PREVIEW - Richard Bartholomew - THE ART CRITIC

Richard Bartholomew The Art Critic

This book has been produced with the generous support of The Raza Foundation www.razafoundation.org

First published in India in 2012 BART 434 GSC Block II, Second floor Sector 29, Noida 201301, India © 2012 The Estate of Richard Bartholomew for the text © 2012 Geeta Kapur for the Introduction © 2012 Pablo Bartholomew for the Afterword ISBN 978-93-5067-365-2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopy, recording or any other storage and retrieval system, wihout the prior permission of the publishers.

Associate Editor: Rosalyn D’Mello Design: Rukminee Guha Thakurta/Letterpress Image sourcing: Shweta Wahi Printed at Pragati Offset, Hyderabad, India

Richard Bartholomew The Art Critic

Archive Editors Rati Bartholomew Carmen Kagal Pablo Bartholomew Introduction Geeta Kapur

BART

To my mother without whom this book may never have happened.

In memory of Sailoz Mookherjea, Kishor Parekh, Kanwal and Devayani Krishna, P.T. Reddy, G.R. Santosh, F.N. Souza, B.C. Sanyal, Mohan Samant, Roshan Alkazi, Tyeb Mehta, Biren De, M.F. Husain, Jehangir Sabavala, Sundari K. Shridharani, Ambadas, Sunil Janah, S.R. Bhushan, S.A. Krishnan, Eruch Hakim, Nasreen Mohamedi and J. Swaminathan.

For Ko Thein Pe’s (Richard Lawrence Bartholomew) ancestors and relatives in Burma and around the world; Sein Hlaing and Winston Carwell.

Daw Hla Kin and William Harris Bartholomew.

Daw Pyone Kin and John Victor Bogle, Flora and Marguerite Bogle.

Daw Ohn Yin and Gerald.

U Thong Pe (Sunny) and Daw Kin Kyi, Daw Tin Tin Ye, Daw Kin Myit, U Pe Aung, U Aung Win, Daw Chaw Chaw, Daw Khin Khin Htay and Daw Kin Kin Htway.

Daw Aye Yin and Patrick William Mackey, Julie, Helen, Dolly, Oscar and Cecilia, Peter, Paul, David and Julian, Hazel, James (Niti Singhasemar) and Sommai Singhasemar, Bandid Rittrakool, Juliet (Thiri Lay Aung) and Yan Lin Oo, Angela, (Nan Dar Lay Aung), and Mark (Si Thu Lay Aung).

Contents

Notes: Rosalyn D’Mello An Indian Critic and the Bard’s Puzzle: Geeta Kapur Richard Lawrence Bartholomew: A Brief Chronology Section 1: The Critic Section 2: The Development of Indian Art Section 3: Affinities Section 4: Pen Portraits Section 5: Politics of Art Illustrations Section 6: The Pioneers Section 7: The Fifties Photographs Section 8: The Sixties Section 9: The Seventies Afterword: Pablo Bartholomew Acknowledgments Index

7 8 29 30 44 96 126 158 178 264 278 354 378 502 631 634 635

Notes Rosalyn D’Mello The Art Critic is by no means a comprehensive collection of the art writing of Richard Bartholomew. What you hold in your hands is a carefully selected edition amounting to roughly two hundred thousand words as against the original three hundred thousand.

More than a decade in the making, this book wouldn’t have been possible without the original inputs by Rati Bartholomew and Carmen Kagal who, together, imposed a structure on what was otherwise an amorphous archive of newspaper cuttings left behind by Richard. It was Rati and Carmen who designed the chapters and the sequence of articles within individual chapters.

Following their intervention, Pablo had managed to scan each article and had committed the printed text into optically read e-text. My initial role involved proofing the scanned text which was populated by errors owing to the fragile nature of each cutting.

This was three years ago. What followed were intense back-to-back readings of the text in order to trim it down to a more manageable, reference-friendly size. This was done in consultation with Carmen.

Simultaneously, we began the search for images to illustrate the text. Given that during the period in question, the 1950s to the 70s, artists didn’t document their work or keep track of what was sold and to whom, the picture search was fairly daunting. We found a certain percent of the original paintings referred to, and wherever we haven’t been successful, we’ve made do with substitutes either from the same period or which reflect the spirit of the work Richard originally referred to. Richard often took the liberty of christening untitled works by their order of appearance in a gallery show, sometimes even rechristening them slightly for reasons not always explicable. We have retained the titles he has used in such instances, but the title may differ in the image credits accompanying the image.

Richard also had a tendency to anglicise names. We have maintained most of his spellings of artists’ names, but have provided, wherever possible, the more accurate version in the Index. We have tried our best to consult the Lalit Kala Directories to check inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Our efforts reflect in the Index.

Working on this archive has been an intensely satisfying and enlightening experience. Richard’s writing is fuelled by his passion for art, his zest for documenting the various transitions in an artist’s career, and by his clear, articulate thought which renders the text accessible and offers the reader a compelling insight into the birth of the modernist moment in Indian art.

Finally, what you hold in your hands is not merely an archive of one man’s rigorous tryst with art criticism, but Richard Bartholomew’s legacy to Modern Indian Art.

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An Indian Critic and the Bard’s Puzzle Geeta Kapur What is this coded page wrapped over a thick volume of RLB’s writings? Words ringed and numbered, a monk’s scribble, an astronomer’s diary, a firmament. What is it we must know about this author, afresh and again? A scrap from Macbeth, made and unmade in a state of madness he was not known to possess: the Bard’s puzzle?1 Among artist peers

This book is a definitive collection of Richard Bartholomew’s writings on Indian art over three decades. It also definitively contours the shape of Indian modern art in the years following the nation’s independence in 1947 – that date being consequent in this context for other than obvious and momentously political reasons. A bunch of artists born in the mid-1920s burst upon the scene all together at this exact juncture and in unison declared their youthful identity as the moderns. 2 This self-declaration was a mode of address to the world and must be duly considered in the project of chronicling the history of modern Indian art. It is a legitimate mode of periodising terminologiesin-use as ideologies of (pomp, pleasure and) power that outlast the moment and gradually underwrite it as a conjuncture. That this came about at all may not be so difficult to predict with hindsight, but it is certainly a historically remarkable coincidence. A bunch of exceptionally talented young artists with a keen sense of freedom beheld a new nation, and, with it, a world made accessible without colonial shackles – and without the shackles (or so it was predicated for that moment) of caste and class and ethnicity, even. That many of these artists were from among the so-called minorities – Muslims, Christians, Dalits – meant that there were repressed or secret histories, often wounds and anxieties, that would play themselves out in their art and life. But until the last quarter of the twentieth century (to which they truly belonged), there was no overt expression of religious bigotry by majoritarian Hindus, certainly nothing of the kind that took Maqbool Fida Husain, our foremost protagonist of this generation, away into exile.

At that moment in 1947 and during the first decades of independence, there was, besides the nation and the republic, and the promises (and betrayals) of these constitutive institutions, a world to be won in the way only modernity as an international project promised – here and everywhere else. And so this generation was destined to flag their dreams with that emancipatory, even utopic desire.

That is an important word here: desire. As we peer at the young faces from the 1950s, they look back with eagerness, innocence, grit and desire – maybe because of our own ambiguous bind with a recent yet receding past. Not surprisingly but of course disappointingly, all the players are male. Amrita Sher-Gil would have led the charge,

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so to speak, but having lived and died before her time – the right time for a declarative stance on modernity – there is no female presence at the turn of the 1940s when these young male artists appear on the horizon with a modernist credo. Among the galaxy of male protagonists are: Francis Newton Souza, Maqbool Fida Husain, Syed Haider Raza and K.H. Ara. There is Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta and Krishen Khanna; there is V.S. Gaitonde, Mohan Samant and Krishna Reddy; and in Delhi, there is Ram Kumar and Satish Gujral, and there is Biren De. And so on. I am not counting to the end.

Among all of them I behold Richard Bartholomew.

Richard was a Burmese émigré who came to India as a boy in 1942 and stayed on after the war. He turned into a literary-minded youth at Delhi University’s St. Stephen’s College and entered the intellectual life of post-independence Delhi. Richard’s photographs of his artist peers are an indelible part of the 1960s imaginary. His lensed selfportraits have an elegance that both courts and shies away from narcissism, and which imparts to his visage a vivid and mask-like purity: Richard with his compact body and exquisite Burmese features (a face from the pages of an oriental tale); Richard’s exotic, quixotic presence, his pronounced twitch, his teasing, mocking smile. He might be a Bunraku puppet, standing beside the tall and lanky, once reticent, later flamboyant Maqbool Fida Husain, his very dear friend from the 1950s – on whom he wrote among his best and longest texts, which include an essay for the first major international publication on an Indian artist.

Richard was a painter, poet and photographer, but known to the public for his vast and dedicated body of writing on art, produced contemporaneously with the production of the then contemporary – now modern – Indian art. Richard’s writing in the three decades from the 1950s took birth in artists’ studios, in traversal of the few exhibition spaces then available, and face to face with the then relevant state institutions.

It matured on a typewriter in modest dwellings that neighboured the artists’ equally modest studio-apartments. Perhaps he is best referred to as artwriter, the more so as he favoured an immanent form of art criticism – a lava-like flow of interpretations melding the plastic arts with the rhetoric/poetics of literature proper.

