bombay progressive artists

8/10/2019 Bombay Progressive Artists

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Progressive Artists' Group

The Bombay Progressive Artists' Group, PAG, was the most influential group ofmodern artistsinIndiafrom

its formation in 1947, they combined Indian subject matter withPost-Impressionistcolours,Cubistforms and

brusque,Expressionisticstyles

History

The Progressive Artists' Group was formed by six founder members,F. N. Souza,S. H. Raza,M. F. Husain,K.

H. Ara,H. A. Gade,andS. K. Bakre.Others associated with the group includedManishi Dey,Akbar

Padamsee,Ram KumarandTyeb Mehta.[1]

The group wished to break with the revivalist nationalism established by theBengal school of artand toencourage an Indian avant-garde, engaged at an international level. The Group was formed just months after

the 14 August, 1947 "Partition of India" and Pakistan that resulted in religious rioting and death of tens of

thousands of people displaced by the new borders. The founders of the Progressive Artists Group often cite

"the partition" as impetus for their desire for new standards in India, starting with their new style of art .[2]Their

intention was to "paint with absolute freedom for content and technique, almost anarchic, save that we are

governed by one or two sound elemental and eternal laws, of aesthetic order, plastic co-ordination and colour

composition."[3]

In 1950,Vasudeo S. Gaitonde,Krishen KhannaandMohan Samantjoined the Group, following the departure

from India of the two main founders Souza and Raza. Bakre also left the group. The group disbanded in 1956.

EuropeanModernismwas the most distinctive influence on the group, but its members worked in dramatically

different styles, from the Expressionism of Souza to the pure abstraction of Gaitonde. Specific Indian imagery

and landscapes were also adopted, particularly by Mehta and Husain.

it has little to do with past concepts of edification but emerges as a vital process, a

landscape where we become familiar with the changes influencing our lives. Thus

signals out how an eclectic range of imagery of a group of artists based in Bombay

from the changing world of postcolonial India became instrumental in evolving a

visual language of collage and citation, which in turn, acted as a vehicle of cultural

force, creating and negotiating as the sacred, the erotic, the political, the modern

and beyond. The very idea of historicizing which carried with it some peculiarly

European assumptions of disenchanted space, secular time and human sovereignty

now challenges the notion of our presence in the waiting rooms of metanarratives.
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The Progressive Artists Group and its Associates curated by Yashodhara Dalmia. The

group PAG consisted of M.F. Husain, F.N.Souza. S.K.Bakre. K.H.Ara, S.H.Raza,

H.A.Gade and people like Ramkumar, V.S.Gaitonde, Bal Chhabda, Krishen Khanna,

Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta were associated them later as a part of the extended

circle. 'They all emerged as late impressionists or post expressionists. But they found

their own styles very early in their careers. Raza began with water-colours of Kashmir

landscapes painted in a very fluid way and then gradually became almost abstract.

All those artists sat together and talked about their art. But each developed his own

style.

To talk about specific genres, we somewhat stumble upon some other kind of

difficulty here for any foreclosure to it has already proven disastrous and an

incomplete study. In the fractured times after independence, an entire generation offeisty, anxious and aspirational artists came into their own in a heroic attempt to find

a voice. How do we account for the uncritical rather intent reading of these works

into categories as belated, ahistorical and unoriginal- are we in urgent need of a

critical apparatus, one capable of reinventing the possibility of a meaningful

engagement with the ambivalent works of this complex generation- post

independence, postcolonial. I have come to believe that pictorial truth is a self-

contained phenomenon within the limits of the medium and visual imagery is only a

means to arrive at this truth. Therefore, I have no story to tell. No literary message to

give, no social commentary to make in my pictures. My paintings, disseminating my

ideas and experiences as a painter- (H. A. Gade). It is hardly surprising that the

character of our art practice during the first 100 years of art colleges' existence was

largely shaped by the conventions of English art. Even the periods of pronounced

nationalist fervour, particularly the late 19th and early 20th century and again in the

immediate post-independence era of the 1940's and fifties may have quelled , but

did not diminish the strangle-hold which the British academic tradition continued to

exert and the anxiety to look up to the West, especially in art colleges, well into the

1960's the nature of Indian response to European modernism are pronounced just

because early modernism was brought here by artists who had gained their

experience of it through London and France, and only to a lesser extent through New

York. It existed, however skeptically, as part of an internationally fluid scheme of

ideas and interventions. Having wavered in their affiliation and with the emergence


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of International Abstraction in the fifties and sixties the relationship was changed but

surprisingly, not severed. Although the momentum for this new art derived from

New York, it was the experience of it gained through London and Paris proved

significant to some of us. But at the same time, the absence of a predominant

international art centre and the criticism for being an appendage of the West

coincided with the growth of a regional impetus in contemporary art, which altered,

as a matter of course, the relationship between the two worlds. In the field of art

criticism, in reaction against the glut of turgid subjective and poetic analysis of

content, critics for example, Clement Greenberg, whose formalist approach

dominated art criticism during the sixties, dismissed all such analysis as irrelevant.

His influence was pronounced in our art writings of that period. In the name of

objectivity, they insisted on dealing exclusively with the formal components of art.

