who forged, as he told the Times of India in 1989, “modern Indian art with a blast.” He left India for Europe in the 1950s, where he had a profound meeting with Picasso, and settled in New York in the late ’60s. There, Souza cultivated a frenetic and agitated painting style that was part Expressionist and Cubist while drawing on Indian temple sculpture and carvings.
He is known for Birth (1955), an iconic painting showing a heavily pregnant woman overseen by a priest in regalia, demonstrating his ability to imaginatively fuse artistic traditions. The religious figure who seems to touch the reclining nude is considered to be a self-portrait. The image sums up the religious and erotic themes that Souza was preoccupied with and led to him being chosen to represent Great Britain for the Guggenheim International Award in 1958. Souza’s brash explorations of Christian narratives, a response to his upbringing in Portuguese Goa and his schooling by Jesuit priests, are today considered some of his most significant artworks.
Amrita Sher-Gil
B. 1913, Budapest. D. 1941, Lahore, Pakistan
Best known for her vivid and sympathetic portrayals of Indian rural life, Amrita Sher-Gil established a bold, modern style over her brief lifetime. Growing up across continents in an aristocratic family, Sher-Gil spent time in her birth country, Hungary, as well as Italy, Paris, and India. Her formal education began at the École Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts when she was just 16, where she was exposed to a range of artistic influences. This is visible in her paintings, where Indian miniature and cave painting traditions meet with the approaches of Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Amedeo Modigliani. In her work she captured the honest and complex details of herself, her sitters, and Indian society.
In the mid 1930s, Sher-Gil returned to India from Paris and began to see her creativity entwined with the country’s distinctive culture, purportedly writing to her father that, “Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, and many others, India belongs only to me.” Typically, her paintings foreground women, such as Group of Three Girls (1935), which delicately addresses the challenges and gender inequalities experienced by her subjects. Her art works were influential in their time and Sher-Gil remains one of India’s most innovative and in demand modern artists.
Jamini Roy
B. 1887, Beliatore, India. D. 1972, Kolkata
Untitled, National Art Treasure -Non Exportable
Jamini Roy
Kumar Gallery
Jamini Roy is regarded as one of the early pioneers of Indian modernism who achieved international renown. The simplified, firm lines and unique style he developed in the 1920s drew on indigenous art forms and techniques, largely as a rebuttal to the European academic styles taught at Kolkata’s Government College of Art.
Having spent his early years undertaking Orientalist-style portrait commissions in oil, Roy later searched for a visual language that was more expressly Indian. To do so, he turned to materials including tempera, wood, and natural pigment, and took inspiration from sources like traditional Kalighat paintings, which were vivid mythological works. His subject matter was exhaustive, including Hindu and Christian icons, dancers, musicians, mythological legends, and animals, and his output was prolific. Roy adopted a craft-guild model for the production of his works, using family members as assistants to rework single subjects, like the mother and child, into several affordable versions.
Tyeb Mehta
B. 1925, Kapadvanj, India. D. 2009, Mumbai
Untitled (Lovers), 1974
Tyeb Mehta
Queens Museum
Mahisasura, 1997
Tyeb Mehta
Asia Society
Tyeb Mehta, a young associate of the P.A.G., developed a sparse style incorporating simplified forms and a striking use of bold block colors. He was profoundly affected by India’s political recalibration and violent partition in 1947, in particular the ensuing riots and deaths as millions were disenfranchised almost overnight. Encouraged by S.H. Raza, Mehta travelled to London and Paris in the mid 1950s, and found inspiration in Francis Bacon’s paintings, seeing in them a way to translate his anguish.
Untitled (Falling Figure) (1965), is characteristic of the way Mehta evoked the pain and alienation felt by families torn apart by the new partition’s borders and signaled universal suffering. Mehta’s paintings often portray the coarseness of life and the human capacity for the oppression of others. Throughout his career, he also frequently depicted the iconic Indian goddess and bull forms. A considerate painter who would often destroy many canvases to reach a single painting, Mehta’s limited oeuvre has fetched impressive prices. In 2005, Mahisasura (1997) sold for $1.58 million making it, at the time, the most expensive painting by a living Indian artist.