Career graph

Soon after his postgraduation from Delhi University in 1950, Richard taught English at Modern School (1951– 58), in which time he married Rati Batra who taught English Literature at Delhi University, and they had their first son, Pablo.3 From 1955, he started writing and publishing as an art critic: he wrote for Thought as well as Indian Express, and then, from 1962 onwards, he was art critic for The Times of India through the 1970s. In between (1960 – 63), he was Director, Kunika Art Centre (later KunikaChemould Gallery) and Curator of the first museum of Tibetan Art, Tibet House, New

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Delhi (1966 – 73). In 1970 – 71, he was in New York on a Fellowship of the John D. Rockefeller III Fund. He curated some important shows of Indian art, among them an official ICCR exhibition celebrating twenty-five years of Indian independence that travelled to the USA (1973); a restructured edition of the National Exhibition of Art (1973); and then the Festival of India exhibition, titled Contemporary Indian Art, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (in 1982), for which I was co-curator along with Akbar Padamsee. From 1977 until his death in 1985, he was Secretary, Lalit Kala Akademi. Throughout the three decades from the mid-1950s, he was the pre-eminent critic in Delhi and indeed on the national art scene. Besides newspapers and magazines, he wrote many catalogue introductions, and his articles were published in journals like the Lalit Kala Contemporary, with a few of the longer texts going into monographs and anthologies.

While, in the normal course of his writing, Richard foregrounded the uniqueness of affect and ignored the context, his wish to nurture an art community, to cultivate a worthy art scene, was fervent. Onwards from 1955, he waged battles against the orthodoxies of the new institutions of independent India, particularly the Lalit Kala Akademi (established in 1954), which was seeming to set (rather, betray) aesthetic standards through its then high-profile National Exhibition. In what gleaming battle-gear we see Richard arguing his case for what he knew to be good and bold and new art in the hands of the young moderns! For example, he immediately flagged Husain’s Zameen as the seminal painting of the first decades, as he valorised Satish Gujral’s dramatic self-positioning as a painter of modern India. Occasionally, one finds him setting even grander criteria and placing Art in conjunction with the Nation and the State, and certainly with society and the public, enjoining artists to fulfil the social contract as citizens of the new republic.4 Given this engagement, his decision to become a part of the Lalit Kala Akademi appears not such a folly after all. Let us say he felt the need to take up the task of public rectification; but let us also admit that in the later years there may have been a personal need for authority and command, security and status – of a kind that journalistic art criticism, and odds and ends of curating, had ceased to provide. He joined the Akademi as Secretary in 1977, at a time when that institution still attracted enlightened state intervention and artists’ participation (such as the sophisticated cluster of artists, including Swaminathan and Krishen Khanna, at work on the 1978 Triennale India, of which Richard was very much a part), and provided a platform for polemical takes on the future of art and/as institution.

Richard served the Akademi for nearly eight years and then, just before he was to retire, he very suddenly died. He slipped into a coma one day in January 1985 and after a few days in hospital, he passed on. It is a strange coincidence that decades later I write

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Richard Lawrence Bartholomew: A Brief Chronology (1926 –1985), Art Critic, Photographer, Poet, Painter Richard Bartholomew escaped from Burma around the time of the Japanese invasion during the Second World War and made New Delhi his home. Here, he earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in English Literature, after which he began his career as a full-time art critic writing for various newspapers, journals and magazines. His creative writing includes poems and short stories which were published frequently in journals like Thought and Illustrated Weekly of India. As a painter, he held one-man shows in New Delhi and Bombay in the 1950s and 60s. As a photographer, he recorded life around him including his family and artist friends. A Critic’s Eye, a selection of his photographs, was exhibited at Sepia Gallery, New York, in 2008; at Photoink, New Delhi, in January 2009; at Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai, in 2010; at Harrington Street Arts Centre, Kolkata, in 2010; and at Fishbar Gallery, London, in 2011.

1926 Born, November 29, in Tavoy, Burma 1930 Schooled at St Paul’s, Rangoon, Burma 1942 Fled to India during the Japanese occupation of Burma 1948 B.A. (English), St Stephen’s College, New Delhi 1950 M.A. (English), St Stephen’s College, New Delhi 1951 – 1958 Teacher, Modern School, New Delhi 1953 Married Rati Batra 1955 – 1960 Art Critic, Thought, New Delhi 1958 – 1960 Assistant Editor, Thought, New Delhi 1958 – 1962 Art Critic, Indian Express, New Delhi 1960 – 1963 Director, Kunika Art Centre, New Delhi 1962 onwards Art Critic, Times of India, New Delhi 1966 – 1973 Curator of Tibet House, the first museum of Tibetan Art, New Delhi 1970 – 1971 Senior Fellowship, John D. Rockefeller III Fund, New York 1977 – 1985 Secretary, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi 1982 Commissioner, Contemporary Indian Art, Festival of India, Great Britain 1984 Invited by the Japan Foundation to meet artists in Japan 1985 Died, January 11, in New Delhi PUBLICATIONS

1971 Husain, Harry N. Abrams, New York (co-author) 1972 The Story of Siddhartha’s Release (poems), Writers Workshop, India 1973 Poems, Writers Workshop, India 1974 Krishna Reddy (Contemporary Indian Art series), Lalit Kala Akademi, India 1986 The Cycle (sonnets), Writers Workshop, India 2009 A Critic’s Eye, Chatterjee & Lal, Photoink and Sepia International, India

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Section 1 The Critic 32 • Criticism in India Cultural Forum, June, 1959 35 • Criticism and Contemporary Indian Painting I Thought, June 15, 1957 40 • Criticism and Contemporary Indian Painting II Thought, June 22, 1957

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Theories of art do not make a critic; he appreciates art the better if he understands, or tries to understand, the nature of the creative process. He must know that the artist’s instinct, his capacity for exploration (or experiment) and his awareness of history, personal and contemporary, determine the quality of his vision. Every artist is great, significant or mediocre in proportion to how he manages to relate these factors in the understanding of reality.

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Criticism in India In this age criticism is a correlate of creativity. When art was primitive it was criticism itself. The image that the artist created was a form of incantation, a formula for correction, and an antidote to evil. Art was a ritualistic symbol designed to disenchant men and to pre-condition them for battle, the hunt, and religious rites. Art was an ideograph of power. The totem, for instance, was a rapport between men and the gods; it symbolised the verticality that the tribe aspired to attain, and it was a monument and a repository of the tribe’s secret wishes.

The function of the artist was holy. He transmitted the spirit of man. And it is the relativity of the experience communicated – in the sense of being related to and dependent on all human experience, and in the sense of transcending time – that makes form the embodiment of the human spirit, and thus, a symbol of God. Today, we tend to separate the activities of creation and criticism. As a matter of fact, they are complementary. It is true that an artist is seldom the best judge of his own work. It is equally true that though the critic may feel that a particular painting or sculpture is deficient or excessive in some aspect of communication, he cannot usually prove the artist wrong by demonstration. Yet there is one premise on which both work. Nothing can be created without a functional principle of criticism, and all criticism – good criticism, that is – is constructive and is intended to foster the growth of art.

Art, then, is the product of criticism. And its end is criticism, in the particular sense that poetry is criticism of life, to quote Matthew Arnold. Society, therefore, must take the artist seriously; the artist must take society seriously; and the critic must take both the artist and society seriously. His function is to correct vision by analysing form. It is also his function to educate the public by interpreting the artist’s functional principles of self-criticism. Theories of art do not make a critic; he appreciates art the better if he understands, or tries to understand, the nature of the creative process. He must know that the artist’s instinct, his capacity for exploration (or experiment) and his awareness of history, personal and contemporary, determine the quality of his vision. Every artist is great, significant or mediocre in proportion to how he manages to relate these factors in the understanding of reality. There is the reality of his imagination, the reality of his technique and the reality of the world-picture. The critic must be able to distinguish the false from the organic.

Our society, like all mechanised, modern societies, tends to take art for granted.

A society that takes its art for granted creates an atmosphere for lethargy, passivity and polite indifference. It does not provide the artist with the mirror of himself that he expects. A society that leaves the care of art to a government, art institutions, and art dignitaries cannot promote art.

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Section 2 The Development of Indian Art 46 • Indian Painting since 1947 Thought, August 13, 1955 52 • Trends in Contemporary Indian Art Views on Contemporary Art, 1957 60 • Contemporary Indian Painting Modern Art of Asia, Japanese Cultural Forum, 1961 72 • The Visual Arts Mature Times of India, August 15, 1972 78 • Contemporary Indian Painting Contemporary Indian Painting, exhibition catalogue, USA, 1973 87 • Recent Trends in Graphics Thought, January 26, 1974 91 • Contemporary Painting and Sculpture The Indian Experience, Festival of India, UK, 1982

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All art, all great art that is to say, is spiritual. For art is the transformation of man’s personal and collective experience – the humanistic spirit – into form. Animals which possess the lower ranges of emotions do not create art. On the other hand, primitive peoples have produced art that is pure and organic. Emotion, it must be remembered and it cannot be stressed too often, is universal; otherwise art would not be universal.

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Indian Painting since 1947 … In the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being – T.S. Eliot Even the uninitiated these days can tell that Indian painting is in a period of transition.

Simplification, a new approach to the problem of form, stronger organisation, a more daring use of colour, dynamic handling of motif, and the presence of a personal idiom within a progressive group or a fraternity of painters are all gestures of fresh blood and of an authentic vision. And though there is no indication that the old practitioners of the Revivalist schools have recanted, the sentimental leanings, effeminate drawing, maudlin colouring, limited technique, and threadbare themes are a local habitation and a name only in the attitudes of a generation now fast waning. A pulse of life is clearly discernible in the plastic expression of a free people. But the new art of this transitional phase is not as yet resurgent or transcendental. It is revolutionary, fragmented, formative, searching, and sincere, loaded with some excesses of vogue and innovation, and strong in the direction of discovery. As with all transitional phases, this revolutionary art too will have to evolve, organise, integrate, and, in the consummation of means and ends, become totally articulate. Just now, something of an art in the adolescent phase is apparent: ‘Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow.’ influences at work today

This ‘shadow’ is the image of technical achievement in Europe and the inspirational glory of the cultural past. The extension of the range in colour and technique (considered largely to include tactile and graphic advances) in the work of Van Gogh and Gauguin; the emphasis on design and oriental colouring in Matisse; the new use of chiaroscuro in Braque; the absolute plastic freedom of Paul Klee; a whole world of pigment and form in Picasso; stimulating work by British lithographers; the spiritualised landscape of Paul Nash and Sutherland – these are some of the foreign influences at work on the present generation of Indian painters.

