| Story Text | [{"record_id":"0","storytext":"Avinash Chandra (1931\u20131991) was a graduate and, for a short while, teacher at the Delhi Polytechnic which eventually became College of Art, Delhi. He employed his training in western academic art towards painting newly decolonized landscapes, such as the Shimla of his youth where he was born. Eventually he would move with his artist wife Prem Lata to London (with a brief stint in New York), winning accolades and appreciation from those who saw in his style a successful marriage of Indian aesthetics and a western sensibility. Absorbing the atmosphere of the swinging sixties into his stylistic evolution, Chandra is now perhaps best remembered for his erotically charged, expressive and colourful line drawings which he made increasingly from the 1970s. This early work depicts a stage in that evolution.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"1","storytext":"One of Avinash Chandra\u2019s early works, Untitled (Houses in the Forest)<\/I> displays his then familiar style of painting landscapes, partly from memories of having grown up in Shimla, the capital city of the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh today, where he was also born in 1931. It was made in the early 1950s, possibly towards the end of his studies at the Delhi Polytechnic and leading up to his first show at the Delhi Silpi Chakra in 1953. ","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"2","storytext":"His career would be marked by shifts from depicting landscapes to \u2018humanscapes, the language of the hills and valleys replaced by dancing lines of nude figures and genitalia; thick impastos by transparent inks\u2019. These shifts, however, were threaded with a common interest in developing a personal subjectivity and relationship with a depicted scene or form.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"3","storytext":"The obverse side of the painting bears the legend \u2018HOTEL CECIL\/ DELHI: 8\u2019, suggesting that the work may have been part of a series and was probably finished in Delhi, perhaps at the Hotel Cecil in Civil Lines, where his father worked as a manager and sponsored the young artist\u2019s studies. Or, it could suggest that the buildings depicted in the landscape constitute the Shimla branch of Hotel Cecil\u2014which was established in 1884.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"4","storytext":"The heavy impasto employed in this landscape study serves to anchor Chandra\u2019s vision of Shimla to his own familial narrative of residence in the town. They gather the landscape in suggestive sweeps of intimate relationality, suggesting that several different planes or hierarchies were working in tandem with each other to keep the glossy appearance of the glamorous town ticking. ","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"5","storytext":"Shimla\u2019s Hotel Cecil was a cynosure of British leisure activities in the hills. As a one-storied house called Tendril Cottage in 1883, the year before it was established in its roughly present-day avatar, it received a first-time visitor in a seventeen-year-old Rudyard Kipling. Kipling would make it a regular haunt for himself over the course of his career\u2014journeying up from Lahore, where he stayed and worked\u2014and is said to have written Plain Tales from the Hills<\/I> (1888) while lodging there. Pre-independence structures still dot Shimla, including buildings such as the former Viceregal Lodge, the Assembly Chamber, and the Kali Bari Temple.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"6","storytext":"According to a historian, \u2018Shimla combined the idyll of England with the entire resources of the Indian subcontinent\u2019; suggesting the necessity of an intensely hierarchical space that could ensure British residents lived in a comfortable bubble or, corner of a foreign field. The social and physical landscape was divided into distinct zones for servants, native princes who built houses in Shimla to be close to power, and the British residents and visitors. While the upper classes lived around the ridge and the mall areas, \u2018down in the Lower Bazaar, which stank of the sewage runoff from above, lived the Indian coolies, labourers, rickshaw pullers, maids and dhobis<\/I>\u2013washer women\u2013on whose backs Shimla was built, their inferior status reinforced by the undesirable location of their homes.\u2019 Chandra\u2019s employment of thick and distinct fields of colour\u2014a recurring feature in his early landscapes\u2014suggests an attempt to transfer a social reading of his hometown onto a pictorial language.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"7","storytext":"From the drawing of the Durand Line that demarcated British India\u2019s borders with Afghanistan to planning the Anglo-Afghan wars, the summer capital of the British Raj saw a lot of significant political decision-making for the entire subcontinent; but it also became a hothouse of social interactions, leading to scandal, gossip and romantic intrigue\u2014frequently reported by Kipling himself. Of particular interest to him were the lives of a large number of \u2018grass widows\u2019 and younger women looking for eligible husbands among the British populations. The atmosphere of intrigue is suggested by Chandra\u2019s investment of a sense of mystery to the landscape, with the trees screening the hills and the cabin in the woods. ","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"8","storytext":"Shimla\u2019s mountainous landscape was studded with trees and vegetation typically found in temperate zones, especially deodars and pines that are now in a steady state of degradation; and this was largely the reason why the British built a conclave there to create a Chhota Vilayat or Little England, away from the heat and dust of the plains. Chandra won his first Lalit Kala Akademi prize for a work titled Trees<\/I>, suggesting an ongoing interest in depicting trees as potentially structural and formal prototypes for a later flowering of human shapes emerging with natural forms. ","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"9","storytext":"In this work too, the trees are the most dynamic aspect of the landscape\u2014suggesting movement, rhythm and an air of protecting dangerous secrets, aside from providing a wealth of opportunities to employ expressive strokes and bands of colour.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"10","storytext":"In another early, untitled work he depicts an almost identical view with greater employment of fields of yellow and red paint, suggesting a strong psychological relationship and sets of associations with this landscape. He met several British residents at the hotel during his childhood and it is speculated that that may have informed his sense of sartorial style and sense of arrogance, perhaps leading to his decision to ultimately move to London for work. There he was \u2018discovered\u2019 and encouraged mostly by a raft of British art critics (and ignored by Indian art patrons), including W. G. Archer who would note a foregrounding of the sexual impulse synthesized through references to classical symbols and forms from Indian and Hindu texts. One could suggest that this erotic energy merely exists in a suppressed state in this landscape, awaiting new ways to announce their desire for consummation.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""}] |
|---|---|
| XY Coords | [{"record_id":"0","xcoord":"50","ycoord":"50","initialize":"true"},{"record_id":"1","xcoord":"13","ycoord":"15","initialize":"true"},{"record_id":"2","xcoord":"15","ycoord":"60","initialize":"true"},{"record_id":"3","xcoord":"40","ycoord":"85","initialize":"true"},{"record_id":"4","xcoord":"38","ycoord":"72","initialize":"true"},{"record_id":"5","xcoord":"15","ycoord":"70","initialize":"true"},{"record_id":"6","xcoord":"65","ycoord":"80","initialize":"true"},{"record_id":"7","xcoord":"80","ycoord":"20","initialize":"true"},{"record_id":"8","xcoord":"40","ycoord":"35","initialize":"true"},{"record_id":"9","xcoord":"85","ycoord":"79","initialize":"true"}] |
| Art Artist Names Single | Avinash Chandra |
Write Your Own Review