Kenneth Clark goes as far as to suggest that it was the Greeks in the fifth century B. C. who invented the art form of the nude, as a contribution to the concept of ‘ideal beauty’. He refers to popular Greek painter Zeuxis’ documented practice of drawing a composite of features from several maidens of Kroton to arrive at his notion of ideal form.

In India, the institutional practice of figure drawing follows established tradition as recorded in the history of the J. J. School of Art in Bombay (now Mumbai). M. V. Dhurandhar, one of the school’s most prominent alumni as well as faculty, excelled at what was at once a romantic and realist depiction of the human figure. Figure drawing classes would usually involve students surrounding a posing model as they sketched, each having a unique perspective due to their position and view—a practice that has been common throughout institutions for centuries. Dhurandhar’s model sketches, mostly of women (as was the norm in figure drawing after the Renaissance), reflect the artist’s ability to capture a sense of grace in the body.

Figure drawing, especially life drawing, endures well into and beyond modernity as both fundamental to art pedagogies and practices with variations in mode and approach. Nineteenth and early twentieth century artists such as the expressionist Egon Schiele, move on from faithful realism to figure drawings that privilege intensity and raw sexuality abandoning the quest for the ideal. His nudes are celebrated even today for their unfettered expression of sexuality.

In India, half a century later, Altaf’s croquis (quick sketch of a live model) and raw figure drawings are stylistic inheritors of Dhurandhar’s realism and Schiele’s expressionistic nudes respectively—evidence that figure drawing is a methodological space of experimentation for artists transcending styles, trends, and schools. Altaf and Schiele’s experimentation with posture often adds a layer of psychological complexity despite the somewhat straightforward recognizability of the human form.

Kenneth Clark writes, ‘Picasso has often exempted [nude drawings] from that savage metamorphosis which he has inflicted on the visible world and has produced a series of nudes that might have walked unaltered off the back of a greek mirror.’ Picasso’s ouvre indeed boasts of figure drawings of the more classical nature but also has cubist renditions of the human body stylistically similar to his cubist contemporary Vilhelm Lundstrøm. In India, F. N. Souza’s figure drawings from the 40s embody a sense of academicism with its soft contours and shadows capturing a kinaesthetic essence, but in the 50s moves onto a sense of abstraction with the focus on lines and angularity.

Moving beyond figure drawings that attempted to find ideal beauty or faithfully reproduce the human body, artists have abstracted the human body therefore disrupting our seemingly neat categories of figurative, abstract and representational art. Schiele, Altaf, Lundstrøm and Souza have all experimented with figure drawing in varying levels of abstraction. Intentional distortion of the human body to create visual metaphors for identity, society and the human condition, constitutes figurative abstraction. The question is, would figurative abstraction then be a subset of figure drawing?

Rabin Mondal’s Taking Over has features resembling human ones—faces, hands, arms—all distorted and combined to create two figures. Formally, he employs techniques such as hatching (parallel strokes to create depth) and stippling (dotted shading), which are commonly used in more faithfully representational figure drawings.

In an untitled work from 1975, Avinash Chandra’s humanistic figures with breasts, torsos, hips, and legs resembling the female body create a landscape or humanscape that almost appear as a forest. Chandra had a unique approach to figure drawing where instead of sketching models from a distance he preferred the perspective of the model standing beside him as he sketched. He deploys his experiments with the methodology of figure drawing in these abstract humanscapes creating a formal medley that recurs in his visual language—illustrating the enduring presence of figure drawing in Indian modern art.