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It is difficult to imagine an Indian painter today who is ignorant of the progress of the plastic arts in Europe. Though his inspiration is essentially native, the conversion of idea into art is dependent on his control over the medium he uses. Oil colours being predominantly the medium employed, the standards of achievement, for the time being, are European. The West has had a great lead in this field. This alone should mitigate the charge (often unfounded) that our painters pander to European purchasers or that they ape the non-Indian cult. A medium has an ancestry and a tradition, and anyone, irrespective of his native genius, must work in the tradition before departures are organic or integral to him.

Pulling in the same direction, there is the indigenous influence that has shaped his craft. Indian sculpture has considerably influenced the use of line in painters as different as Husain, Kulkarni, Hebbar, Gade, Ram Kumar and Biren De. The outline of figures essentially meant for bas-relief, or of sculpture seen three-dimensionally at an elevation, is being used (with mastery in some instances and as mere design in some others) for constructional patterns to hold vivid colours. This is daring enough when one considers the double distortion when seen at eye-level. Then the flow of folk-art patterns and motifs, combined with a dynamic line, while lending simplicity and directness, continues to determine the use of colour which is generally near saturation.

There is no colour that is taboo on the palette of the modern Indian painter today.

It is the combinations that have changed. Painters no longer take the line of least resistance and soak their drawings in sentimental twilit shades that come easily in wash.

Canvases on exhibit these days are resplendent in warm colours – violet, ultramarine, scarlet lake, madder, emerald green, and a whole range of rampaging yellows and reds.

The Bombay painters, almost without an exception, have strong colour preference, faceting the chromatic arrangement so that it hits the eye. Husain’s Zameen at the Lalit Kala Akademi exhibition this year proved that with even a painting of such magnitude brilliant colours can be subtle, controlled, and far from pastiche. Whatever be the content, the manner generally is expressionistic, groups having affinities within and divergences without.

The Delhi painters in the Silpi Chakra are as different from the Bombay Progressive Group, just as they, in turn, are different from the Madras painters. Colouring and drawing are of course only the means, and often the end in view (conditioned by the content) is different. Art-school training, a bias for a foreign master, subject matter, and individual predilections condition the work of all. But apart from the patchwork pieces of a transitional period in the output of a particular painter, the result is consistently Indian – if in a new way. Generally speaking, for instance, Pai is decorative; Raval is poetic; Husain is expressionistic.

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Fig. 1, pg 178

Section 3 Affinities 98 • Plastic Surgery and X-ray in Recent Indian Painting Thought, August 24, 1964 103 • Esoteric, Organic, Photographic, and Picturesque Thought, March 16, 1974 105 • Light and Colour as Themes of Vision Thought, April 13, 1974 107 • Nature and Abstraction: An Enquiry into Their Interaction Lalit Kala Contemporary, No. 23, 1977–78 114 • Attitudes to the Social Condition: Notes on Ram Kumar, Satish Gujral, Krishen Khanna, and A. Ramachandran Lalit Kala Contemporary, Nos. 24 and 25, 1978

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Of course one does not respond to the work of these artists in this coldly analytical manner during the process of scansion, when the accentuation and the rhythm matter much more than what might be taken ultimately as themes.

It is when we have to define the class and category of the imagery used by each artist that we tend to see some inherently basic principles at work, varied as the practice of these artists might be.

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Plastic Surgery and X-ray in Recent Indian Painting I am discussing the image in painting, and the character it has assumed in recent years.

The kind of image that is prevalent in the works of Jeram Patel, Himmat Shah, Ambadas and Jagmohan Chopra. These four young painters are essentially graphic artists and each is intent on making the eye-game (the pun is intended) a point of positive contact.

Anatomy, botany, anthropology, sociology, and zoology are intrinsically their fields of focus. And their purpose is direct. They all seem to say: Don’t block sensation. Don’t mock the old masters. Don’t talk about values. Don’t think and don’t blink. Just look.

And if you see something that has shape and energy, look for more. Put the image in the map of your memory.

Abstract-imagist Attitude

All this adds up to an abstract-imagist attitude: like the line, “Vacant shuttles weave the wind.” One could call it metaphysical in a special sense. For they are all concerned with the physical contour which has a psychic life. They want to touch you with the simple truth – that existence is energy, that action (and there are some traits of action painting in their work) is the impact of attitudes. Incidentally, Jeram, Ambadas and Himmat are in the textile and weaving business; essentially designers and textile-makers. Jagmohan is an engraver and a photographer, attached to the College of Art in Delhi. Himmat is the only one among them who has used the human figure, stripped, ripped and whipped. In his hands the phallus is sword and spear, arrow and stake. And the theme covers two sentiments: “… each man kills the thing he loves,” and “… woman wailing for her demon-lover.”

Shape of Things to Come

All these four painters are concerned with visualising before hand what is to come after; all four are concerned with this basic approach. But they are also radicals who have introduced into painting blow-torch, enamel paints, plastic substances, mixed media. In their images we see the coral, the anthill, the spermatozoa, the sinews, and the ‘gestalt’ of guided accidents governed by good taste and sometimes the desire to shock.

I have made a rough list of the ‘ologies’ their images refer to because I feel that these artists do not believe in isms. An ism-sprung art is essentially intellectual; but these men are anti-intellectual. An ology-directed art, on the contrary, makes constant reference to psychology. Their images are psychological sensations, and they want these sensations to strike a viewer’s psychology. Himmat and Jeram’s animals speculate on evolution.

They are products of multiple copulation. Ambadas’ great anthills of spermatozoa are sponge and coral formations. They lie in the levels of the deepest unconscious; and all

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Section 4 Pen Portraits 128 • The World of Sailoz Mookherjea Thought, October 15, 1960 131 • The Smile of the Mountains: Kanwal Krishna Thought, January 1, 1960 133 • Banker-Painter The Statesman, September 11, 1957 135 • Ram Kumar Exhibition Catalogue, Kunika, November 1961 138 • Biren De Exhibition Catalogue, Kunika, November 1961 141 • The Wall of Satish Gujral Span, June, 1961 145 • The “Letters” of M.F. Husain Thought, September 14, 1974 149 • M.F. Husain Extract from Husain, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1971

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We are very callous, we writers. We know that the final truth – the question of life and death – and all the books that are to be written are contained in a single work like the Bible or Chambers Dictionary.

The rest is understanding, fortitude, and the ability not to have to denounce life.

Now that Sailoz has died I like to think that, lonely and withered and selfprotected as he was, he did not denounce life.

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The World of Sailoz Mookherjea Whenever the gulmohars flower and the jacarandas underline the blue of the Indian summer, memories of Sailoz Mookherjea will crowd and blur, for Sailoz was a continual and colourful blur. And his art was himself, always. And recalling the Sailoz that was, the man, and conjuring up those pictures that he painted I begin to feel a kind of thirst, a call of the summer of the senses inside me that is a sort of blur. I recall Sailoz, glass in hand, looking over the gulmohars in Connaught Place. Sailoz in a sunset of sadness that is between shades of the loneliness of the supremely finite artist, always between illusion and reality.

The world passed by Sailoz Mookherjea in the Connaught Place restaurant in those days when drinking in public places was not prohibited – youth and gaiety, figures in money and flesh, men and women who could buy art, but didn’t, those who would never understand it, and men and women who would stop begging if only it were not so profitable. The mercury vapour lamps burned, the redness dimmed, and for Sailoz the past and the future bubbled like the soda in his whisky. In a world where isms had begun to vie with one another and the young were beginning to forget the old, Sailoz sat looking over his whisky – at weariness itself. Sunk in a cane chair on the corridor above the shop that sold pastries, sweets, cheese-straws, and brown bread, here was this middle-aged artist entrenched in youth. That was Sailoz almost 10 years ago.

If you went up to see him, you had to climb a stairway the walls of which professed a fresco. Whatever rhythms the band upstairs frisked, a giant cat from the decoration looked at you from behind a motley façade – unwinking, unkind, callous and preying. I would give anything now to have Sailoz photographed against that cat. Gentle and fragile and birdlike always, Sailoz and the cat, it seemed, stood on different walls.

This is speaking sentimentally of the past, for it was somewhere between these harsh realities that Sailoz took notice of me for the first time when I was younger and had just begun to write art criticism as a form of literary exercise, and I knew less of Sailoz, how he was placed as a man and as an artist. I knew one thing then, intuitively – that art criticism, to be real, had to live a life of words. That is the ultimate truth about criticism. I know that Sailoz then knew one thing, and that he practised it consistently – that painting, to be real, had to live the life of an inner necessity. He never painted what he believed was beyond him. Sincerity, therefore, came naturally to him.

But to return. Sailoz gave up the company of his glass and of whatever cronies that surrounded him to tug me by the sleeve. “Very good,” he said, and I saw that his eyes were bleared. “Your article, very fine.” Then he smiled, very briefly. Then he sat down, or was tugged back into his seat by steadier friends. He shook his head in deprecation of the unknown. Then he pointed a finger at me. “Must write,” he said. “Very good.”

