Contemporary Indian Paintings Notes for UPSC Examinations

December 17, 2013 September 12, 2022

In 1867, EB Havel was appointed the Principal of the Art College at Calcutta. He, as we discussed above, gave greater importance to the art traditions of this country, instead of those of Europe. However, he himself was not able to produce some outstanding works. This task was taken up by Abanindranath Tagore and the result was the Bengal School of Art. This school proclaimed Raja Ravi Varma, who was a leading practitioner of the academic style, to be in bad taste. Whatever its shortcomings, the Bengal School restored to health the indigenous tradition in painting and infused self-confidence among the Indian artists. This school was followed by the Santiniketan School, led by Rabindranath Tagore’s harking back to idyllic rural folk and rural life. By the time of Independence in 1947, several schools of art in India provided access to modern techniques and ideas. Galleries were established to showcase these artists. This was the dawn of Modern Indian Paintings.

The Calcutta Group

The Calcutta Group was the first group of modern artists in India, formed in 1943 in Kolkata. Its leading members included the sculptor Pradosh Das Gupta and the painters Subho Tagore, Paritosh Sen, Gopal Ghose, Nirode Mazumdar and Zainul Abedin. The group held exhibitions from 1945, and held a joint exhibition in 1950 with the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay.

This group of artists expressed the need for a visual language that could reflect the crisis of urban society. For the first time in modern Indian art, artists began to paint images that evoked anguish and trauma and reflected the urban situation. Rural scenes were no longer purely idyllic, and the formal treatment of the paintings began to reflect the influence of European modernism.

Progressive Artists’ Group, Bombay

Progressive Artists’ Group, Bombay was established Francis Newton Souza, first post-independence Indian artist to achieve high recognition in the West. It’s early members were S. H. Raza. M. F. Husain and Manishi Dey.

Objective of the Progressive Artists’ Group
The objective of the Progressive Artists’ Group was to break away with the revivalist nationalism established by the Bengal school of art and to encourage an Indian avant-garde, engaged at an international level. The group was highly influenced by the Indian inner version or the antar-gyan and the same was now being portrayed in their art rather than the European realism.

Other prominent painters of the group included S. K. Bakre, Akbar Padamsee, Ram Kumar and Tyeb Mehta.

They wanted to paint with absolute freedom for content and technique. This group was basically an omnium-gatherum of different styles and influences. The most important influence on the group was of European Modernism. The group later lost into oblivion in late 1950s.

Young Turks

Beside the Calcutta Group, there was another group called the Young Turks, among whom P. T. Reddy was the prominent member. The Young Turks encouraged by Charles Gerrard, principal of Sir J.J. School of Art held their first exhibition in 1941. Then there were Bhabesh Sanyal and Sailoz Mukherjee, who left Calcutta. The first went to Lahore and the second came to Delhi in search of employment. These artists find prominent place in the National Gallery of Modern Arts collection.

Francis Newton Souza

Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002) was a famous Indian painter, born in Goa. He was the first Indian artist to receive recognition in the west. He attended Sir J.J. School of Art but due to his involvement in the Quit India Movement, he was suspended in the year 1945.

Contribution in Indian Art’

Souza was the founder of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group. In 1949, he went to London and started getting recognised there for his works at Gallery One, North London. In 1954, his work was included in an exhibition organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts. His autobiographical work ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’ was published in Encounter, a journal then edited by Stephen Spender. In 1959, another book by him called Words and Lines got published which was highly acknowledged.
Souza’s initial work created an impact both in India and abroad as a strong mode mist. His strong, bold lines delineated the head in a distinctive way where it virtually re-invented the circles, hatchings and crosses. His forms retained their plasticity in later years but became less incentive. In later years, his forms retained their plasticity but became less incentive.
As per John Berger, Souza’s style was deliberately eclectic and essentially expressionist. But at the same time his work was often considered highly erotic as he depicted post-war Art Brut movement and elements of British Neo-romanticism.
He went to New York in 1967 and settled there. He later returned to India shortly before his death. He was honoured with the Kala Samman in the year 2000 by the Madhya Pradesh government. He died in 2002. In 2008, his painting ‘Birth’ (1955) set a world auction record for the most expensive Indian painting sold till then by selling for Rupees 1.3 crore.

