In these personal notes by Bhanu Athaiya, she fondly recalls her mother Shantabai with deep gratitude, love, and pride. She deems her mother the enabler of her success, dreams, and aspirations. Read on to know more.
Read More
Bhanu Rajopadhye Athaiya (b. 1929) was born in her 300-year-old sprawling ancestral house in the heart of Kolhapur. Bhanu grew up surrounded by indigenous and western political, social and cultural influences. Her ability to translate all this information into the medium of cinema and art made her the first Indian ever to win an Oscar. Bhanu Athaiya is not only recognised as the revered doyenne of Indian costume designers; but also a remarkable modernist artist.
Read More
An unabating artist whose creative expression was unfazed by the trials and tribulations he faced, A.A. Raiba (b. 1922) was relentless; almost restless in his artistic pursuits till the very end saying, “Itni Umar Gayi, Kam khatam nahi Hua". [1] His visual narrative was derived from his love for Urdu poetry and Islamic Literature. Born in Mumbai, most of Raiba’s works exude nostalgia and are intimate observations of old Bombay and his travels all over the country. Raiba’s oeuvre is rooted in intensively researched history with influences from his lifelong practice in Calligraphy.
Read More
Art Rebel Centre, founded in 1933, was formed and led by Gobardhan Ash, Annada Dey, and Bhola Chatterjee. Subsequently, some of those invited to submit their work in exhibitions accepted membership. These include Lalit Chandra, Haridas Ganguly, Samar Dey, Amar Dasgupta, Sachin Das, Kalikinkar Ghoshdastidar, Khagen Roy, and Suren Dey, among others. Manoj Bose and Rabi Bose became members too, despite not providing paintings for exhibitions. The following is a brief history of how Art Rebel Centre came to be.
Read More
An intensely private artist whose artistic imagination was fuelled by the strange, dark fantasy of his grandmother’s stories and charred by the horrors of his reality, Ganesh Pyne's paintings are quiet revelations of his personality. Pyne's intricate ink works, haunting temperas, and jottings are rich in imagery and symbolism, bordering along the uncanny and drawing our attention to a world beyond the familiar. His art deeply rooted in dark, unsettling images, derived from mythology and dreams.
Read More
I had the good fortune of spending a larger part of my life in close association with M. F. Husain. Or Uncle H, as I called him. He was more than just a friend of the family. He was part of the family. We all lived, painted, and went on vacations together. There were always the choicest of paints and canvases in the house while growing up, for which I am always thankful to him. I got to paint alongside him right from when I was 6 years old. As a child, he must have seen a unique creative spark in me. Or so he said to me in a note, written inside a book he sent me just a month before he passed away.
Read More
At first sight, this encaustic painting – rendered in heated beeswax, into which pigments of various colours have been mixed – seems to be worlds away from what most viewers know of Bhupen Khakhar’s work. There are no limp-limbed yet curiously wide-awake men from a broad middle class; no domestic interiors laid out for erotic encounter; no playful or picaresque encounters among figures whose ordinariness is belied by some eccentric bodily feature or undecipherable gesture. No figures at all, in fact.
Read More
An observer and painter of life, a chartered accountant occasionally picked up his paintbrush to reflect the uncanny, the fantastical, the mixed droll, and dramatic impulses quintessential to everyday life. Bhupen Khakhar (b.1934) unabashedly revealed the melancholia, mundanities, and inner monologues of the marginal man. Khakhar was born in Bombay, but the quaint town of Baroda nurtured the artist in him. An office accountant in the city of dreams, money was not the only thing Bhupen wished to draw.
Read More
A letter written by Francis Newton Souza expressing his views on Modern Art in the summer of '88. This is one of Souza's three letters to be featured in the Modern Indian Art auction this May,
Read More
Once upon a time, a dreamer derived his painterly language from Indian mythological tales, legends, and fables rich in moral and spiritual lessons. Manjit Bawa (b. 1941) introduced fragments of his thoughts, ideas, and poetry into the rational world throughout his artistic oeuvre. Born in Dhuri, Punjab, Bawa's childlike fascination with music, spirituality, and philosophy breathed heavily on his canvas. Manjit Bawa's artworks are mystical musicals that strike a chord and capture a dream.
Read More
A silent, dedicated artist content amidst the walls of paintings stacked in his Begampur mud house stirred a quiet revolution against the preconceived notions of artistic expression. No wonder Gobardhan Ash (b.1907) carved a niche for himself as an individualistic artist who fearlessly explored diverse artistic styles and techniques.
Read More
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).
Read More
Peggy Guggenheim was born in 1898 in New York. Her father, Benjamin Guggenheim, and uncle, Solomon R. Guggenheim were power brokers. The family’s fortune came from mining and smelting industries.
Read More
Ram Kumar was an essential part of the first generation of postcolonial Indian artists. He was born in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh in 1924 and was a member of the Bombay Progressive Artists Group along with other popular artists like Husain, Raza, and Sadanand Bakre.
Read More
Somnath Hore was one of the most prominent political artists and activists of post-independence India. His affiliation with the Communist Party at an early age strongly influenced his artistic ideologies and methods of art practice. However, his career as a student of art and later as an art practitioner was unlike his contemporaries.
Read More
Sailoz Mukherjee was one of the pioneering figures of modern Indian art in the twentieth century. During the early forties, when India was at the peak of its struggle to attain her own independence and identity, the art community of the country was striving to locate its indigenous understanding of modernity.
Read More
K.G. Subramanyan’s artistic oeuvre reflects the synthesized modernism in post-independence India, that was devised to accommodate the varied Indian artistic aesthetics and history as a continuation of cultural pursuits.
Read More
One of the most iconic figures of modern Indian art of the mid-20th century, Jamini Roy’s reputation spilled over from the art world into a larger public and popular domain, and even as his name became synonymous in modern Indian art history with a reinvented "Bengali folk" style.
Read More
B C Sanyal, as he was popularly known, was a doyen of modernism in Indian art.
Read More
Prodosh Dasgupta was a crucial figure of that mid-20th century generation of artists in Bengal who were giving shape to a new vocabulary of modernism in Indian art. His role was particularly important in defining a distinct place for modernism in Indian sculpture, in advocating the concept of form as an independent identity in sculpture, and in pioneering a style of semi-abstract three-dimensional figuration.
Read More
Install this application on your home screen for quick and easy access
then 'Add to Home Screen'