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Section 5 Politics of Art 160 • Art and the Akademi – I Thought, February 22, 1958 166 • Art and the Akademi – II Thought, March 1, 1958 170 • Art and the Akademi – III Thought, March 8, 1958 175 • Playing Possum in Art The Statesman, February 1, 1959 250 • The Art of the Akademi Thought, February 21, 1959 253 • Art in the Shadow of Official Patronage Thought, March 21, 1959 256 • A Short Biography of the Lalit Kala Akademi Thought, November 21, 1959 258 • If Gold Should Rust What Shall Iron Do? Thought, August 3, 1974

158

C riticism in I ndia

The National Exhibition of Art has a strange record. What the judges did and sometimes what they said appear to be extremely contradictory and curiously motivated when seen in perspective.

What they did not have was a set of criteria, an objective and informed attitude to contemporary art trends. The heterogeneous character of the panel, and the judges’ own diverse affiliations tending to pull in contrary directions, was always a grave handicap.

159

Art and the Akademi – I [In a three-part series published in Thought in 1958, Bartholomew took the Lalit Kala Akademi to task for its retrograde attitude toward the development of art and for its whimsical method of awarding prizes at its national exhibitions. ] For four years, since its institution in 1955, the advent of the National Exhibition of Art has been the occasion for surprise, shock, and sensation-mongering. The public, consisting of conservative and progressive elements, is surprised at the spectacle the Lalit Kala Akademi has to offer as the representative art of the age. Those surprised are also the judges. These have always felt that the response from artists could have been better in quality for, on an average, about 1,000 pictures are submitted for consideration each year. The painters are shocked, the critics are shocked, and because the painters and the critics are shocked, the judges, too, are shocked.

The painters are shocked at the selection generally, and at the way they have been represented. They are also shocked by the want of a consistent criterion or canon of aesthetics and by the ambiguous merit of some of the awards, particularly the Gold Plaque.

In the past three years, the significance and function of the Gold Plaque has been the subject of controversy.

The critics are shocked at what is really an affront to the living tradition, and their sense of shock is transmitted, promptly and summarily, as critical comments, because newspapers believe in brevity and directness. Judges, who are sensitive people (otherwise they would not be judges), are shocked and alarmed at the state of affairs. In the opinion of some of the judges at least, criticism represents the Cassius attitude.

In the opinion of most of the critics and many of the painters, authority is Caesarean.

Everybody, in his own way, professes to be interested in the health of the state of the Plastic Arts. The judges, who have professedly championed, with republican ardour, the cause of the painters, all and sundry – by the awarding of cash prizes and national honours – muster under the convenient precept, “Let hundred flowers bloom.”

Naturally, they feel a righteous indignation about the rumpus. And there are some painters who would like to say, “Not that I loved Caesar less but Rome more.” All this constitutes an allegorical dream, as yet scattered as fragments in the mass mind. There has been no night of thunder and lightning. No voice has prophesised, “Beware the Ides of March.”

The Layman’s Reaction

Let us begin with the attitude of the public and try and see why people are surprised by the annual spectacle of the nation’s art as presented by the Lalit Kala Akademi. The

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Fig. 48

Fig. 50

Fig. 49

Fig. 51

Fig. 48: Amarnath Sehgal, Cries Unheard, 1958, Bronze sculpture, 68 (ht) x 23.75 x 23.75 in, Source: Amarnath Sehgal, Monograph, Lalit Kala Akademi (LKA), New Delhi Fig. 49: Satish Gujral, Shrine, 1956, Acrylic on board, 34 x 45 in, Source: Satish Gujral Fig. 50: Rabindranath Tagore, Dancing Woman, c. 1930, Ink on paper , 10.2 x 14.4 in, Source: NGMA, New Delhi Fig. 51: Rabindranath Tagore, Woman Face, c. 1930, Ink on paper, 20 x 20.8 in, Source: NGMA, New Delhi

196

Fig. 52

Fig. 53

Fig. 52: Amrita Sher-Gil , Self Portrait (9), 1934, Oil on canvas, 19.3 x 25.8 in, Source: NGMA, New Delhi Fig. 53: Amrita Sher-Gil , Brahmacharis, 1937, Oil on canvas, 56.7 x 34 in, Source: NGMA, New Delhi

197

Fig. 54

Fig. 55

Fig. 56

Fig. 54: Amrita Sher-Gil , Bride’s Toilet, 1937, Oil on canvas, 56.9 x 33.8 in, Source: NGMA, New Delhi Fig. 55: Amrita Sher-Gil , Hill Scene, 1938, Oil on canvas, 25.6 x 34.4 in, Source: NGMA, New Delhi Fig. 56: Amrita Sher-Gil , The Ancient Story-Teller, 1940, Oil on canvas, 27.5 x 34.3 in, Source: NGMA, New Delhi

198

Fig. 57

Fig. 58

Fig. 57: Jamini Roy, Three Pujarins, Date unknown, Tempera on paper, 14.4 x 27.7 in, Source: NGMA, New Delhi Fig. 58: Jamini Roy, Santhal Girl, Date unknown, Oil on canvas, 19 x 41.7 in, Source: NGMA, New Delhi

199

Fig. 59

Fig. 60

Fig. 62

Fig. 61

Fig. 59: Ram Kumar, Untitled, c. 1950, Oil on canvas, 32.25 x 20 in, Source: Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi Fig. 60: K.H. Ara, Untitled, Date unknown, Watercolour on paper, 29.5 x 21.5 in, Source: Saffronart Fig. 61: Satish Gujral, The Despair, 1954, Acrylic on board, 30 x 30 in, Source: Satish Gujral Fig. 62: Satish Gujral, Tyranny, 1953, Acrylic on board, 34 x 45 in, Source: Satish Gujral

200

Fig. 63

Fig. 64

Fig. 65

Fig. 63: Satish Gujral, Self Portrait, 1953, Oil on board, 32 x 40 in, Source: Satish Gujral Fig. 64: Krishen Khanna, Girl Having Her Hair Combed, 1956, Oil on canvas, 48 x 48 in, Source: Krishen Khanna Fig. 65: Krishen Khanna, Lure of the City, 1956, Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 in, Source: Krishen Khanna

201

Fig. 66

Fig. 67

Fig. 69

Fig. 68

Fig. 66: V.S. Gaitonde, Untitled, 1954, Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in, Source: Saffronart Fig. 67: Satish Gujral, Indira Gandhi, 1957, Oil on board, 32.5 x 47 in, Source: Satish Gujral Fig. 68: Satish Gujral, Crucifixion, 1955, Oil on board, 43 x 32 in, Source: Satish Gujral Fig. 69: Dhanraj Bhagat, Bull, c. 1950, Wood sculpture, 25.6 x 5.9 x 14.96 in, Source: NGMA, New Delhi

202

Fig. 120

Fig. 121

Fig. 122

Fig. 120: J. Sultan Ali, Sea-God, 1965, Oil on canvas, 30 x 35.2 in, Source: DAG, New Delhi Fig. 121: V.S. Gaitonde, Painting, Date unknown, Oil on canvas, 39.8 x 70 in, Source: NGMA, New Delhi Fig. 122: Gulammohammed Sheikh, Brown Horse, 1962, Enamel and oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in, Source: Gulammohammed Sheikh

219

Fig. 125

Fig. 126

Fig. 127

Fig. 125: Gieve Patel, Nude with Fruit, 1964, Oil on plywood, 42 x 30 in, Source: Gieve Patel Fig. 126: Gieve Patel, Family, 1965, Oil on board, 84 x 48 in, Source: Gieve Patel Fig. 127: Himmat Shah, Untitled, 1966, Collage on paper, 21.2 x 20.5 in, Source: DAG, New Delhi

221

Fig. 128

Fig. 130

Fig. 129

Fig. 128: Vivan Sundaram, Khajuraho Cages, 1965, Enamel on canvas, 60 x 84 in, Source: Vivan Sundaram Fig. 129: Jehangir Sabavala, Decent from the Cross I (Pieta), 1959, Oil on hardboard, 39.7 x 29.9 in, Source: Jehangir Sabavala Fig. 130: Jehangir Sabavala, Phantoms of the Night, 1961, Oil on canvas, 31.8 x 42.1 in, Source: Jehangir Sabavala

222

Fig. 131

Fig. 132

Fig. 131: Paramjit Singh, Red Figure in Garden, 1966, Oil on canvas, 20 x 30 in, Source: Paramjit Singh Fig. 132: Paramjit Singh, The Canal, 1967, Oil on canvas, 32 x 40 in, Source: Paramjit Singh

223

Fig. 133

Fig. 134

Fig. 135

Fig. 133: K.K. Hebbar, Mahim Dargah, 1958, Oil on canvas, 20.86 x 26.7 in, Source: LKA, New Delhi Fig. 134: Benodebehari Mukherjee, Spring, c. 1930, Watercolour on paper, 29 x 23.5 in, Source: Pablo Bartholomew Fig. 135: Benodebehari Mukherjee, Sthala Padma, 1943, Tempera on Nepalese paper, 13.7 x 11.4 in, Source: R. Siva Kumar

224

Section 6 The Pioneers 266 • The Beautiful Penumbra Thought, January 1, 1966 268 • Amrita Sher-Gil – Her Life and Paintings Indian and Foreign Review, May 1, 1972 275 • Jamini Roy and the Akademi Thought, July 6, 1974

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C riticism in I ndia

Amrita is still a legend because hardly any biographical material exists about her. Her art–its achievements and inconsistencies put together–is something of an enigma. On a close examination the poorer of her paintings appear bad and tentative but when seen from afar, when the blots have blurred and the uncertain drawing softens, there is, unmistakably, the Sher-Gil vision; her concept of form and colour.