V.S. Gaitonde
B. 1924, Nagpur, India. D. 2001, New Delhi.
Painting No. 6, 1962
Vasudeo S. Gaitonde
Guggenheim Museum
One of India’s most influential abstract artists, V.S. Gaitonde created atmospheric, textural images which he called “non-objective.” Studying at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay at the time of the P.A.G., Gaitonde was influenced by a range of visual references including Basohli miniature paintings and Klee’s expressionist works.
Following a year living in New York in 1964 thanks to a Rockefeller Foundation grant, Gaitonde embraced and experimented with the non-representational ideas associated with Abstract Expressionism. Since the late ’50s, he had been gradually removing any figurative traces in his paintings. This full foray into abstraction is shown in one of his seminal works Painting, 4 (1962). In this work, fields of color suggest a horizon line marked by loose, hieroglyphic shapes and calligraphy-style strokes. His work continued to evolve as he began to practice Zen Buddhism and became interested in Chinese calligraphy. Throughout his work, Gaitonde sought a pure form of expression. He undertook this quest with devotion, isolating himself and intensely focusing on balancing color, light, and forms. As he said in an interview for ART India in 1998, towards the end of his life, “‘I’m still learning about painting, because I believe that process is constant.”
Nasreen Mohamedi
B. 1937, Karachi, Pakistan. 1990, Kihim, India
Untitled, ca. 1975
Nasreen Mohamedi
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
From gestural abstraction to monochrome Minimalism, Nasreen Mohamedi’s unparalleled vision stands alone among Indian modernists. She studied in Europe at Central Saint Martins and at a Parisian print studio. But when she returned to India and settled in Baroda in the early 1970s, she began refining her abstract style. There, she made friends with artists including V.S. Gaitonde and M.F. Husain, and her artworks evolved as she combined her wide-ranging interests: Constructivism, post-war art, poetry, classical and modern Indian music, and Islamic architecture and calligraphic forms.
Her early oil paintings, collages, and drawings suggesting plant life were abandoned as Mohamedi grappled with the grid format. Later, her work developed into the detailed linear and geometric graphite and ink designs she is best known for. Committed to achieving, as she said, “the maximum of the minimum,” her surprisingly dynamic works like Untitled (1975) conjure layered landscapes.
Abanindranath Tagore
B. 1871, Kolkata. D. 1951, Kolkata.
Untitled, Unknown
Abanindranath Tagore
The Eye Within
Abanindranath Tagore, an early revivalist at the turn of the 20th century, contributed to the reimagining of Indian modern art. Based in Kolkata, Tagore was part of an intellectual milieu that would fuel the beginnings of India’s independence movement. Tagore looked to the past and present in his delicately rendered figurative artworks, bringing together Sanskrit sources, Mughal and Rajput painting, and Buddhist imagery along with Japanese, Persian, and realist aesthetics to craft an “Indian” approach to art.
Breaking from colonial visual culture, Bharat Mata (1905), painted at the time of the British Raj’s partition of the Indian region of Bengal, personifies India as a Hindu deity with glowing halo. The painting became synonymous with the country’s intense struggle for independence although Tagore would later distance himself from nationalism. An influential teacher whose students included Nandalal Bose and Meera Mukherjee, Tagore is credited with championing an enduring appreciation for Indian heritage.
Arpita Singh
B. 1937, Baranagar, India. Lives and works in New Delhi.
In Arpita Singh’s most celebrated paintings, seemingly weightless figures float in disjointed environments. Having grown up as India was partitioned and witnessing communal violence, Singh is part of a second generation of modernist artists, including Madhvi Parekh, Nilima Sheikh, and Nalini Malani, who embraced figuration. Although her paintings and drawings often make reference to historical events and gender politics, they are at once personal and mysterious. The artist recently said, in an exhibition catalogue conversation with Serpentine curator Tamsin Hong, “In my work, the symbols don’t have a permanent image or meaning. The meaning of a form changes according to time.”
Her work combines many different inspirations, from expressionism, to Bengal folk painting, to Marc Chagall, to traditional Indian textiles. For example, Devi Pistol Wali (1990), on view in her current show at the Serpentine in London, features an Indian goddess-like figure standing atop a man and brandishing a gun at another, while fruits and numbers float through the space.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/DMWl2Ym
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