Search results for: 'Book chittoprasad a re'

Much of Indian modernism is enriched by the work that some of its best known artists produced after they had left the country, choosing as home another land. F. N. Souza was among the first to leave, in 1949, to head for London, where a successful practice catapulted him to the top of Britain’s artists. He was followed, in 1950, by S. H. Raza, who settled in Paris, winning the coveted critics’ award (Prix de la critique) in 1956, while others such as Krishna Reddy (Paris and New York), S. K. Bakre (London), Sakti Burman (Paris), Avinash Chandra (London and New York), Mohan Samant (New York), Natvar Bhavsar (New York), V. Viswanadhan (Paris), Sohan Qadri (Copenhagen), Rajendra Dhawan (Paris), Eric Bowen (Oslo), Ambadas (Oslo), and Zarina Hashmi (New York), followed in the 1950s-70s. These fourteen artists, with their diverse styles and concerns in art making, are masters lauded for the sheer range of responses to their environment that their work has registered. However, the question this exhibition forefronts, as its curator Kishore Singh asks, is: ‘Does the artist’s ethnic identity mean art too has an ethnic identity?’ Ambadas Avinash Chandra Eric Bowen F. N. Souza Krishna Reddy Mohan Samant Natvar Bhavsar Rajendra Dhawan S. H. Raza S. K. Bakre Sakti Burman Sohan Qadri V. Viswanadhan Zarina Hashmi

DAG invited leading historians of Delhi, Swapna Liddle and Rana Safvi, to explore our archives collection. The items they found there include numerous photographs of the three durbars, taken by prominent photographers of the day. They also include many other objects relating to the durbars, from portraits and medals, to maps and official guidebooks, and to tickets and programmes. Historians in the past have analysed the ideology of the Delhi durbars, but never before has such a collection of the material culture of these events been brought together for display.

Jamini Roy’s was an art of quiet resistance that assimilated so seamlessly into the folk and craft traditions of Bengal that it did not cause any discernible ripples among the prevalent artistic mood. All around him, art was being nurtured, questioned, uprooted—it was, after all, a period when nationalist feelings ran high and a search for an indigenous lexicon was paramount—but Jaminida’s ability to look to tradition for a modern approach, though revolutionary, was instinctively natural and organic. It was art that everyone understood and wanted to take home. No wonder Jamini babu became a household name in his native Calcutta and went on to be honoured as one of the pre-eminent National Treasure artists of the country whose art has the greatest acceptance of any known Indian modernist.

Sunayani Devi picked up a paintbrush in 1905 when she was thirty years old while supervising her kitchen duties, self-taught, but with enough talent to attract the critical attention of Stella Kramrisch who organised an exhibition of her paintings in Germany in 1927. It was in her worthy footsteps that India’s women artists followed. Devayani Krishna was born five years after Sunayani Devi began painting; Amrita Sher-Gil already had a career in Paris by the time India’s first art school-trained woman artist, Ambika Dhurandhar, earned her diploma in Bombay. B. Prabha followed next, her work reflecting the realities of the marginalised in a piquant language. By the time Nasreen Mohamedi and Zarina Hashmi, both born a decade before Independence, established their careers, women were joining art schools in greater numbers, validating their practice not on the basis of their gender but on its context. Anupam Sud Devayani Krishna Gogi Saroj Pal Latika Katt Madhvi Parekh Mrinalini Mukherjee Navjot Rekha Rodwittiya Shobha Broota Zarina Hashmi

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.

This is the first-ever retrospective of the Indian modern artist Avinash Chandra who lived most of his life in the West, in London and New York. The artist, who had trained in New Delhi, left soon after for London, and most of his practice was limited to London and New York, the two cities he called his home till his unfortunately early death in 1991. In the roughly three-and-a-half decades of his career, Avinash’s work changed amazingly, reflecting his environment and milieu as he grew and adapted to cities vastly different from their Indian counterparts, with their own sub-cultures. That this happily coincided with a discovery of India, however superfluously, as a land of spirituality and sexuality, seemed to serve him well as his muse.

Few artists claim as rich and intriguing a legacy as M. V. Dhurandhar in the landscape of late 19th and early 20th century Indian art. His practice leaves us with challenging questions about encounters and exchanges with India's colonial past and the influence of Europeans in shaping the evolution of painting. This exhibition revisits Dhurandhar's vast oeuvre through DAG's extensive collection of his paintings, archival material and ephemera, in an attempt to understand the socio-cultural context of his emergence, and to re-examine his influence on institutional and commercial art in the country.

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.

An art workshop and a tour of the Hooghly Imambara, relating the history of this iconic monument and the remaking of the fresco paintings that adorn its interiors with Agnibesh Ghosh, Mirza Sajid Ali and Sumantra Mukherjee.

A musical evening at Prasad Tagore Palace, the heritage residence of Pramantha Tagore, preceded by a conversation with Sujaan Mukherjee about the Tagore family’s ties to music, theatre, and art patronage.

The idea of primitivism centres on the wish to identify with, or respond to, elements of a society that are deemed ‘primitive’. In artistic terms, it is about rejecting realism, simplifying technique and reducing the formal means of expression to a ‘primitive’ state. The term itself is borrowed from discussions of Western art, where high-profile examples include the images of Tahiti and its people made in the 1890s by Paul Gauguin, and responses to African sculpture by Pablo Picasso in 1906-09. The second thread of primitivism—the reduction of formal means—is best exemplified by the ‘cut-outs’ made by Henri Matisse in the 1940s.

The Art of Santiniketan showcases the work of its four chief artists—Santiniketan’s founder, Rabindranath Tagore, its first principal and the architect of the Santiniketan pedagogy, Nandalal Bose, and his two illustrious students who went on to make a name for themselves as highly original and significant artists—Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij. Santiniketan was a path-breaking educational institution Rabindranath Tagore set up in rural Bengal in the early twentieth century, and the exhibition begins by examining its genesis in Tagore’s radical ideas of basing education in freedom and in the midst of nature. Benode Behari Mukherjee Nandalal Bose Rabindranath Tagore Ramkinkar Baij