Freedom to Form

In 1970, K.G. Subramanyan drew attention to Gujarat's significant impact on India's art scene, noting its early interventions in modern architecture and its progressive post-Independence institutions. At the centre of that transformation was Baroda, a city that had long enjoyed royal patronage and an indigenous modernity under Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, yet lacked a formal institution of its own. Unlike Calcutta, Bombay or Madras, it had no colonial art school to inherit or dismantle. This made the founding of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University in 1950 a turning point: India's first post-Independence art school, free to shape its own idiom from the ground up.

Freedom to Form: Baroda Modern traces the origins and evolution of this remarkable institution, whose influence extended far beyond the city—across Gujarat and the country. Through paintings, sculptures, mixed-media works, prints and photographs, the exhibition explores the extraordinary range of ideas, material and experimentation that the Faculty produced. Alongside these works, archival material from the DAG collection offers a glimpse into the camaraderie, teaching and daily life that made Baroda what it was.

What emerged at Baroda was an art of unusual freedom. Its teachers encouraged students to engage with folk and craft traditions, to embrace a rootedness that was never romanticised, and to build a modernity from India's own visual reservoirs. Successive generations found their own languages—some in the tactility of material and the making of new forms, others in an abstraction grounded in surface and place, and still others in a figuration charged with the political and the personal. Students became teachers in turn, and the pedagogies they shaped deeply influenced some of the most significant Indian art of the last century.