S. H. Raza

Syed Haider Raza (born 1922 – died 2016), was the 2013 Padma Vibhushan awardee. He was born in Babaria, Mandla (Madhya Pradesh), studied at the Nagpur School of Art and later went to Sir J.J. School of Art, Bombay. In 1946, his first solo show was held at Bombay Art Society Salon for which he also was awarded the Silver Medal. He then went to France in October 1950 on a Government of France scholarship. He studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure Des Beaux-Arts (ENSB-A) in Paris from 1950 to 1953. He travelled across Europe after his studies, and lived and exhibited his work in Paris. In 1956, he became the first non-French artist to be awarded the Prix de la critique.

Painting Style – The Razabindu

For Raza, Bindu is a point where he concentrates, his energy, his mind, and has become his Bhagvat Gita, Swadharm etc. For him, the ‘bindu’ has been a vast subject with its variations throughout his life. Raza’s works make price history.
Bindu shows the emergence of symbolic and ritual elements in traditional art as pure abstractions. Abstraction is the dominant element in Raza’s Bindu series at the turn of the 1980s.
Hailed as one of the country’s most expensive artists, he set a milestone last year when his work, ‘Saurashtra’, sold for Rs16.42 crore in an auction at Christie’s.
He uses very rich colours, replete with icons from Indian cosmology as well as its philosophy. His works are mainly abstracts in oil or acrylic. Raza’s style has evolved over the years. His paintings eventually became more abstract in nature. From his fluent water colours of landscapes and townscapes, he moved towards a more expressive language painting landscapes of the mind.

Awards

In the year 1981, he was awarded the Padma Shri and Fellowship of the Lalit Kala Akademi^.^.In 2010, he became India’s priciest modern artist seminal work, ‘Saurashtra’ which was sold for 16.42 crore INR. He was honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 2007 and in 2013; he was awarded Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India.

Maqbool Fida Husain

Maqbool Fida Husain (1915-2011), India’s most charismatic and most internationally recognised painter, was romance personified in both work and life. Husain’s crime was that he had painted Hindu gods and goddesses, in the nude sometime in the 1970s. Though there are many examples of Hindu deities depicted in the nude in exquisite ancient temple sculptures, the Hindu right wing hounded him out of India.

He was born on September 17, 1915, in a poor household in Pandharpur, Maharashtra. His father was a timekeeper in a small mill and had the additional responsibility of bringing up his motherless son. Hussain had lost his mother when he was an infant. He remained a devotee of women and womanhood for the rest of his life.

As a co-founder of Progressive Art Group

Hussain went to study at V.D. Devlalikar’s art school in Indore while in his teens. The family’s finances were strained, but it somehow managed to send him to the school of Devlalikar because he was a respected artist and teacher who painted in the Indian style. Its worth note that other famous artists such as S.H. Raza, H.A. Gade and Ingole had also studied under Devlalikar.

The paucity of resources led Husain to move to Bombay where he became a painter of huge film banners. He also studied for a while at the Sir JJ School of Art. Later, he came into contact with the Austrian expressionist Langheimer and the art critic Rudy Von Leydon, both refugees from Hitler’s Nazi Germany. These two men played a seminal role in introducing 20th century Western art in Bombay. Husain became a co-founder, along with Francis Newton Souza, of the Progressive Artists Group in 1948. In 1952, his first solo exhibition was held at Zurich. He was awarded Padma Shri by the Government of India in 1955. In 1967, he made his first film, ‘Through the Eyes of a Painter’. In 1971, he was a special invitee along with Pablo Picasso at the Sao Paulo Biennial (Brazil). In 1973, he was awarded Padma Bhushan. He was nominated as a Rajya Sabha member in 1986. Later, in 1991, he was awarded Padma Vibhushan by the Indian Government.