265

The Beautiful Penumbra A demon of creation drove Rabindranath Tagore, when he was at the height of his powers as a poet, to switch art forms (almost completely) and to concentrate on painting. At 69, Tagore found himself possessed by a spirit that spoke through him, the spirit of magic forms and shapes that made him listen to form, to the rhythm of incantation.

In the beginning, the drawings were arabesques or fantasies in black ink. They were principally erasures on his manuscripts. But these drawings took on recurring shapes, those of sharp-beaked birds, masks, and curves that would have exhausted a draughtsman’s repertoire. We do not know whether individually each actually portrayed something of the text of the poem on which it was drawn. But taken together, they comprise a world of magical figures. The negative spaces remind one of baroque and grotesque cuts and incisions in Indonesian leather puppets used for shadow plays. The muscle of this drawing, its nerve and power, lay in its ability to spring a terrifying and dynamic shadow. This is the sensation we get when we see the drawings on the manuscripts. We are, of course, intrigued by the sophisticated writing, the words of the poem, but our heart goes out to these ancient images. They are not primitive, or tribal. They are images of a distinct but lost civilisation, as beautiful as Mayan images.

As Tagore went on, the themes became more complex as his technique became more complex. He started to use coloured inks, red, blue, green, yellow and of course black. He drew with the pen. He used the brush. He used silver, and paper on which letters or notes had been written. He mixed all these colours ‘amateurishly’, by professional standards. But, if the poetic symbolic which gave birth to this kind of free and automatic painting referred to states of incantation (which are quasi-mystical), conversely, the spirit of incantation made him project (from his unconscious depths) universal and totem images. These images referred to a world on that side of life or a world in which there is a theatre of sublime mime. Sublime because sin and human sensation have become purified by profound thought conceived as or converted into time.

So Tagore, in a sense, was an alchemist with colours. He made age-old, timeless images live in a fresh dimension of colour compounded irrationally. The sombre backgrounds out of which faces, birds, flames and flowers emerge and appear as a background, or as a stage of silence and memory. And this was possible because the plastic concept – the painter’s principle – was none other than the precise application of poetic neutralisation.

There is nothing of good or evil reflected in that beautiful Tagore penumbra. There is no evidence of light or shadow; no shade of sadness or of joy; no hint of before or after; but just the presence, and the present, the person as an abstract image. I use the word ‘abstract’ in its original pristine sense of being quintessential and not in the sense that it is being used these days.

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Fig. 50, pg 196

Fig. 51, pg 196

Section 7 The Fifties 280 • The First National Exhibition of Art Thought, April 9, 1955 284 • Second National Exhibition of Art Thought, January 28, 1956 289 • Exhibition of Eight Painters Thought, December 1, 1956 292 • The Contemporary Indian Art Exhibition Thought, December 6, 1956 293 • Delhi Silpi Chakra: Tenth Annual Exhibition

329 • Contemporary Indian Artists: Dhanraj Bhagat Design Magazine, March, 1959 333 • “Composition 1957” Thought, September 28, 1957 335 • The Human Form in Indian Sculpture Thought, September 5, 1959 337 • The World of Laxman Pai Thought, September 27, 1958

Thought, March 29, 1958

339 • Paintings by S.H. Raza Thought, May 16, 1959

295 • Trends in Modern Indian Art Design Magazine, February, 1959

341 • Paintings and Sketches by K.G. Subramanyan

300 • Fifth All-India Sculpture Exhibition Thought, May 23, 1959 302 • Biren De: A Problem of Space and Colour Unpublished, c. 1950 306 • The Noble Savage and the Ascetic: The Paintings of Biren De

Thought, April 23, 1955

342 • Sculptures by Sankho Chaudhuri Thought, December 29, 1956 343 • Paintings that Depict the Indian Psyche The Statesman, February 16, 1957

The Vak Review, Summer, 1958

345 • 29 Paintings by H.A. Gade Thought, February 1, 1958

313 • The Paintings of Ram Kumar Hindustan Times Weekly, October 23, 1955

347 • Sculptures by C.P. Rajaram Thought, January 3, 1959

317 • Ram Kumar and the Theatre of the Mind Thought, October 10, 1959

349 • Paintings by Anjolie Ela Dev Thought, October 24, 1959

319 • Forty Works by M.F. Husain Thought, December 14, 1957

350 • Paintings by Jaswant Singh Thought, December 26, 1959

321 • Recent Paintings by M.F. Husain Thought, December 19, 1959

352 • Paintings, Ceramics, and Batik Work

by Devayani Krishna

323 • Paintings of Krishen Khanna Thought, November 8, 1958 325 • Satish Gujral: The Agony of Belief Thought, January 7, 1956

278

Thought, December 14, 1957

353 • The Graphics of Kanwal Krishna Thought, December 7, 1959

C riticism in I ndia

Among Indian painters today Ram Kumar is perhaps the only one who has no imitators and no followers, for both his themes and his method are so simple and sincere that imitation is practically impossible.

His themes are everyday subjects we in the cities see, the poor, the oppressed, the frustrated lower middle class, not necessarily or typically Indian, but nevertheless alive and boldly stated in non-theatrical yet dramatic terms.

279

The First National Exhibition of Art Concerted hysteria in the daily press heralded the opening of the Lalit Kala Akademi’s First National Exhibition of Art. Condemnation of the standard was unanimous, though the disappointment expressed shifted in emphasis from individual works hung to painters missing or misrepresented. There was, however, if not an acceptance of everything, a note of welcome that the exhibition itself was a reality, and that it had come to stay.

Any first, in such a category as art, is bound to be a surprise package. Especially in as diversified country as India where indigenous aesthetic energy is transformed abroad, to return home, like textiles used to do, via Birmingham. Generally, too, the aesthetic force in this country is insular, as in the case of the Bombay group so completely represented in this exhibition. I feel that such a force could find correlatives and correctives, if and when, as in this exhibition, the excesses and the achievements are consistently measured in terms of individual drift and national direction. The sponsors, therefore, could transfer – if not all that is on show, at least the major and influential exhibits – to other towns of India. There could be nothing more healthy or bracing than this for the national art movement.

The spectator at Jaipur House will not fail to see that the bias these days is on the side of the contemporary European manner in painting. If nothing else is clear, this is – that for all the talk of a cultural heritage, painters have shorn off sentiment for emotion. There is something antiseptic and ‘scientific’ about modern painters and paintings.

Unfortunately, the organisers of this exhibition have not made it easier for the public to accept modern art. The paintings hang in confusion. Greater pains at classification might have shown, even with the exhibits available, the development of art in this country, from representation to symbol and image and design, from linear and chromatic harmony to dynamic tension. As it is, the walls of the aisles and corridors are studded with nondescript work in all media, while in the cubicles and compartments, the big-shots are each at war with the other, in size or in manner. A catalogue, with an analysis or exposition of arrivals and departures in form, might have helped; perhaps even titles pinned along with the exhibits could have reduced frustration. In some instances paintings have been displaced, and the total impression of an artist’s work has been destroyed by separation or exile.

Finally, some of the listed prices are fantastically high. Apart from the psychological damage that this might do to adding to the sense of dissociation – that art is a luxury and a decadence – artists might profitably remember that no provincial museum can afford such imperial rates for work which is by rising practitioners. It is not so much a sense of charity as modesty which might prompt our painters in pricing their work. Some criticism heard among painters, and justified to some extent, is the method of, and the

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Above: Ram Kumar, Richard and Rati, Almora, c. 1955; Below: Biren De, with the city of Haridwar in the background, c. 1965.

355

Above left: A member of the audience holds up a floodlight at Shridharani Art Gallery, New Delhi, where Husain is painting live, c. 1968; Above right: Husain painting live in front of an audience at Shridharani Art Gallery, c. 1968; Below: American art critic Clement Greenberg at the exhibition “Two Decades of American Art� organised by Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, shown at the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1967.

356

Above: Artists at an opening at a gallery in New Delhi, c. 1970; Below: An exhibition at the Shridharani Art Gallery, New Delhi, probably a group show, Akbar Padamsee is seen standing on the left, in the middle of a conversation, c. 1970.

357

Above: Amitava (facing away), Mona Rai, Ambadas (third from left), Nirmal Kapur, and S. Sircar (extreme right); Below: From left to right, artists Jagadish Dey, Jagmohan Chopra, Manjit Bawa, Paramjit Singh, Vohra, Ved Nayar, Nareen Nath, Dharmani and Bhushan.

358

Above: Viko Soni (second from right) and Nand Katyal (third from right) at the Lalit Kala Akademi Elections, New Delhi; Below: Dhanraj Bhagat (second from right) and Kanwal Krishna (extreme right) with other artists in the art classroom at Modern School, New Delhi, which served as a meeting point for many artists.

359

Left: Portrait of Bhupen Khakhar; Right: M.F. Husain and Ram Kumar.

