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Have you wondered how people looked at paintings and photographs in the nineteenth century? For DAG’s annual Heritage Festival ‘The City as a Museum’, we explored various aspects of the city’s visual culture. As we are about to launch the DAG Journal let us revisit the walk co-led by Sarbajit Mitra and Amreeta Das at the Uttarpara Jaykrishna public library to delve into the periodical archive and trace the evolution of printed pictures in India. Flipping through the pages of these periodicals offered glimpses into the everyday habits of consuming art—from simple wood-cut and lithograph illustrations, to full plate colour reproductions of paintings and photographs, artist albums, and exquisitely ornate typography.

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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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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

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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.

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Among all attempts by foreign artists to present a complete view of India, none is so focused on people as the work of François Baltazard Solvyns, who lived in Calcutta for a decade starting in 1791. While picking up odd jobs, he embarked on an ambitious project to produce a comprehensive survey of ‘the manners, customs, and dresses, of the Hindus’. The first edition contained 250 hand-coloured etchings and was published by Solvyns between 1796 and 1799.

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The nude. Just the term sends a frisson of excitement down the spine in most people. For the few of us who are part of the art fraternity, however, more than just the anticipation of being able to view the human body as an artistic work in its many forms and avatars, its beauty and its degradation both, is the true mark of an artist’s genius. And yet, the history of the nude in Indian art has remained curiously unmapped. A. A. Almelkar A. A. Raiba A. P. Bagchi A. Ramachandran Abalall Rahiman Akbar Padamsee Anita Roychowdhury Anupam Sud Avinash Chandra B. Prabha B.Vithal Bengal School (Anonymous) Bikash Bhattacharjee Chintamoni Kar Chittaprosad F. N. Souza G. R. Santosh George Keyt Gogi Saroj Pal Gopal Ghose Hemendranath Majumdar J. Sultan Ali Jamini Roy Jaya Ganguly Jehangir Sabavala Jeram Patel Jogen Chowdhury Jyoti Bhatt K. H. Ara K. K. Hebbar K. Laxma Goud K. S. Kulkarni L. Munuswamy Laxman Pai M. F. Husain M. R. Acharaker Madhav Bhattacharjee Maniklal Banerjee Nalini Malani Navjot Nikhil Biswas P. Khemraj P. T. Reddy Prodosh Das Gupta Prokash Karmakar R.Vijaivargiya Rabin Mondal Radha Charan Bagchi Rameshwar Broota Ramkinkar Baij Ranbir Kaleka Ravi Varma Press Rekha Rodwittiya S. Dhanapal Sakti Burman Satish Sinha Sudhir Khastgir Suhas Roy Sunil Das Sunil Madhav Sen Surendran Nair V. Nageshkar Ved Nayar

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The mid-twentieth century saw a churn in the practice of art in India with a number of artists beginning to explore a genre that had swept the West with its absence of figuration in favour of abstraction. The non-representational began to gain traction as artists found within it a way to express themselves purely through colour as a potent tool to communicate emotions. Abstraction emphasised the relationship between originality and expression in ways that were complex, leading one to debate about the eventual goal of art. Ambadas, Krishna Reddy, Sohan Qadri, Zarina Hashmi, Rajendra Dhawan

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A hop-in hop-off trail through the Calcutta underground metro rail, exploring the story of the murals that adorn the metro stations and enliven the everyday commute of millions of people.

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An experiential learning and apprenticeship programme for high school students in collaboration with arts education organisations, offering them a first-hand experience of working in a museum, learning about the art and history, and translating their learnings to develop museum experiences for their peers.

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Shobha Broota is often described as among the most enigmatic artists of her generation. Her strength lies in ‘simplicity’, which she has used dexterously to explore the most complex of subjects in her art, making her a pioneer in choosing abstraction when very few women artists of India were doing so. Learn More