Inquiry into issues external to art was condemned. But in the following decade, the

formalist approach lost its sway over to art discourse. Critics in increasing numbers

and with growing confidence have been investigating extra-aesthetic feelings and

thoughts in here in the physical properties of works of art. Though, everyone is

aware of the intentional fallacy, that an artist's intention is not necessarily conveyed

by his or her works, critics are also looking into artist's own statements for

suggestions. This idea that these artists were thrown into the middle of whole

process of art making is a revolutionary idea- a critique of modernism. There was a

tremendous amount of group activity and a feeling of working together, but it wassoon gone. We started seeing very strongly in our own way. Though we were friends

we were thoroughly opposed to each other's approach- what Souza was doing , or

Raza or Akbar and Tyeb- (M.F.Husain). The artists claimed they were inventing

modernism for India. They do not begin at the beginning or end at the end. Instead

of drawing out the character on providing a catalogue on abstraction this essay

mainly makes a selective attempt to re-embrace some of these artists that helped in

producing a corpus of radical language in Indian Modern Art.


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The Bengal Renaissancerefers to a socio-cultural and religious reform movement during the nineteenth

and early twentieth century in undivided India's Bengal province, though the impact of it spread in the

whole of India. The Bengal Renaissance is said to have begun with Raja Ram Mohan Roy(17751833)

and continued until the death ofRabindranath Tagorein 1941.The Renaissance was a revival of the

positives of India's past and appreciation of the impact of the Modern West, as it had emerged since the

Fifteenth-century European Renaissance. Thus, the Bengal Renaissance blended together the teachings

of the Upanishad in order to create public opinion against Hindu superstitions including Sati, infanticide,

polygamy, child marriage, caste-division, inter-caste hatred, Dowry, untouchability etc. and the efforts of

the Christian Missionaries and the British Colonial Government who introduced Western education,

politics and law to administer all those who indulged in superstitions and caste-bas. TheTagore family,

includingRabindranath Tagore,were leaders of this period and had a particular interest in educational

reform.[4]Their contribution to the Bengal Renaissance was multi-faceted. Indeed, Tagore's

1901Bengalinovella,Nastanirhwas written as a critique of men who professed to follow the ideals of the

Renaissance, but failed to do so within their own families. In many ways Rabindranath Tagore's writings

(especially poems and songs) can be seen as imbued with the spirit of the Upanishads.His works

repeatedly allude to Upanishadic ideas regarding soul, liberation, transmigration andperhaps most

essentiallyabout a spirit that imbues all creation not unlike the Upanishadic 'Brahman'. Tagore's English

translation of a set of poems titled theGitanjaliwon him theNobel Prize for Literaturein 1913. He was thefirstAsianto win this award. That was the only example at the time but the contribution of theTagore

familywas enormous. ed Hindu medievalism.

In Bengal, the intellectual mood had been changing under a variety of influences from the

1870s. Defense of Hindu traditions became more respectable as scholars like Max Muller

rediscovered the glories of ancient Aryans, and as a romantic cult of the exotic Orient developed

in the West, bearing fruits in the Theosophical movement of Olcott and Blavatsky.

A small but influential group headed in the 1880s and 90s by Jogendrochandra Ghosh

formulated a media policy to project India's traditional image. Sophisticated and intellectualized

revivalism was best represented by the Bankimchandra of the 1880s, reinterpreting Krishna as

ideal man, culture hero and nation builder. At a more obscurantist level revivalism was

represented by Sasadhar Tarkachudamani and Krishnaprasanna Sen, who claimed shastric

precedents for all the discoveries of modern western science.

But revivalism was most effective when it sought to appeal to emotions rather than to the

intellect: through the neo-Vaishnavism of the Amrita Bazar Patrika, seeking inspiration in

Chaitanya rather than the Krishna of the epics whom Bankim had sought to idealize, and above

all through Ramakrishna Paramhansa, the saintly Dakshineswar priest who cast a spell over

Calcutta's sophisticated intellectuals precisely through his eclecticism and rustic simplicity.

In the 1890s, his disciple Vivekanda. leapt to fame after a memorable appearance at the

Chicago Congress of Religions. Vivekananda was very far from being an obscurantist or

revivalist in any crude sense. One major effect of his work still was to increase the faith of the

people in the Vedic religion. Inspired by the Christian model of social service and religion placed
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together He founded the Ramakrishna Mission in 1897, which has proved an efficient

philanthropic organization with no claims to social radicalism. Yet Vivekananda himself had

combined passionate evocation of the glories of the Aryan tradition and Hinduism (particularly

before Western audiences) with bitter attacks on present day degeneration: 'Our religion is in

the kitchen. Our God is the cooking pot.' 'As if religion consisted in making a girl a mother at the

age of twelve or thirteen', was his private comment on the Age of Consent furore. He preacheda this-worldly type of religion, emphasizing self help and the building-up of manly strength:

'What our country now wants are muscles of iron and nerves of steel. '

Equally remarkable was Vivekananda's concern for the plight of the 'Daridra-narayana ', the

Shudra and the untouchable, his famous appeal to 'forget not that the lower classes the

ignorant, the poor, the illiterate, the cobbler, the sweeper, are thy flesh and blood, thy brothers '.

In eclecticism precisely lay the strength of Vivekananda's appeal, and his mixture of patriotism

with the cult of manly virtues, vague populism and evocation of Hindu glory was to prove heady

wine indeed for young men in the coming Swadeshi period.

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