360

Section 8 The Sixties 382 • Indian Triennale: First Impressions Thought, February 24, 1968 385 • Delhi Silpi Chakra Annual Exhibition Thought, March 18, 1961 386 • The Elusive Image: Delhi Silpi Chakra Annual, 1967 Thought, March 11, 1967

388 • The Second Generation of Painters Thought, April 2, 1960 391 • The Dark Is Light Enough Thought, January 16, 1960 394 • Exhibition: Satish Gujral's Paintings Exhibition Catalogue, Forum Gallery, New York, 1964 398 • Impressions of Varanasi:

Wax and Ink Paintings by Ram Kumar Thought, May 7, 1960

400 • A Question of Focus Sunday Standard, January 1, 1961 402 • Rare Clarity and Power Part of Husain Make-Up

412 • Fourteen Sumi-e Paintings

by Krishen Khanna Thought, December 4, 1965

414 • Twelve Compositions with the Figure by Tyeb Mehta Thought, February 19, 1966

417 • Mystery Minus Mystique: Sumi-e and Oils by Tyeb Mehta Thought, March 25, 1967 419 • The Works of Sailoz Mookherjea Thought, November 19, 1960 421 • Paintings by P.T. Reddy Thought, September 24, 1960 422 • Ready, Steady, Go Thought, November 2, 1968 423 • Shanti, Shanti, Shanti Thought, April 16, 1966 425 • Laxman Pai Exhibition Catalogue, Kunika, January, 1962

Times of India, April 1, 1965

426 • Pai, Purusha and Prakriti Thought, November 12, 1966

404 • Drawing-room Decorations Thought, October 23, 1965

427 • Recent Paintings by K.S. Kulkarni Thought, May 6, 1961

406 • Jeram Patel Exhibition Catalogue, 1963

428 • The Art of Polite Conversation Thought, October 8, 1966

407 • Material and Medium Thought, September 25, 1965

430 • A Sculptor Dedicated to Nature Exhibition Catalogue, October 1, 1961

409 • Eighteen Paintings by Biren De Thought, December 9, 1961

434 • Vivid Metal and Wood Sculptures

by Dhanraj Bhagat

410 • Krishen Khanna Roop Lekha, Vol. 32, No. II, 1962

378

Times of India, October 1, 1966

435 • The Swaminathan Cycle Thought, May 14, 1966

C riticism in I ndia

440 • Kinetic, Not Psychic: First One-man Show of Ramachandran's Paintings

463 • No Man Is an Island Thought, April 23, 1966

Thought, December 24, 1966

465 • Artist ‘Earnest’ but Art ‘Bore’ Indian Express, January 7, 1962

442 • The Human Puppet: A Note on Ramachandran's “Encounter” and Preliminary Sketches for the Easel Painting

466 • Magic Lantern Show Thought, December 17, 1966

Thought, May 13, 1967

444 • Stripped Trees and Bird Catchers: 15 Paintings and 3 drawings by J. Sultan Ali Thought, January 8, 1966 446 • The Naked Truth: Paintings and Drawings by J. Sultan Ali Thought, May 27, 1967

448 • Sultan Ali, A Painstaking Painter Times of India, February 23, 1969 449 • Paintings by V.S. Gaitonde Thought, November 26, 1960 450 • Gulam Mohammed Sheikh Exhibition Catalogue, February, 1963 452 • Painter Who Shocks People Times of India, February 14, 1965 454 • The Writing on the Wall Thought, March 5, 1966 456 • In Search of the Secret Life:

15 Paintings by G.R. Santosh Thought, January 29, 1966 458 • The Bird in Hand Thought, March 19, 1966

467 • Admirable Oils by Paramjit Times of India, December 21, 1967 468 • Pilgrim’s Progress: Retrospective Exhibition of the Paintings of K.K. Hebbar Thought, November 23, 1968

470 • Padamsee’s Paintings: Are Drawings in Colour Times of India, March 8, 1969

471 • Impressive Display of Benode Behari’s Works

Times of India, March 14, 1969

473 • Paintings and Sketches

by Jaya Appasamy Thought, March 19, 1960

474 • Subtracting from Nature Thought, November 25, 1967 475 • Lush, Variegated Textures Times of India, March, 1966 476 • Matbar Singh Exhibition Catalogue, 1963

460 • The Map or the Diagram: 22 Paintings by Himmat Shah

478 • Group Show of Graphic Art: Kunika Group Show of Works by Tyeb Mehta, Husain, Gaitonde, Ram Kumar, Kanwal, Devayani Krishna, and others

462 • Spectacle of Sex in Sundaram’s Paintings Times of India, March 30, 1966

481 • The Krishnas: Kanwal and Devayani Exhibition Catalogue, January, 1960

Thought, March 26, 1966

Exhibition Catalogue, December, 1961

379

483 • From “Lovers” and “Cacti” to “Allah”: Recent Graphics by Devayani Krishna Thought, September 23, 1967

484 • Variations in Imagery Thought, October 7, 1967 485 • Telescoping Time Thought, January 27, 1968 487 • Talented but Tame Thought, August 19, 1967 488 • Interesting Intaglio Prints on View Times of India, January 18, 1969 489 • Graphic Show by Alkazis of a High Standard Times of India, March, 1964

490 • Lithographs by Maganbhai Soma and Nakli Ram Exhibition Catalogue, March, 1965

492 • Splendid Show by Group 8 Times of India, September 25, 1969 494 • Between Quality and Quantity: Photographs by T.S. Satyan, Sunil Janah Thought, December 25, 1965

497 • Personal Photography: “Life in Germany”: A Photo Essay by T.S. Satyan, and Documentary Prints from the Federal Republic of Germany Thought, October 29, 1966

499 • Seventh Members’ Photographic Exhibition Thought, April 23, 1960

380

C riticism in I ndia

Husain is a careless painter often; a facile painter sometimes; Husain is a painter with a carefully selected repertoire always.

Husain has flirted with the abstract, pondered on its verge, and, periodically has revived his own creative faculties by the imposition of a literary motif, much in the tradition of the artists of the past. The great thing about him is that in all this he has been essentially, and consistently, Maqbool Fida Husain.

381

Indian Triennale: First Impressions World Art has come to India in the form of the First Indian Triennale housed in the three galleries of the Rabindra Bhavan and the first floor of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. These two establishments that culture art in India – the former by organising National Exhibitions and awarding prizes, and the latter by acquiring contemporary works for posterity – are jointly shouldering the responsibility of display.

The first impression is that of sculpture – the standing Japanese monolithic black stone carving, When One Prays, by Kentaro Kimura, which is a contrast to the idealised farm horse from the GDR, both on view at the very entrance of Rabindra Bhavan.

The last impression is that of sculpture – American Joseph Cornell’s magic boxes, Hotel Andromeda and Navigation by Birds. The Gold Plaque or Grand Prix was awarded to the Japanese Kimura, for the best artist in the Triennale. Joseph Cornell won the international gold medal for sculpture.

Indian sculpture missed the bus. The big wood construct Reclining Figure by Pandya, for instance, and the beaten and welded copper King of Janakiram, the forged and welded steel Icarus by Davierwalla (from the National Gallery’s collection). The judges re-allocated the gold medal reserved for Indian sculpture and made one additional award in the painting section.

From the way the awards were given, India, it seems, is strong in graphics (K.G. Subramanyan won a gold medal for a print and Devayani Krishna, an honourable mention). It is even stronger in painting for two gold medals were awarded to Krishen Khanna and Tyeb Mehta, and two honourable mentions to J. Swaminathan and Bhupen Khakhar.

Going by the number of gold medals alone (three out of the total of six awarded), it would appear that the Indian section was the strongest in the Triennale since the three International medals were shared by Britain (Ceri Richards for painting), Mexico (Jose Luis Cuevas for graphics), and America (Joseph Cornell for sculptures). Whatever be the finer arguments in favour of the differentiation between International and Indian awards, the uninitiated would undoubtedly conclude that two Indian gold medals put together do not equal (in value and status) one International one. This is not a matter of prestige for Indian art, particularly as the Indian paintings, Krishen Khanna’s, for instance, are priced at Rs 7,000 each whereas the two Ceri Richards are valued at Rs 33,600. Of course this may provide some scope for gallery speculation for if the value of the awards are the same, Gallery Chemould of Bombay, for example, which loaned 21 out of the 91 pieces, could probably invest in more paintings, after the event.

These are some of the strange sidelights of the show. Nevertheless, it has had some impact on the public. On holidays seven to 800 visitors see the exhibition at Rabindra Bhavan and that too on a ticket of half a rupee. The National Exhibition of Art never

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Section 9 The Seventies 506 • Rise of the Private Image Sunday Standard, January 25, 1970

536 • Ram Kumar ’73 Exhibition Catalogue, December 22, 1972

508 • National Art Exhibition Opened Times of India, October 17, 1976

538 • The Abstract Principles in the Paintings of Ram Kumar Lalit Kala Contemporary, Nos. 19 and 22, 1975–76

510 • Third Triennale: Some Plain Speaking Times of India, February 16, 1975 513 • “The Rejects” Win First Round at Silpi Chakra

545 • Ram Kumar’s Hallmark of Maturity Times of India, December 10, 1977

Times of India, February 22, 1972

546 • Souza’s Shock Treatment Times of India, February 3, 1973

515 • Interesting Canvases on Show Times of India, November 13, 1972

547 • Presence of Time Evident in Souza’s Work Times of India, February 3, 1976

516 • Souza’s Drawings on Display Times of India, November 29, 1972

549 • Santosh’s Serious Essays in Paint Times of India, March 31, 1970

517 • Interesting Exhibition of Art by Group Times of India, March 12, 1974

550 • Esoteric Principle in Painting Times of India, November 28, 1973

520 • Young Painters Shine among Contemporaries

551 • Vision Still Evident in Santosh’s Paintings

Times of India, March 16, 1972

Times of India, March 23, 1976

522 • Massive Art Show for Serving a Cause Times of India, February 17, 1977

553 • The Lone Wolf: Recent Paintings by Jeram Patel Thought, January 24, 1970

524 • Calcutta Artists Have

Surrealist Approach

Times of India, October 15, 1972

555 • Jeram Patel Catalogue XIV, Sao Paulo Biennale, 1977

525 • Manifestations of Group Spirit Thought, October 26, 1974

559 • Krishen’s Paintings Are Strong and Direct Times of India, January 9, 1972

527 • Mixed Group of Bengal Artists Times of India, April 6, 1976 529 • Kerala Artists Rooted in Myth, Folklore Times of India, October 18, 1975 531 • The Gujral Artefact Thought, January 5, 1974 534 • A Painter for All Seasons Times of India, September 29, 1975

