Search results for: 'Masters: Indian Art from the 19th and 20th Century'

Artists have often formulated their theories and observations to analyse and become aware of the cognitive modes of art making, and to associate with broader contemporaneous art movements. These manifestos become a window into an artist’s process. Prabhakar Barwe’s seminal treatise, <i>Kora Canvas</I> (The Blank Canvas, 1989), exemplifies his deep understanding of the fundamental elements of art and keen observations of nature and his surroundings.

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.

Radha is painted as a queen in this Early Bengal oil painting, surrounded by her fellow Gopis (cowherds and companions) and Krishna—her divine consort and an incarnation of one of the Hindu trinity—dressed as a sentinel. She sits on her royal throne amid a forest landscape, perhaps recalling her identification as Vrindavaneshwari (goddess of Vrindavan). Going by the small but remarkable details of the jewellery, we can guess that it is the work of an artist trained in the miniature tradition. But does the painting hide other possible secrets?

At first glance, J. Swaminathan’s paintings appear disarmingly simple. The longer you look, the more expansive they become.

In this work from his celebrated Bird, Tree Series, Swaminathan reduces the landscape to its elemental forms—a bird, a tree, a glowing field of colour—creating a visual language that feels at once primal, meditative, and strikingly modern. Painted during the 1980s, the work belongs to a significant phase in the artist’s practice when he moved away from illusionistic depth and towards flattened forms, symbolic motifs, and intuitive space.

For Swaminathan, art was not bound by ideology or narrative, but offered a way of experiencing life itself. The bird and tree here are more than natural forms; they become quiet cosmic presences suspended within a luminous red expanse. Meaning emerges not through description, but through rhythm, colour, balance, and stillness.

Curator Jesal Thacker and art writer Meera Menezes speak about Shanti Dave’s art practice and choice of medium that allowed several elements to come together in his encaustic paintings and layered watercolours.

For Shanti Dave, creativity is a consistent and persistent exploration of the word or akshara—a term defined in the Natyashastra as a stroke in musical notes—which he perceives as the source of all creation. Dave’s abstract iconography, beginning in the early 1950s, adapted to modernism, aesthetic continuity and transcultural exchange. He altered, rejected and improvised the archaic image into a resonant form resembling an ancient script.