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One of the most distinguished families in Bengal, the Tagores exercised unparalleled influence over the cultural landscape of the region. The Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941), and two of his nephews, Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938) and Abanindranath Tagore (1871 - 1951) were recognised as India’s National Art Treasure artists. Sunayani Devi (1875 -1962), their sister, is regarded as one of modern India’s first women painters known by name. Her lyrical paintings and embroideries often looked inward to an imagined world of fables and myths. At the turn of the twentieth century, we see Abanindranath emerging as the founder of the Bengal School as he envisioned a new Indian art that was free of colonial influence, rooted in pan-Asianism. Gaganendranath, on the other hand, was a prolific satirist and cartoonist, who imagined new forms and perspectives inspired by Cubism. Together they formed the influential Indian Society of Oriental Art in 1907, while Rabindranath’s school and university at Santiniketan would continue to shape modern art in Bengal for generations to come.

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The wash technique has come to be associated in India with the art of the Bengal School, but the story of its origins in India takes us back to an era of rich cultural exchanges. In the early twentieth century artists like Abanindranath Tagore were trying to imagine a pan-Asian cultural identity, and they turned for inspiration to traditions from across Persia to Japan. Rabindranath Tagore's friendship with Okakura Kakuzō occasioned the arrival of several Japanese artists in Kolkata, such as Yokoyama Taikan, Hishida Shunsō and Katsuta Shōkin. While the latter found inspiration in the Hindu epics, artists in Bengal adapted techniques that were used by the Japanese, such as the wash technique or the subtle use of ink and brush. Since then, the wash technique has been interpreted widely by individual artists, offering an ethereal quality of light to their works, or, in some cases, like for Gaganendranath Tagore and Prosanto Roy, new possibilities of painting in various shades of darkness.

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Khagen Roy hailed from Medinipur in present-day West Bengal and came to Calcutta to study art. However, he left the Government School of Art in Calcutta as well as the College of Arts and Crafts in Lucknow dissatisfied with their curriculum. A chance encounter with painter and sculptor D. P. Roy Chowdhury convinced him to join the Government College of Art and Craft, Madras. Learn More

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In a career spanning four decades, Amitava’s location as an artist has determined the authority that he brings to his practice. As an artist studying and working in the 1960s, Amitava Das experienced a decade of fragmented locii. The ’60s, the period of his education at the College of Art, was the decade of wars, fiscal difficulty and an uncertain polity in the wake of the death of Jawaharlal Nehru. Further, as a second generation pravasi (non-residing Indian) Bengali, the roiling political violence of West Bengal’s Naxal movement came to him through the filter of poetry, film and art—much as he would have received the existential writing of Camus, Genet and Rilke. Through the 1960s and ’70s, small groups of artists and filmmakers in different pockets in India had a heightened response: the state of the nation found an uncanny echo in the language of modernism, of the artist’s isolation and purity even within a state of uncertainty.

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This exhibition takes us on a journey into the lives and works of artists from a diverse range of traditions and practices. Despite differences in technique, philosophy and politics, they are united by an attempt to forge a new language of Indian art which rebels against existing visual vocabularies while seamlessly combining influences from European modernism and the rich history of visual arts from South Asia. This assimilation is achieved in different ways. From M. F. Husain’s figurative renditions of Indian deities to the many languages of abstraction developed by artists like Ram Kumar, Ganesh Haloi and others—we see artists responding variously to the socio-cultural problems of a post-colonial nation.

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Born in Faridpur in present-day Bangladesh, Bijan Chowdhury moved to Calcutta to study at the Government School of Art, but due to his leftist activities, was expelled. He then went to the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca, headed by his erstwhile teacher, Zainul Abedin, from where he graduated in 1953. Learn More

Born in Simla on 28 August 1931, Avinash Chandra studied painting at Delhi Polytechnic, where he also taught for a few years. His students included Paramjit Singh and Arpita Singh, who would go on to make a name for themselves in later years. Learn More

Born in present-day Bangladesh, Amalnath Chakladhar belongs to that category of Bengali modernists who carved an identity uniquely their own, despite the overarching influence of the three prominent strains of modern art in Bengal in the first half of the twentieth century—the Bengal School, academic training in art schools of Calcutta, and expressionism in Santiniketan. His contribution to furthering modernism in India, therefore, assumes importance for being a seminal, individual effort. Learn More