Search results for: 'Transformation of Bombay’s society across eras'

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The grandnephew of the well-known sculptor V. P. Karmakar, and the son of an artist who worked in Bombay film studios, Prabhakar Barwe was born on 16 March 1936 in Nagaon, Maharashtra. He joined Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, in 1954. Learn More

The grandnephew of the well-known sculptor V. P. Karmakar, and the son of an artist who worked in Bombay film studios, Prabhakar Barwe was born on 16 March 1936 in Nagaon, Maharashtra. He joined Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, in 1954. Learn More

The search for abstraction in Indian art in the early years of Independence was born out of a desire among artists to attain an independent idiom of modernism. Rooted in the country’s philosophical and religious aesthetic, Prabhakar Kolte is among the leading practitioners engaged in this quest. A master of poetic and metaphysical abstractionism, Kolte received a diploma in painting from Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, in 1968. Initially, he freelanced as an illustrator, also working as a designer at Bombay Dyeing. Learn More

Hailing from an artistic family based in Bombay, P. Khemraj was fascinated with manifestations of all things fine in every aspect of life. On completion of his training in drawing and painting at Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, Khemraj, a fine violinist, left for New Delhi to learn the sitar from Pandit Ravi Shankar. Learn More

N. R. Sardesai was born in 1885 in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra, and completed his early education at the Ratnagiri School of Industry. Here, he studied carpentry and drawing in 1906, before joining Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, for formal training in art. Thereafter, he began work as a drawing teacher in a school in Fort, Bombay. In 1915, he had a short stint as a drawing teacher at his alma mater too. Learn More

Born in Bombay, Mohan Samant showed early proficiency for both music and art. A lifelong player of sarangi—an Indian bowed, string instrument—Samant chose painting as a career and obtained a diploma from Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, in 1952. In the early 1950s, he was influenced by his teacher Shankar Palsikar, a painter of the traditional school, but moved soon towards an expressionistic mode in an attempt to discover his own style, fusing the expressive, the primitive and the abstract in his art. Learn More

A painter with a strikingly elegant bearing, Jehangir Sabavala was born on 23 August 1922 in an affluent Parsi family in Bombay and grew up in an intellectually charged environment. He studied at Elphinstone College, Bombay, before graduating from Sir J. J. School of Art in 1944. Thereafter, he studied at some of the leading art schools of Europe—The Heatherly School of Art, London (1945-47), Académie André Lhote, Paris (1948-51), Académie Julian, Paris (1953-54), and Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris (1957). Learn More

Samuel Bourne (1834—1912) was a British photographer known for his prolific seven years' work in India, from 1863 to 1870. Landing first at Madras, then Calcutta, he travelled across the subcontinent—leading some of the earliest photographic trips to the Himalayas—and wrote about his first impressions of the places he visited.

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How did the idea of Indian art come to be constructed over the last century and more? The painstaking work of collectors and curators went a long way towards establishing the history of art in India. In this article we highlight some of the most significant collectors of art from South Asia over the course of the twentieth century. Usually starting as personal collections, most of them would eventually donate their works to museums in India or abroad, allowing these rare works to be seen regularly by new generations of art enthusiasts across the world. Their collections, curated exhibitions and publications fashioned the canons of Indian modern and pre-modern art

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Art Lab by DAG’s Museums Programme is a pop-up art exhibition of facsimiles of works from the DAG Museum Collection that travels to schools and introduces students to modes of visual learning. After two successful iterations in CBSE and ICSE schools in Kolkata, Art Lab travelled to its first Bengali medium West Bengal Board school—Barisha Janakalyan Vidyapith for Girls. Through three days of workshops spread across two weeks, the students interacted with the artworks, learnt the basics of research, delved into historical material, and developed their own creative projects. Take a peek at some of the wonderful projects they curated as they took over the exhibition and made it their own.

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