the art of the art of CONTENTS January – March 2012 Director’s Note 5 © 2012 Delhi Art Gallery Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi Editor’s Note 7 White, Black And Grey: 10 The Colonial Interface Paula Sengupta ‘Revivalism’ And The 32 11 Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi 110016, India ‘Bengal School’ Tel: 91 11 46005300 Sanjoy Mallik DLF Emporio, Second Floor, Vasant Kunj New Delhi 110070, India History And Utopia 44 Tel: 91 11 41004150 Ina Puri Email: [email protected] www.delhiartgallery.com Late 18th Century -1910 62 PROJECT EDITOR: Kishore Singh 1911-1920 103 EXECUTIVE EDITOR: Shruti Parthasarathy PROJECT COORDINATOR: Nishant and Neha Berlia 1921-1930 120 RESEARCH: Aditya Jha, Puja Kaushik, Poonam Baid, Sukriti Datt 1931-1940 140 PHOTOGRAPHY OF ARTWORKS: Durga Pada Chowdhury 1941-1950 164 RESTORATION: Priya Khanna 1951-1960 208 DESIGN: Madhav Tankha, Vivek Sahni – Vivek Sahni Design 1961-1970 252 PRINT: Archana Printers Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi 1971-1980 298 All rights are reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, 1981-1990 340 electronic and mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing 1991-2010 368 from the publisher. 2000-2010 400 ISBN: 978-93-81217-23-8 Artist Profiles 415 Front cover: Author Profiles 452 Back cover: Artist Groups in Bengal 453 Bibliography 454 Artist Index 461 DIRECTOR’S NOTE engal – the association with its art (and literature, and cinema, and food) is instinctive, almost as if it’s DNA-coded into its people. For Indians, as for people around the Bworld, Bengal in general, and Calcutta (now Kolkata) in particular, is the crucible of, especially, modern art. Here it was that coloniser and colonised first met in a clash of cultures, and the Bengali is still arguing about who triumphed from that epic collision. While that adda will classically find no winners, or losers, here, within Delhi Art Gallery, I am delighted to say that we have never worked harder than for this particular exposition. My colleagues in the documentation division have been burning the midnight oil to meet an extremely tight deadline for pulling in material from different sources, reading up books and catalogues, researching dates – in which exercise I have contributed not a little to the chaos and debates – but in my defence, let me say that Bengal and Bengal-influenced artists are the lifeblood of Delhi Art Gallery. I was educated, so to speak, on Indian modern art when I first travelled to what is now Kolkata, and to places around it, where the culture of art was still alive and strong, and where it was easy to see works by the masters, even though large swathes of it was lying in a state of neglect. I was lucky that artists and their families let me in to see and acquire these fabulous treasures, and I cannot tell you how pleased I am that with this exhibition, I will have fulfilled my dream of putting together what must be the largest such exposition on the art of Bengal. There is no other private collection with a repository as rich as that of Delhi Art Gallery, and I am proud that we can showcase the splendid contribution Bengal has made to the world of Indian art through this exposition. Much as I must thank everyone who has worked on this exhibition from within as well as outside Delhi Art Gallery, it is the hundreds of artists and their families as well as the early patrons and collectors of Bengal art who have inspired my close-to fifteen years of collecting, who are owed my gratitude. I am delighted to have the opportunity to now take this fountainhead of Indian modernism and bring it to art-lovers in India and around the world. I hope it will be an equally enriching experience for all of you. Ashish Anand 5 EDITOR’S NOTE hat is the extent of Bengal art? With only one clear focus – that it must reflect our insist- ence on modernism in all its implications – we were still unprepared for the sheer length Wand breadth of what the region’s art practice offered us. We were, of course, sure that we would not be narrowed into a straitjacketed fit that looked at Bengal art as defined for too many years as the outcome of what is discussed as the Bengal School, or as revivalism – both terms which one of our scholars, Sanjoy Kumar Mallik, places within quote marks. This healthy debate – both in the es- says in this book, and between ourselves at the Gallery when we set out to take stock of the project, has shaped this book. It has done so in ways that, I hope, will invite everyone from scholars to art- lovers to review their own and current perceptions about Bengal (not Bengali) art. For a start, we decided to define for ourselves what Bengal represented. Because of the considerable scholarship previously available, we found that there were no hitches when it came to going back to a time when the first winds of modernism blew in from Europe in the form of traveller-artists who arrived in India in general, and Calcutta in particular. Documentary evidence of their work has sur- vived in the form of those works either in Calcutta itself (Victoria Memorial being a treasure trove) or in national museum collections and in, particularly, the British Museum and Library in London. Printed references of their works made possible a study of the images as well as the peculiarities of the occidental eye and art practice. There, were, of course, Dutch artists who probably preceded the British and influenced the local artists in Bengal – leading to what came to be known as Dutch-Bengal art, which later developed as Company Paintings. In Calcutta, it was a period of change and transition. That influence and those changes and their documentation was less difficult than what was to follow. In the suburbs and villages surrounding Calcutta grew a printing industry that was shaped by local subjects and European technology; several of the lithographs, oleographs and chromolithographs in our collection contained printed references of the names of the presses Paula Sengupta discusses in her essay – but the challenge lay in providing dates for them. Dates – about which artists typically have been lackadaisical in the past – were to become our bane, beginning with those printed works. When might the original have been done? When the first litho- graph? When the bazaar prints? Experts were consulted, we pored over books, the existence of the presses within their time frames was taken into account – to the extent possible, the dates ascribed to works are accurate or near-accurate suggested by our research. 6 7 The same skills were called on repeatedly as a large number of works by even well-known artists particular affinity to Bengal in their works – ergo, they could be eliminated from the selection. There is remained undated. In the past, scholars had tended to leave a very wide window when it came to no doubt that some scholars, or even artists, will take us to task over this method, but it was one we dating works that had not been ascribed a date by those artists long since dead. We did not have that felt was fair and without prejudice. luxury because we had decided – and at times it had seemed frustrating – to place the selected works in a chronological order. Earlier representations from Bengal had tended to place groups of artists to- The selection of the artists was difficult enough, that of finalising the artworks was painful. How gether, or placed them by either subject or groups. We avoided what would have been thus conveni- many Nandalal Boses could we include? Did we really have to eliminate those beautiful Benode Behari ent for what we felt was more important: for readers to be able to see the parallel developments taking Mukherjees? Were the works representative across different periods, genres and all mediums? Was place in the region. our selection, in a sense, good enough to be a retrospective of Bengal art? If mostly we were fortunate to suffer a problem of plenty, some gaps became evident and had to be plugged – in a hurry. The di- In a sense, this coalesced too with our understanding of Bengal art which included, of course, what rector pulled out all stops and all his contacts and set to travelling, to come back with more treasures, is referred to as pre-Independence art alongside what the Bengal School, Abanindranath Tagore and which required more changes on our pages, causing dismay to our book designers in the bargain. his students came to represent, the work that was happening in Santiniketan which represented still another genre of modernism, to, of course, the later course of modernism that took select aesthetics A final hurdle remained with regard to cut-offs. There are, after all, a large number of recognised artists from the revivalists but charted its own vocabulary in response to what the artists experienced around practicing in Bengal – but since Delhi Art Gallery confines itself largely to the space of the masters and them. And what a sensory overload it represented across different mediums, the same period show- the moderns, the younger contemporaries – no matter how popular – were kept out, including such casing works by widely different artists, styles and genres in an approach that showed the existence artists as Chittravonu Mazumdar, Jaya Ganguly, Paresh Maity and Jayasri Burman.