For too long now, art from Bengal has been associated with veteran artist Jamini Roy’s rows of women, or cats, with drooping eyelids—and clubbed under an all-encompassing title, the “Bengal School of art”. Roy, who was influenced by the traditional Kalighat patachitras, traded their religious content with modern imagery.
Delhi Art Gallery’s ongoing show, The Art of Bengal, attempts to rejig this association. The exhibition features over 400 works by 104 artists and spans over two centuries, with works priced between Rs 35,000 and Rs 5 crore.
The Bengal School was born from the philosophy of Abanindranath Tagore—the nephew of the poet Rabindranath Tagore— who envisioned a “pan-Indian art” as a rejection of the colonial aesthetic. He sought to modernize the Mughal and Rajput miniature tradition to counter the influence of the Western models that were being taught in art schools under the British Raj. While this was an important movement, and one of the earliest documented in India, it has served to obliterate the “before and after” of the Bengal School because of art historians’ overriding focus on this coinage.
“The art of Bengal has been influenced by several styles...for instance, the Japanese stalwart Kakuza Okakura bought the technique of watercolour washes with him when he came to Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1902 and that left a lasting impression,” says Kishore Singh, who has co-curated the show along with the gallery’s director, Ashish Anand.
While the pivotal artworks in the show would still be classified as Bengal School, and by those artists trained at Santiniketan in West Bengal, which was founded by Rabindranath Tagore in 1901, the exhibition sails through the shores of various stylistic influences, travelling back and forth in time while doing so.
The Art of Bengal charts the growth and development of art in Bengal from 19th century onwards when the first winds of modernism came with traveller-artists such as the Italian Olinto Ghilardi who arrived in Calcutta in 1886 to teach Western styles of portraiture and landscape art to students at the Calcutta School of Art (where he taught Abanindranath). It also travels beyond the golden age of the Bengal School—arguably the crucible of modern art in India—to chronicle the influences of mid-20th European modern art movements such as Cubism and Surrealism.
With “Bengal” as a loose connecting thread, the exhibition features artists not merely claiming ancestry to Bengal but also those who were nurtured in its cultural climate: from Ghilardi to M.A.R. Chughtai from Lahore and K.G. Subramanyan from Chennai.
This exhibition is a tribute to the art of Bengal, which, while not in the same way as before, continues to exert its influence on Indian art.
OF FOLK TALES AND MYTHOLOGY
Untitled (Two Women and a Rose). Courtesy Delhi Art Gallery
The near-naturalistic executions of what are called Early Bengal Oils (19th century) reveal how the demand for oil paintings in the European academic styles was growing among the elite of Bengal, and being met by folk and traditional artists. The subjects were folk themes or Hindu gods—the first signs that traditional styles were merging with European naturalism.
Untitled (Two Women and a Rose), oil on canvas, late 19th century. This painting, executed in a Kalighat patachitra style, is precious for its suggestive theme, Rs 30 lakh
THE WESTERN GAZE
(Untitled) Portrait of the artist’s wife, Sunila Devi.
For nearly four centuries, the Portugese, Dutch, French, and finally, the British, touched upon the shores of Bengal. The cultural colonization gradually manifested itself in the visual arts. Works by the British portraitist Benjamin Hudson and landscapes by Ghilardi began reflecting in the works of the Indian “gentlemen artists” who were trained in art schools under the British Raj.
Untitled (Portrait of the artist’s wife, Sunila Devi) by J.P. Gangooly, oil on canvas, 1904. This portrait shows how masterfully the “gentlemen artists” of Bengal had begun to emulate Western portraiture—before arriving at their own style, Rs 10-15 lakh.
THE WASH OF THE ORIENT
Gita Govinda.
Okakura arrived in Calcutta in 1902, bringing to painters in the city (Abanindranath in particular) Japanese aesthetics and techniques. Abanindranath and other artists such as Kshitindranath Majumdar began to use Japanese watercolour washes as well as woodcut processes.
Gita Govinda by Kshitindranath Majumdar, watercolour wash on mount board, 1950s. The use of Japanese techniques was in keeping with Abanindranath’s idea of a modern pan-Asian artistic style which would merge the common aspects of Eastern spiritual and artistic culture, Rs 35 lakh.
PIONEERING MODERNS
Untitled(Deepavali).
The Bengal School proved strongly influential in the course of Indian art, if at least in being rejected in order to create a new, robust Indian art “closer to reality” by the artists of the 1930s and 1940s, who were influenced by the modernist movements in the West. The exhibition features the works of modernist masters such as Somnath Hore, Prodosh Das Gupta, Chittaprosad, Rabin Mondal, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Jogen Chowdhury and Meera Mukherjee and many others spanning the 1940s to 1980s and beyond, who looked to voice the inequities and dystopia of society around them.
Untitled (Deepavali) by Prosanto Roy, watercolour on paper, 1954. This painting, despite being about an Indian festival, is strongly reminiscent of Pablo Picasso and Cubism, Rs 15 lakh.
The Art of Bengal is on view at Delhi Art Gallery, 11, Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi, till 10 March. It will travel to The Harrington Street Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Kolkata, from 4-17 April.