Contribution to Indian Art

His narrative paintings, executed in a modified Cubist style, can be caustic and funny as well as serious and sombre. His themes which were usually treated in series included diverse topics such as Mohandas K. Gandhi, Mother Teresa, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the British raj, and motifs of Indian urban and rural life.
He has also produced & directed several movies, including Gaja Gamini and Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities.
Husain was charged with “hurting sentiments of people” because of his nude portraits of Hindu gods and goddesses in 2006. Since then he lived in self-imposed exile from until his death. At Christie’s auction in 2008, Husain became the best-paid painter in India, with his highest-selling piece fetching $1.6 million. He was conferred Qatari nationality in 2010. For the last years of his life Husain lived in Dubai and London. M. F. Husain died in 2011.

Tyeb Mehta

Tyeb Mehta (1925-2009) was one of the pioneers of modern Indian art. He was born in 1925 in Kapadvanj, a town of Kheda district, Gujarat. During his early days, he worked as a film editor in a cinema laboratory at Famous Studio (Mumbai). In 1952, he joined Sir J.J. School of Art where he received a diploma and became a part Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, due to which he was strongly influenced and inspired by Western Modernism. In 1959, he went to London and worked there for nearly 5 years. During this period, he was highly influenced by the expressionist works of Francis Bacon. He was later awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship in 1968 for which he went to New York. While in New York his work came to be characterized by minimalism. He also won a gold medal for painting first Triennial in New Delhi in 1968.

In 1969, he accidently discovered the ‘Diagonal series’ which later became one of the main characteristic features of all his work through the 1970’s. Later, his worked also included ‘Falling Figures’, and mythological figures highlighted by the depictions of goddess Kali and demon Mahishasura. He won the Filmfare Critics Award in the year 1970 for three minute short film name ‘Koodal’ . The film was based on Bandra slaughter house. In 1974 the he won the Prix Nationale at the International Festival of Painting in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France. During 1984-85, he was also an Artist-in-Residence at Shantiniketan. This led to a significant transformation in his work.

He received the Kalidas Samman in the year 1988. In 2002, his creation named ‘Celebration’ for 15 million INR which made him the highest paid Indian painter of that time. In 2005, his painting ‘Gesture’ was sold for 31 million Indian rupees to Ranjit Malkan. It was the then highest price paid to an Indian painter by an Indian. His work has been exhibited in the various International art museums including Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England, and the Hirshhorn Museum. He was awarded with the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India in the year 2007. He died in the year 2009 at the age of 83.

Art of Tyeb Mehta

Tyeb had grown up in the Crawford Market of Mumbai within the orthodox Shiite community of the Dawoodi Bohras. He had witnessed the violence and experienced the frowzled remains of the Indian society. During his childhood, he used to live at Mohammed Ali Road. It was a time of India’s partition. One day he saw a man getting slaughtered on the streets just below his house. The man was hammered by the mob and his head smashed because he happened to be a Muslim. This incident made Tyeb ill for several days and then the memory haunted him through out his life. The violence that he saw during his childhood, gave way to the emotions, which reflects in his paintings.

In 1947, he got enrolled at Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai. There he met the graduates of this school including MF Husain and FN Souza, who comprised the Progressives and rejected both Western classicism and the nationalist Bengal school in favor of a new Indian avant-garde.

Following a self-imposed separation from his extended family at age 29, Mehta went abroad to London and Paris for four months in 1954 to study Western art, both the old masters and European modernists. In 1956, he completed his first important works, Rickshaw Pullers and Trussed Bull, abstract canvases composed of hard-edged shapes that prefigured, in both subject and style, his best-known works.

Diagonal Series

The Diagonal Series of paintings creates an effect a partition of space that was homogenous until the making of this gesture, into two related but separate parts. This series reverberates an echo of the 1947 Partition of British India. It was the partition of India, that put Mehta and other Muslims under the pressure to choose between the homeland or new collective ideal based upon only religion. The diagonal series also emphasises separation and twinning and the psychology of schism that haunted this painter, while he was alive.