502

561 • Common Objects Presented in Unusual Way Times of India, February 26, 1975

563 • Khakhar’s One-Man Show of Paintings Times of India, February 22, 1970 565 • Bhupen Khakhar’s 26 Watercolours Times of India, October 26, 1976

C riticism in I ndia

566 • Laxman Pai Times of India, October 28, 1975

582 • Anjolie’s Figures Are Poetic Times of India, November 28, 1972

567 • Expressive Paintings by Laxman Times of India, November 19, 1976

583 • Sensitivity Is Sabavala’s Forte Times of India, December 1, 1972

568 • Spectacular Paintings by Ramachandran Times of India, December 9, 1977

584 • Jehangir Sabavala: Painter of People Times of India, April 19, 1976

569 • V. Sundaram: A Lyrical Painter Times of India, September 28, 1972

585 • Fine Constructions in Plaster Times of India, March 28, 1973

570 • On Grafitti, Spaghetti and Social Comment

586 • Intelligent Use of Colours by De Times of India, February 17, 1974

571 • Elements of Surprise in

587 • Discreet Use of Colour by Manu Parekh Times of India, March 27, 1974

Times of Imdia, March 20, 1976

Paramjit’s Paintings

Times of India, April 13, 1975 572 • To Care and Not to Care for Shanti Thought, April 27, 1974 573 • Nasreen’s Works: Deft and Delicate Times of India, April 8, 1972 574 • Nasreen’s Drawings Have

Colour and Rhythm

Times of India, February 11, 1976

576 • Consistent Approach in Sanyal’s Paintings

Times of India, December 12, 1975 578 • Ambadas: A Mature, Sensitive Painter Times of India, January 8, 1970 579 • Tyeb’s Paintings of Unfinished Character Times of India, February 13, 1972 580 • Swami’s Paintings Overdramatic Times of India, February 24, 1973 581 • Arpita Singh’s Visual Metaphors

Are Good

Times of India, April 22, 1972

588 • Jatin’s Works Impressive Times of India, October 31, 1974 589 • Warmly Abstract Paintings

by Viswanadhan Times of India, December 24, 1974

590 • Excellent Paintings, Metal Reliefs by Vasudev Times of India, December 27, 1975 592 • Arnawaz’s Paintings Have Element of Cogency Times of India, December 1, 1975

593 • Fine Workmanship in Nayar’s Art Times of India, February 1, 1976 594 • Refreshing Pencil Drawings of Laxma Goud Times of India, April 11, 1976

595 • Saroj Pal Gogi Exhibition Catalogue, 1979 – 80 597 • Surrealist Keen on Musical Analogies Times of India, November 18, 1972 598 • Works of Personal Expressions Times of India, March 6, 1972

503

599 • Decorative Paintings

by Dhiraj Choudhury

626 • Bonanza for Art Buyers at Graphic Workshop

600 • Red Key Colour in Mohanti’s Paintings Times of India, February 22, 1977

627 • Printmaking Workshop Shows Good Results

Times of India, January 17, 1976

601 • Ram Kinkar’s Watercolours

Show Variegated Vastness

Times of India, September 26, 1976

Times of India, March 20, 1974

Times of India, February 16, 1977

629 • Retrospective of Kishor Parekh’s Work 1983

603 • Subramanyan’s Terracottas on Show Times of India, January 31, 1972 604 • Grace Abounding: Recent Sculptures

by Chintamoni Kar Thought, January 10, 1970

605 • Sculptures with Core of Stillness Times of India, February 3, 1972 606 • Dynamic Sculpture by Meera Times of India, January 23, 1970 607 • Sehgal’s True Self Yet to Find Expression Times of India, November 17, 1972 609 • Krishna Reddy Monograph, 1974 613 • Senior Service: Recent Graphics by Devayani Krishna Thought, January 31, 1970

615 • Devayani Krishna Monograph, 1976 617 • Kanwal Krishna Monograph, 1976 619 • Variegated Show of Bright, Grey Prints Times of India, June 10, 1970 621 • Neat Exhibition of Prints by Group 8 Times of India, January 3, 1973 623 • Prints with Brilliance of Paintings Times of India, February 5, 1976 625 • Very Fine Show by Group 8 Times of India, December 14, 1976

504

C riticism in I ndia

It happened on a Wednesday evening. I saw frst the photographers.

There were painters–Jeram Patel with his Nikkormat and Husain with his Bolex on a tripod. The Government of India’s television team had stepped aside perhaps to make way for the painter-cameramen.

The scene was Kunika Chemould Art Centre where Bhupen Khakhar is holding his one-man show of paintings. The occasion was the Press preview. The event a kind of happening.

505

Rise of the Private Image I must say that this National Exhibition somehow succeeds in making an impression.

This despite the fact that it is largely a forum of young and not so well-known talent.

And why not? The established artists do not seem to lay much store by the Akademi’s annual. In fact, this national event has become in recent years essentially a platform for the young by default of the seniors who no longer need such a platform, having the resources and means to find their way on their own. They are, indeed chary of rubbing shoulders with their younger contemporaries. Persuasion and pampering has brought them into company periodically. But left to themselves, they would rather not.

There is no gainsaying the fact that their participation does add a lot of substance and dignity to the exhibition and that the overall picture becomes richer. But it is not odd at all that the exhibition, even without them, has always provided a fairly approximate view of the prevailing situation in art. And each year the exhibition brings forth fresh talent of promise some of whom have subsequently made good. Those who fitfully keep away from the annual now once sought this platform hopefully.

All-Out Effort

We miss them and wish them back. That the Akademi should make an all-out effort to win them back and evolve a process to eliminate the possibility of indifferent and casual work to jostle in is not gainsaid. But it is more than likely that the National will substantially remain as a meeting ground for the younger talent unless the Akademi chooses to break away from convention once and for all and gives the exhibition a strictly exclusive character. Of the 10 awards made this year, Ishwar Sagara richly deserves his for a highly competent fantasy. Another newcomer is S. Nandagopal who deserves it equally despite the not wholly original concept and technique of his sculptures. Paramjit Singh gets an award for one of his best surrealistic fantasies again. Jagmohan Chopra and Bimal Bannerji, the two graphicists, are about the best in this section. Bimal Bannerji’s two graphics are remarkably mature and distinguished.

Talk of technical competence, it is true of the exhibition on the whole. This grip over the medium and feeling for material is increasingly becoming evident and should be taken for granted. We are concerned mainly, therefore, with the nature and concept of the result of the emerging image.

The Graphics

It is here that we get lost. In the graphics for instance, attracting an increasing number of artists each year, the preoccupation is hardly above the level of the thrilling technical effects of the medium. The achievement is of such an order, however, that we may

506

s u n day sta n da r d , jan uary 2 5 , 1 9 7 0

Afterword Pablo Bartholomew He died in tragic circumstances in ’85. Fifty-eight he was then, too young!

A stroke took him, at an official meeting at the home of the head of the arts’ organisation he served then. Those around him thought it better to let him lie and rest and not take him to hospital. So he lay there unconscious without medical attention and was brought home hours later in that unexplained state…

A shattered family that was already dysfunctional. Some magazine assignment I was away on. My mother was living apart from him by then. My brother was the only one to receive him in his unconscious state. But it was too late to bring him back. In a coma for ten days in the hospital he was before life left his body.

A year after his death, an exhibition of his photographs I did. Shown in Delhi and Bombay, it was my way to deal with him, seemingly adequate at the time, showing only his Indian and American street photography, the most familiar of that body of work I could then deal with.

Three years on, I tried making peace with myself, tried to fill in the blanks… childhood stories of the tribes who helped him on his journey. Bedtime stories they were; tales of a safe passage, the exodus from Burma, a young boy and a victim of the Second World War, walking into India to escape the Japanese. The Northeast region that I explored and its people that I met in my obsessive search; a ten-year project it became which only temporarily filled up some emotional voids but never really answered enough.

It took more than a decade to reconcile within the family that it was important to put the writings out. Yet the path seemed too muddied and blurry to make any headway. More time went by, and we as the family, faltered. Not because we did not have the intention, but we did not know how to go about things adequately. There were some terrible stumbling blocks. Some around erred. Like the close family associate who was in the gallery business, and a publisher, who promised to help, taking all his writings and holding onto them. Nothing happened. Four years on, one learnt and heard that the same person was now an expert, presenting, giving talks on art, a subject that had not quite been his forté at all. Worse, the material was nearly appropriated. Mother fought, only for it to be returned in parts.

Pushing mother to get going, to take time out from her very involved and engaged life in the cultural arena; her street theatre, and the many interests, connections that she had, it was difficult to wean her away from her world.

