The old school glamour of The Great Gatsby meets the 21st century home. The magic of the roaring '20s is very much in vogue today owing to the endless allure of Art Deco's luxurious and lavish style. Be it a wise old satinwood chest of drawers or a sturdy Rosewood cabinet that creaks with wisdom, each art deco element fits like a glove in the contemporary home.
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Wood has stayed in our hearts and homes for centuries. And yet, its versatility remains timeless. The look and feel of a wooden piece of furniture are known to transcend time and geography.
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Art Deco is an opulent and alluring visual arts design style that unfolded in the 1920s in France. It burgeoned internationally in the early 1940s. This style still has a boundless influence on everything from architecture to sculpture, interiors to jewelry, furniture to car design.
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Bhanu Athaiya: The legacy of a long-hidden sun I. It was D.G. Nadkarni, elder statesman among Bombay’s art critics, who first told me that Bhanu Athaiya had trained as a painter and had once shown alongside the members of the Progressive Artists' Group (PAG).
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The art of portraiture seems much more enticing today when we live in a world where ‘portraits’ can be created at the click of a button with a single handheld device. There is something enigmatic about how artists in the past captured personalities with strokes of the brush and immortalized them in portraits. There is something romantic about the notion of portraits themselves, and how a sensitive artist could capture the physical characteristics as well as the psychological aspect of the subject of the portrait.
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"My father, a multifaceted man, was far ahead of the times. His thirst for knowledge led him to explore avenues of learning beyond scholastic and academic boundaries. He would travel to Mumbai frequently to collect books on various subjects ranging from painting to photography and embroidery to film making. These books were imported from Britain by Englishmen who had big stores in Mumbai.
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Bombay, May 2010 - "I was exposed to paintings from a very young age. My father was a self-taught artist who sometimes painted in oils by studying the old European masters and sometimes following his own inspiration. In his studio, he had many books on paintings of European masters like Leonardo Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Turner, Gainsboro, Constable, and others. I enjoyed looking at these books just as I enjoyed washing my father's brushes and pallet.
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The annals of the watchmaking history fondly remember the winter of 1969. It was at this time that Seiko, the Japanese watchmaker, introduced The Astron, a timepiece that would change the dynamics of the watch industry forever. It marked the beginning of the Quartz Revolution.
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The city of Kolhapur in southern Maharashtra is often called Kalapur, a city of the arts: a tag that originated in the early twentieth century. This was a result of a social and cultural transformation initiated by Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj (1874-1922).
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She was born to design! As a girl of nine years, she passed the elementary and intermediate art examinations and won a scholarship to the JJ School of Arts in Mumbai at nineteen. That is Bhanu Athaiya, India’s first Oscar-winning designer for the mega-blockbuster film, “Gandhi” by Sir Richard Attenborough in 1982.
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Atul Bose (1898-1977) was virtually forgotten in the decades following independence when the Progressive Artists of Bombay dominated in the era of Nehruvian modernism. Recently, many of these earlier artists are undergoing significant reassessment.
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The world's fascination with Persian carpets existed long before we heard tales of Aladdin and his Magic Carpet. A thousand stories of its weavers, their craftsmanship, and a promise to transport you to faraway lands stitch together the fabric of the quintessential Persian carpet. The history of its artistic magnificence dates back to 500 BC.
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The ravishing Burmese Ruby or the glorious Colombian Emerald, which one will it be? Read on to make your choice.
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Bhanu Athaiya achieved a lot over a period of six decades - the only woman member of the Progressive Artists Group and the first Indian to win an Oscar.
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Traversing the world of art can be a game of clue hunt. Sometimes, even if there is a lot documented about a group of artists and their works, one tends to find a thread that can become an enticing exploration in itself. A lot has been written about the Progressive Artists' Group, which was formed in India in the year 1947.
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Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute (BDMI) was a center for innumerable artists of diverse fields and practices. An institute with the same structure and bohemian style has never been established again, giving rise to various experiments, collaborations, and discussions. The impact of the atmosphere created at the BDMI has touched the practice of artists visiting the space for various reasons.
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Post-Independence India was a new revolution in India’s history. As the struggle for freedom was finally achieved, new mindsets were formed. The new free India respected and worshiped humanity at its best along with promoting freedom of expression. At this point, a group of supreme artists came together who shared a common art type: modern art for the new free India and called themselves the Bombay Progressives Art Group!
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In reading about the Bhulabhai Desai Institute, one can acquaint themselves with a few historically important personalities who supported contemporary Indian art in the 1950s and 1960s by nurturing talent and providing an international stage and platform for many of them.
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Artists don’t exist in a vacuum. The feature looks at the works of two Indian artists who occupy a special niche in the art world. This feature looks at VS Gaitonde and Nasreen Mohamedi through different prisms.
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Somnath Hore's pictorial language in his sketches, sculptures, and prints is more often a reaction to one of the major crises that hit Bengal in the 20th century. Here we focus on his printmaking.
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