The Journey of Modern Indian Art

A piece for India Today about the state of modern Indian art, (occasioned by a new book on the subject, Modern Indian Painting, edited by Giles Tillotson and Rob Dean). 

'Assassin', by the late Ganesh Pyne. (Tempera).

Last week, an “art market intelligence” firm called Artery India announced on its website that India’s ‘Top 3 Artists’ over the last five years are V.S. Gaitonde, M.F. Husain and S.H. Raza. Husain and Raza, once colleagues in the Progressive Artists’ Group, are running neck and neck, with 494 and 454 works sold for Rs 331 crore and Rs 321 crore respectively. Gaitonde is the dark horse, having totted up Rs 392 crore with just 81 works.

The racecourse metaphor may seem undignified, but it’s also sadly accurate in a country where art is only discussed for its price tag. When Christie’s sells a Tyeb Mehta work for Rs 22.9 crore, or an “unseen” Souza is a Sotheby’s auction highlight (as will happen on March 18 in New York), modern Indian art can provide temporary grist to the national pride mill. Five artists—Raza, Husain, Gaitonde, F.N. Souza and Mehta—account for two-thirds of the top 500 lots sold at auctions. The market’s unrelenting appetite for big names can lead down murkier paths. In February, several works listed for auction by the Neville Tuli-run Osian’s-Connoisseurs of Art Pvt. Ltd—an untitled 1957 Souza, Shadow of Death by Bhupen Khakhar, a 1964 Jehangir Sabavala and a 1952 Akbar Padamsee—were charged with being potential fakes.

Kito de Boer and his partner Jane Gowers began collecting modern Indian art 25 years ago during a seven-year sojourn in India. Their collection, now 1000-odd images strong, offers an example of how informed private collectors might depart from such a highly skewed art market. The de Boer collection is now the basis of a new book, Modern Indian Painting, edited by Giles Tillotson and Rob Dean.

The de Boers' personal tastes sometimes align with the market, for instance on the Bombay Progressives. Yashodhara Dalmia’s essay on them usefully contextualises each artist: e.g. Raza’s move from early cityscapes and representational works, like the arresting Three Artists, to the abstract, ever more luminous oils that he began to make in the 1960s; or Souza’s iconoclasm, including ghoulish depictions of Christian themes and unprecedented sexual imagery. Dalmia includes a great anecdote from artist Krishen Khanna: a woman he once heard muttering “Disgusting, absolutely disgusting”, as she stepped away from a nude self-portrait by Souza.

The late S.H. Raza's 'Three Artists'

The de Boers also display a strong interest in art from Bengal, and because the region has been so crucial to modern Indian art, the book works superbly as an introductory historical survey. Partha Mitter’s essay on the Bengal School explains succinctly how Indian art first became wound up with nationalism. The rise of western art training in colonial India first gave rise to an artist like Raja Ravi Varma, who “used the syntax of Victorian academic art for his ‘authentic’ recreations of the Hindu past”. Varma’s style of portraiture, spread by his printing press, became the new norm in the popular imagination. But, Mitter writes, by the early twentieth century, there was a reaction to western academic art. The Bengal School, under E.B. Havell and Abanindranath Tagore, led a formal movement against western-style three-dimensional illusionism. This included using watercolours rather than oils, and looking East (e.g. to Japan’s colour wash techniques), or to India’s own past (e.g. Ajanta frescoes or Mughal miniatures) for ‘Swadeshi’ form and subjects.

The book illustrates this period with Tagore’s own Bharat Mata and The Passing of Shah Jahan, A.R. Chughtai’s Shah Jahan Looking at the Taj, Kshitindranath Majumdar’s Chaitanya images and, most interesting of all, Prosanto Roy’s works in variegated styles, from Untitled (Arabian Nights) to the Tibetan thangka influences in Mara’s Attack on the Buddha. Tillotson’s essay further amplifies our sense of this early period, illustrating how the Tagore-led Bengal School was challenged, not just by the Bombay School’s portrait painters, like M.V. Dhurandhar and M.F. Pithawalla, but from within Bengal itself. Practitioners in oils like Motilal Pai created ‘realistic’ perspectival architectural settings for epic themes, while the Calcutta Naturalists like Hemendranath Mazumdar, B.C. Law and Satish Sinha focused on naturalistic female figures and landscapes.

Bezwada, by Chittaprosad.

Sona Datta’s essay frames the mid-century change in Bengal’s art as a rural idyll (Jamini Roy, Nandalal Bose, Benod Behari Mukherjee and others at Shantiniketan) disrupted by famine, war and Partition. The standout figure here is Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, whose woodblock prints and ink-on-paper drawings are a scathing commentary on stark times. But Datta also helps explain the darkness of major mid-century Bengali artists, like Nikhil Biswas, Rabin Mondal, Somnath Hore and Prokash Karmakar.

The book ends with three fascinating interviews with living artists: Ganesh Pyne and his unsettling, ghostly temperas, A. Ramachandran’s vegetally embellished re-workings of Indian myths and Rameshwar Broota’s eclectic career that was “never influenced by the watercolours of the Bengal School”. As he says, “I am influenced by universal art.” May all future Indian art be as confident.

Published in India Today, 15 Mar 2019. A brief accompanying interview with Tillotson is here.