Falling Series

The Falling Series also reverberates the traumatic memory from his childhood when he witnessed the violent death of a man during the Partition riots of 1947. The Falling Figures series represent an exceptional moment of synergy between Tyeb’s artistic and social concerns. The emotions behind the falling figures were to define a resistance and control the tension in the paintings through spaces, colors, images and matrices in order to bring out a catastrophe. The Falling Series won a lots of accolades for him in India as well as abroad. His famous painting titled the “Falling Figure and Bird” displays a human figure in a state of deliberation while falling. The painting shows his intellectual rendezvous with modernist existentialism and international concepts of the “Universal Man”.

Akbar Padamsee

Akbar Padamsee is considered one of the pioneers in Modern Indian painting. He was born in Mumbai, India. He met his first mentor Shirsat, a watercolourist in St. Xavier’s High School, Fort. He initially received training in this medium. Subsequently, he attended classes on nudes in preparation for his studies at the Sir J.J. School of Art. Due to his deep understanding about the intricacies of art, he was directly admitted to the third year in Sir J.J. School of Art. It was then where he came in close contact with pioneers of modern Indian paintings like by Francis Newton Souza, S. H. Raza, and M. F. Husain who had formed the Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947. This close association has a deep influence on his work. He has worked with various mediums from oil painting, plastic emulsion, water colour, sculpture, printmaking, to computer graphics, and photography, as worked a film maker, sculptor, photographer, engraver, and lithographer.

In 1951, he went to France where he met the surrealist Stanley Hayter, who became his next mentor. He joined his studio named “Atelier 17”. In 1952, Padamsee’s first exhibition was held in Paris for which he was awarded by the French magazine Journal d’Arte along with the painter Jean Carzou. It was only in 1954, when his first solo exhibition was held at the Jehangir Art Gallery. In 1962, he received the Lalit Kala Akademi Fellowship. He also received a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965, after which he was subsequently invited to be an artist-in-residence by the University of Wisconsin–Stout. In the year 1997, he was honoured with the Kalidas Samman by the Government of Madhya Pradesh. He received many distinctions such as the Padma Shri in 2009 and Padma Bhushan subsequently in the year 2010. He is amongst one of the most valued Indian painters today.

Art of Akbar Padamsee

The work of Akbar Padamsee is introspective. His “Metascapes” or his “Mirror Images” are abstract images formed from the search for a formal logic. His topics include landscapes, female nudes, heads and he has done portraits created in pencil and charcoal.

The depth which emerges from his oil-based works emanates from the colored matter. He has also done black and white photographs which use light to create dimension.

Padamsee’s heads reflect the radiant presence of the prophets and martyrs who fascinated him during the 1960s.

The “Metascapes” he did in the early to mid-1990s have won him accolades in India as well as abroad and is considered to be his finest work. The distinct identity of the Metascapes is the depiction of Sun and Moon. The idea of using the sun and moon in the metascapes originated when Akbar was reading the introductory stanza to Abhijnanashakuntalam. Here Kalidasa speaks of the eight visible forms of the Lord without mentioning them by name, the sun and the moon as the two controllers of time, water as the origin of all life, fire as the link between man and god, and the earth as the source of all seed. This is the subjection of the denotative sense to a poetic meaning. Through this process, the artist deals with reality without describing it; when poetic meaning is superimposed upon the sign a new form arises – this belongs to the mind of the artist, not to nature.

In order to explore new genres, Padamsee created “SYZYGY”, “Events in a Cloud Chamber” films shot in 1970, and explored computers in “Compugraphics”. His painting ‘Reclining Nude’ was sold for USD 1,426,500 in 2011.

Amrita Sher-Gil

The Birth Centenary Celebrations of Amrita Sher-Gil was launched in February 2013 at the National Gallery of Modern Art. To celebrate the life and works of Amrita Sher-Gil, the Ministry of Culture, Government of India is organizing a series of events under the auspices of the Centenary Celebrations.

