Search results for: 'Pen and In'

At the turn of the twentieth century, Abanindranath Tagore asked himself if the emerging artists of modern India should continue to paint in the manner of their European colonizers; or was there a new path waiting to be forged? His answers led him to envision a pan-Asian cultural identity, spanning traditions from Persia to Japan, and culminating in a ‘new “Indian” art.’ Regarded as the founder of the Bengal School, Abanindranath left an unparalleled legacy both in terms of his own diverse body of work, and through his pupils, like Nandalal Bose, who shaped the contours of art across the subcontinent in the twentieth century.

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Gogi Saroj Pal was one of the earliest women artists of India to paint the female body as a receptacle of patriarchal gaze, a trope that she has continued to explore right through the seventh decade of her life. She speaks with commendable candour in this short video on how art helped liberate her as an individual. Learn More

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

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.

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A translation of Rani Chanda's (nee Dey) essay/ memoir of Nandalal Bose, her teacher, and his friendship with Mukul Dey (Chanda's elder brother) and Jamini Roy. 

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It was in the 1970s that the government of India declared nine artists as National Treasures, attesting to the significance of their contribution to the shaping of modern Indian art identity. ‘Navratna: Nine Gems of Indian Art’ was a unique opportunity to see seminal works by all the nine together, to understand the uniqueness of their collective contribution, at Drishyakala, a joint collaboration between DAG and the Archaeological Survey of India. Learn More

Twenty years after India’s independence, Films Division, the government’s documentary and propaganda filmmaking body, was seeking to re-invent itself. It had the mandate of recording the nation’s history on film. It was also a project of moulding the citizen through films that were screened in cinema theatres, before the entertainment feature. The films covered varied subjects from development, self-reliance, social issues, to art and culture, making them an invaluable archive of the Indian state’s record of the nation’s history as a modern, progressive nation. The films remained largely unpopular, like homework, among the unwilling audience of people who waited for the entertainment film to follow the documentary. Learn More

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A close look at bus art with artist Sumantra Mukherjee as we join him on a walk through a bus depot, and a bus ride through the city where we try our hand at this popular visual language through paint and text. 

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An exhibition and workshop drawing from Cartoon Dol’s archives of Bengal’s caricature art, on confronting social-political issues through humour and satire, with a closing performance by Chandrabindoo. 

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