Search results for: 'Indian Modern Art, A visual historyt'

Did you know that the portrait painter Frank Brooks whose two trips to India won him commissions from the rulers of principalities in the Bombay Presidency, trained Raja Ravi Varma’s brother in the art of figure painting? For his second India voyage (1892-93), he was invited specially to paint the heads of the twenty-eight rulers of the Kathiawar Agency. The subject of this stunning portrait is Thakur Becharsinhji of Chuda, a state so small it did not even merit a gun salute for its ruler. Explore in detail with Kishore Singh, SVP, DAG.

Ramkinkar Baij is rightfully described as India’s first modernist sculptor for his pathbreaking use of cement and laterite as material, his choice of subjects and scale in public art projects, and his unconventional development of ideas.

The Poet is an abstract portrait of Rabindranath Tagore, imagined through negative spaces, concaves and convexes forming the eyes in a hollowed head, a masterclass in Baij’s cubist vocabulary. The portrait shared almost no physical attributes with the subject, instead focusing on distorting Tagore’s visage to give us insights into the state of his mind.

That Anupam Sud is one of the most prominent printmakers in the country is a given, even though it would be unfair to limit so versatile an artist to only being a printmaker. Indeed, her body of work includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, bookmaking—and as you will see through the pages of the book accompanying the exhibition, a record-keeper observing the passage of time with self-portraits that she has undertaken to make periodically. A role-model for generations of artists and printmakers through her work and for her influence as a teacher at the prestigious College of Art, New Delhi, Anupam Sud’s name evokes recognition around the world where she has admirers, collectors of her work, and students who have trained under her.

Henry Singleton’s The Last Effort and Fall of Tippoo Sultaun belongs to a genre known as history painting: the depiction of important historical events, usually on a large scale, as if they were playing out in front of one’s eyes. Author and parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor and art historian Giles Tillotson explain the lively imagination deployed in Singleton’s painting that depicts the British assault on Seringapatam and the killing of its ruler, Tipu Sultan—himself the source of so many stories that it was difficult to unravel the truth from the many falsities spun by the biased colonial administration and historians of the time.

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.

Artist and institution-builder Shuvaprasanna’s residence is located in a leafy corner of Kolkata’s suburban township, Bidhannagar or ‘Salt lake City’, which was envisaged by the former Chief Minister of West Bengal, Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy in the late 1950s. Having grown up elsewhere—in College Street, in fact—the artist only moved here in 2002-03 with his family, which included his wife and fellow-artist, Shipra Bhattacharya. In this photo-essay we will learn about Shuvaprasanna’s personal collection and the relationship between his collecting practices and his art-making.