Here are some important points about her life and her work:

Known as India’s Frida Kahlo.
A 2006 auction made her most expensive woman painter of India.
Born in Hungary to a Sikh Aristocrat, mother was a Jewish opera singer from Hungary.
Trained in Europe as a painter, drew inspiration from European painters such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin. Early paintings display a significant influence of the Western modes of painting with special influence of works of Hungarian painters, especially the Nagybanya School of painting.
The first important painting was “Young Girls”. This painting led to her election as an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris in 1933, making her the youngest ever to have received this recognition.
She was greatly impressed and influenced by the Mughal and Pahari schools of painting and the cave paintings at Ajanta.
In 1937, she produced famous South Indian trilogy of paintings – “Bride’s Toilet”, “Brahmacharis” and “The South Indian Villagers”. By this time, her style had transformed and her paintings expressed the life of Indian people through her canvas.
While living in Saraya, Gorakhpur, she painted the “Village Scene”, “In the Ladies’ Enclosure” and “Siesta” all of which portray the leisurely rhythms of life in rural India. Siesta and In the Ladies’ Enclosure reflect her experimentation with the miniature school of painting while Village Scene reflects influences of the Pahari school of painting.
Initially, her painting found no buyers.
The Government of India has declared her works as National Art Treasures, and most of them are housed in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.
Amrita was known for her many affairs with both men and women and many of the latter she also painted. Her work “Two Women” is thought to be a painting of herself and her lover Marie Louise.
A postage stamp depicting her painting ‘Hill Women’ was released in 1978 by India Post, and the Amrita Shergill Marg is a road in Lutyens’ Delhi named after her. In 2006, her painting “Village Scene” sold for `9 crores at an auction in New Delhi which was at the time the highest amount ever paid for a painting in India.
Her work is a key theme in the contemporary Indian novel “Faking It” by Amrita Chowdhury.

Important Paintings

Young Girls; Camels; Hill Women; Two Women; Hungarian Market Scene; Tribal Women; Two Elephants; Bride’s Toilet; Brahamcharis; The South Indian Villagers; In the Ladies’ Enclosure; Village Scene; Siesta

Other Modern Painters

Binod Behari Mukherjee

Binod Behari Mukherjee, a pupil of Nandlal Bose, was one of the pioneers of Indian modern art. He was a painter and a celebrated muralist. He was one of the earliest artists in modern India to take up mural as a mode of artistic expression, and his murals display a subtle understanding of environmental and architectural nuances.
In 1972 filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who was also Mukherjee’s student, made a documentary film named “The Inner Eye” on him.

K. G. Subramanyan

G. Subramanyan (Born 1924)is a renowned Painter, Sculptor and muralist. Presidency College, Madras is his alma mater where he studied economics. He was greatly influenced by Gandhian philosophy and he participated in Indian freedom struggle with full enthusiasm for which he was also imprisoned.
During British rule, he was even restricted from taking admission in government colleges. In 1944 he went to Shantiniketan to study in Kala Bhavan (Art Faculty of Visva Bharti University). It proved to be a turning point of his art career and he studied there till 1948.
In Santiniketan he came into intimate contact with Nandalal Bose, Benodebehari Mukherjee, and Ramkinkar Baij who sensitized him to the requisites of a national modernism.
It was their influence which persuaded him to look art as response to social and personal needs for communication and expression. In 1981, he became the first artist to be awarded the Kalidas samman by the Government of Madhya Pradesh. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 2012

K.H. Ara

Krishnaji Howlaji Ara was an Indian painter, born in 1914 in Bolarum, Secunderabad. He is recognised as the first contemporary Indian painter to focus on the female nude as a subject while staying within the limits of naturalism. Initially, he started with landscapes and paintings on socio-historical themes but he is best known for his still lifes and nudes.

Manjit Bawa

He was born in Dhuri, Punjab in the year 1941. He received the Kalidas Samman by the Government of Madhya Pradesh in 2006. He expired in the year 2008. Manjit Bawa was a figurative painter from the beginning. The main charm of his paintings is the sense -saturating expanse of colour-fields which create space and define the contour of figures. He was one of the first painters to break out of the dominant grays and browns and opted for more traditionally Indian colors like pinks, reds and violet. Bawa is known for his vibrant paintings but at the same time he is also known for his love of spirituality and sufism. There is an undercurrent of Sufi mysticism in the choice of his subjects.

