Search results for: 'telling myself i won't go there'

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.

A unique academic engagement where professors from diverse disciplines bring their classrooms into the galleries, explore connections between their curriculum and the collection on view and experiment with new ways of teaching through art.

The city was consolidated over the course of the eighteenth century, and its access to global trade routes helped it grow over the following centuries as well, leading some to describe it as the 'door of the East with its Face to the West'. How did European artists view this growing city?

Nine artists find special mention in India as ‘art treasures, having regard to their artistic and aesthetic value’, a directive by the Archaeological Survey of India in the 1970s. Spanning a period of one hundred years of art practice, these artists represent a diversity of art traditions and movements but are unified by one common thread: a return to Indian roots through context, theme, subject, and an engagement with identity.

The birth of Amrita Sher-Gil to an Indian father and Hungarian mother bequeathed to the nation one of its most incandescent artists. Known for her luminous paintings, her work changed the face of modern Indian art and paved the course it was to take in the country. In a rare sculpture of tigers made, poignantly enough, in the last year of her life, Amrita Sher-Gil is revealed as someone exploring new directions before her tragic demise in 1941.

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.

S. H. Raza had begun to paint using oils, moving away from his impressionistic watercolours, on his way to winning the prestigious critics’ award in 1956. Just a year before, he completed a stunning painting of Parisian rooftops, revealing not a daylight scene but one of the night, only yellow lamplight from the streets dimly silhouetting the chimneys and sloping roofs. This period of Raza’s career is somewhat lesser known than his later, tantra-inspired works, as Ashok Vajpeyi and Aman Nath explain to us.

One of India’s nine national treasure artists, Nandalal Bose (1882—1966) forged a long and glittering career as the foremost artist-pedagogue bridging the late-colonial period and the first few decades after Indian independence. He maintained an active drawing practice throughout his life, with many small sketches done on postcards that he carried around with him as a sort of visual notebook.

This collection of essays, co-edited by eminent scholars of art history, Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar, navigate the fraught religio-political contexts of South Asia to bring into relief the fragility and amorphous nature of a contested term like the ‘secular’.

Tipu Sultan’s historical legacy has led to several conversations, among which its visual inheritance has provided room for debate on its particularly skewed European view. Catch our guest speaker William Dalrymple’s reflections on this subject.