Untitled

Devi Prasad Roy Choudhury is one of the most well-known Indian sculptors of the twentieth century. He was also a painter, writer, teacher and institution-builder, closely associated with many late-colonial and postcolonial art academies, including the government art school in Madras (now Chennai) and the Lalit Kala Akademi. He learnt from Abanindranath Tagore—a pioneering twentieth-century Indian artist and active proponent of nationalist revivalist art, who was the founder of what came to be known as the Bengal School—as well as European teachers, leading him to develop a unique synthesis between deliberate orientalist styles and western, realist idioms. In this gouache work on paper, he explores a more ambivalent aspect of modern man’s search for meaning, unlike the dominant mood in his public sculptures of workers and nation-builders. Suggestively reminiscent of Rabindranath Tagore, perhaps on a visit to his estates in the eastern regions of Bengal, it explores his melancholic encounter with modernity.