Ram Kumar

Ram Kumar was born in Shimla in 1924. He is one of the pioneers of abstract painting. He gave up figurativism for abstract art. He is known for his abstract landscapes in oil or acrylic. One of the main concerns of the artist is human condition which was depicted in his paintings through alienated individual within the city. Increasingly abstract works done in sweeping strokes of paint evoke both exultation of natural spaces and more recently an incipient violence within human habitation. He fetched $1.1 million for his work “The Vagabond” at Christie’s, New York. His works are usually sold at a very high price both in domestic and international market. Kalidas Samman was given to him in 1986. In 2010, the Indian government honoured him with Padma Bhushan . He was awarded the Fellowship of Lalit Kala Akademi in 2011.

Bhupen Khakhar

Bhupen Khakhar was an internationally recognised Indian contemporary artist. He was born in 1934 in Bombay. He openly portrayed homosexuality through his paintings and he explored his own Homosexuality in a very sensitive way. The life of a homosexual from Indian perspective was beautifully portrayed by him even though a subject like homosexuality was uncommon at that time. His paintings were often compared to that of David Hockney.

V. S. Gaitonde

Vasudeo S. Gaitonde was regarded as India’s foremost abstract artist. He was born in Maharashtra in 1924. Gaitonde’s abstract paintings with their translucent beams of light refer to nothing other than themselves and evoke subliminal depths. He experimented hugely with form and shape in his works. His use of symbolic element and very few ground lines made his work appear like a flowing river. His paintings invoke a concealed and obscure description of the real world. He was the first Indian contemporary painter whose work was sold for Rs. 92 lakhs at the Osians art auction.

Mukul Dey

Mukul Chandra Dey is considered as a pioneer of drypoint-etching in India. He was the first Indian artist to travel abroad for the purpose of studying printmaking as an art. For the portrayal of Indian life, Dey essentially chose Western medium. He concentrated on dry-point etching which not common to the Indian painting culture. He chose Indian subjects such as river scenes in Bengal or traditional baul singers, even when his medium of potrayal and techniques were Western. Some of his finer works are dry-point etchings that have been hand-colored with watercolors, colored pencils, or thin washes of ink. In 1928, he became the first Indian to be appointed as the principal of the Government School of Art, Calcutta.

Satish Gujral

Satish Gujral, younger brother of former PM Inderkumar Gujaral, is a Prominent Indian painter, sculptor, muralist, graphic designer, writer and architect. He was born in Jhelum, West Punjab (British India). A sickness at the age of 8 years resulted in impairment of hearing.

He has consistently dominated the art scene in India for the entire post-independent era. He has won an equal acclaim as an architect. His design of the Belgium Embassy in New Delhi has been selected by the international Forum of architects as one of the one thousand best built in the 20th century round the world. “A Brush with Life” is a 24 minute documentary made on his life. It was released in 2012 and it explores the literary, cultural, political and personal influences on his life and works. In 1999, the Government of India honoured him with the Padma Vibhushan.

Ebrahim Alkazi

Ebrahim Alkazi is one of the pioneers of Indian theatre. He is considered as one of the most influential Indian theatre directors of all time. Initially, he was associated with the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group and got in close contact with art pioneers like M.F.Husain, F.N.Souza, S.H.Raza, Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta. These artists have also painted and designed his sets. Nearly 50 plays including numerous Shakespeare and Greek plays, Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq, Mohan Rakesh’s Ashadh Ka Ek Din and Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug, were directed by him.

In 1950, he won the BBC Broadcasting Award. He began his theatrical career in the English-language Theatre Group of Sultan “Bobby” Padamsee, a pioneer of the English theatre movement in India. In 1954, he initiated his own Theatre Unit and began to revolutionise Indian theatre by the magnificence of his vision, and the meticulousness of his technical discipline. He became the Director of National School of Drama, New Delhi in 1962 and held the post till 1977. He also founded the Art Heritage Gallery in Delhi along Roshan Alkazi, his wife.

In 2004, he became the first recipient of Roopwedh Pratishtan’s the Tanvir Award for his lifetime contribution to the Indian theatre. For his outstanding Direction, he has been awarded The Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1962. Later, he was awarded Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship for lifetime contribution to theatre. The Government of India awarded him Padma Shri in 1966, the Padma Bhushan in 1991 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2010.