With a family friend who was familiar with the art world and was an important editor, together, they edited, debated, structured, mapped the writings, while I looked up and dug out, restoring the archive again from newspaper offices, libraries, and any

631

Index Adalja, Jivan, 387, 480, 620 Aggarwal, Jai Krishna, 613 Ahmed, Amina, 37, 40, 66, 67, 297, 298 Alkazi, Ebrahim, 489 Alkazi, Munira, 489 Ambadas, 17, 18, 25, 80, 98, 99, 100, 101, 386, 387, 435, 437, 525, 578 Anand, Dev/Dev, Anand, 520 Anand, Mulk Raj, 9, 164, 260 Appasamy, Jaya, 10, 276, 294, 385, 386, 473, 520, 598 Ara, K.H., 7, 283 Arsic, Miroslav, 511 Auden, Sheila, 50 Baburam, M.R, 529 Bagga, Naresh Kumar, 627 Baij, Ram Kinkar/Ramkinkar, 67, 93, 260, 300, 601, 602 Bannerjee/Banerjee Dipak/ Dipak Prosad, 613 Bannerji/Banerjee Bimal, 90, 506, 613 Baskaran, 90 Bendre, N.S./Narayan Shridhar, 40, 49, 50, 56, 176, 261, 287, 291, 298, 518 Bhagat, Dhanraj, 76, 281, 285, 286, 293, 300, 329–32, 347, 383, 385, 434, 520, 605 Bhaskaran, RB/ Rajabather Bala, 508 Bhat/Bhatt, Girish, 301 Bhatnagar, R.K./Raghuvansh Kumar, 292, 388, 389, 520 Bhatt, Jyoti/Jyotindra M., 90, 259, 260, 298, 479, 487, 513, 619 Bhattacharjee, Bikash, 507, 509, 515, 516, 524, 526 Bhavsar, Natvar, 81, 86 Bhavsar, Ramnik/Ramnik Keshavlal, 509

Bhusan, 507 Bhushan, Vidya, 162–64, 167, 260, 513 Bose, Nandalal, 63, 93, 270 Bose, Rita, 301 Bowen, Eric, 388, 507, 525, 619 Brinda, Sunila, 522 Broota, Rameshwar, 90, 520, 522, 523, 620 Broota, Shoba/Shobha, 520, 620 Canon, Mike, 500 Chakravarty/Chakravati, Ajit, 524 Chakravarty, Aravinda, 507 Chandra, Avinash, 50, 72, 281, 282, 287 Chatterji, R., 513 Chaudhuri, Sankho, 76, 259, 260, 261, 285, 298, 300, 342, 347 Chhabda, Bal, 83, 260, 261, 518, 520 Chavda, 66, 67 Chhetri, Romesh, 627 Chopra, Jagmohan, 17, 76, 88, 89, 98, 437, 479, 492, 506, 513, 514, 520, 592, 613, 619, 620, 621, 625, 627 Chopra, Yogshakti, 492 Choudhury, Dhiraj, 520, 528, 599 Choudhury, Sarbari Roy, 510 Chowdhury, D.P. Roy/Deviprosad Roy, 171, 254, 277, 281, 284 Chowdhury, Jogen, 19, 527 Chowla, Damayanti/Damyanti, 50 Chuikov, Semyon, 468, 469 Coburn, John, 383 Cornell, Joseph, 382 Craven, Roy, 276 Cuevas, Jose Luis, 382 Das, Arup, 170, 285, 287 Das Gupta, Dharma Narayan/ Dharmanarayan, 524 Das Gupta, Kanchan, 509 Das Gupta, Pradosh, 254 Das Jatin, 514, 523, 588, 620 Das, Jeevan, 619 Dasgupta/Das Gupta, Bimal,

635

287, 527 Dathan, M.R., 529 Dave, Shanti, 163, 170, 259, 285, 297, 298, 423, 424, 511, 513, 522, 572 Davierwalla, A.M., 77, 260, 298, 382 De, Biren, 7, 15, 24, 47, 49, 50, 66, 67, 74, 79, 80, 92, 95, 103, 104, 130, 138, 139, 163, 259, 260, 283, 287, 292, 297, 299, 302, 303, 306, 337, 383, 388, 389, 409, 468, 507, 516, 517, 522, 586 De, Jagdish/Jagadish, 528 Devan, M.V., 529 Devraj, D./Dakoji, 90, 619 Dhar, D.N., 287 Dharmani, M./Metharam, 300, 385 Dhawan/Rajendra, 389 Dikshit, 388, 389 Dixit, 387, 619 Doraiswamy, S., 90 Doshi, Chandra/Chandra Manilal, 623 Douglas, C., 529 Driver, Arnawaz, 592, 619 Dutta/Dutt, Lakshmi, 492 Fabri, Charles, 10, 129, 261 Gade, 47, 50, 56, 66, 67, 287, 294, 296, 298, 345, 346, Gaitonde, V.S., 7, 15, 25, 37, 66, 67, 72, 74, 82, 87, 95, 107, 112, 113, 176, 287, 291, 296, 438, 449, 478, 480, 538 Gajwani, Gopi, 387 Gangartharan, 507 Ganguli, Gunen, 480, 620 Ghai, Suraj, 389, 388, 507, 520 Ghosal, Satyan/Satyen, 292 Ghosh/Ghose, Gopal, 37 Gorkha, H.K., 500 Goswami, 621 Goud, Laxma, 90, 510, 518, 594 Gujral, Satish, 7, 8, 13, 14, 20, 23, 37, 40, 50, 66–71, 73, 74, 81, 114–16, 118, 123, 141–44, 163, 164, 176, 259, 260, 285, 289, 290, 293, 297–99, 325–28, 333, 340, 391–97, 468, 511, 517, 519, 522,

636

531–33, 593 Gupta, Satish, 620 Habib, Rano, 514 Hakim, Eruch, 507 Haridasari/Haridasan, Keechery Veetil, 507 Harzanis, G.M., 287 Hassan, Gayoor, 509, 510 Hauser, Erich, 383 Havell, E.B., 63 Hayter William, 88, 609 Hebbar, K.K., 47, 50, 66, 67, 163, 170, 259, 260, 261, 277, 287, 292, 468, 469, 508 Hore, Somnath, 89, 260, 479, 484, 525 Husain, M.F., 6–08, 13, 20, 22, 23, 29, 37, 40, 47, 49, 50, 56, 66–69, 71, 72, 74, 85, 87, 91, 93, 94, 145–47, 149–57, 162–65, 168, 176, 256–60, 281, 282, 284, 285, 287, 289, 297–99, 315, 319–23, 340, 349, 381, 400–05, 456, 468, 478–80, 505, 513, 515, 522, 534, 535, 542, 563, 564, 594 Istler, Josef, 383 Jaganathan/Arthur Santhanam, 479 Jain, Santosh, 627 Janah, Sunil, 494, 495 Janakiram/Perumal Vedachalam, 94, 382, 383 Jharotia/Zharotia, Jai, 626 Joshi, Prafulla S., 298 Jus, Kuldip Singh, 387 Kaneria, Raghav, 77, 260, 511, 525 Kanvinde, Sunita, 492, 619 Kapur, Amar, 500 Kapur, Geeta, 6, 563, 570 Kapur, Madhoor, 446 Kapur, Nirmal, 522 Kar, Chintamoni, 76, 604 Kar, Sanat, 90, 525, 526 Karanjai, Anil, 514 Karim/Abdul, 383 Karmakar, Prakash/Prokash, 520, 527 Katt, Balbir Singh, 519

INDEX

Katt, Latika, 94 Katyal, Nand Kishore, 387 Kaul, Kishore/Kishori, 522 Kaushik, V.S./Vidya Sagar, 388 Khakkar/Khakhar, Bhupen, 19, 22, 74–76, 83, 84, 94, 382, 518, 563, 565, 626 Khandalavala, Karl, 270 Khandu, Dilip, 527 Khanna, Bishamber, 386 Khanna, Krishen, 7, 8, 14, 40, 66, 67, 72, 73, 79, 80, 83, 107, 112, 114, 118–21, 133, 260, 287, 289, 290, 297, 298, 323, 340, 382, 410, 412, 510, 515, 516, 518, 523, 559, 561 Khemraj, P., 509 Khosa, Kashmiri, 520, 522, 523 Khosla, 387 Kimura, Kentaro, 382 Kowshik, Dinkar, 37, 50, 170, 287, 293, 294, 385 Krishna, Devayani, 15, 22, 76, 83, 88, 105, 106, 294, 352, 382, 478, 479, 481, 483, 613, 615, 616 Krishna, Jai/Agarwal, Jai Krishna, 90, 621, 623 Krishna, Kanwal, 15, 22, 49, 50, 66, 67, 83, 88, 89, 107, 109, 110, 131, 132, 294, 296, 337, 353, 386, 478, 479, 481, 615–18 Krishnadasa, Rai, 164 Krishnan, S., 259, 261 Kshatriya, Puja, 623 Kulkarni, K.S., 37, 40, 47, 50, 66, 67, 176, 260, 261, 291, 293, 294, 297, 298, 333–35, 385, 427–29, 469 Kumar, Bhupinder, 627 Kumar, Jatendra, 301 Kumar, Jitindra, 285, 286 Kumar, Ram, 7, 13, 14, 20, 22, 23, 37, 40, 47, 49, 50, 66–72, 82, 87, 95, 107, 110, 114–18, 123, 135–37, 163, 176, 257, 259, 260, 281, 282, 287, 289, 290, 293, 296, 298, 313, 315, 317, 318, 337, 340, 346, 385, 386,398, 399, 478, 480,

INDEX

515, 517, 518, 522, 536, 538, 543–45 Kumar, Sharwan, 627 Kunhiraman, Kanayi, 529 Lall, Harkrishan/Har Krishan, 386 Lingren, Paul, 619, 620 Lovrencic, Ivan, 511 Mago, Pran Nath, 293, 294 Malani, Nalini, 19, 94, 516, 518 Malik, Keshav, 10, 261 Malwankar, R.K., 292 Mamtani, Mahirwan, 624 Mathur, K.N., 499 Mathur, Nutan, 627 Mehra, Rajesh, 294, 387 Mehta, Rajesh, 520 Mehta, Tyeb, 7, 66, 73, 79, 83, 87, 94, 260, 283, 340, 382, 414, 415, 417, 478, 480, 510, 515, 518, 579 Menon, Anjolie Ela/Dev, Anjolie Ela, 349, 582 Mio, Kozo, 511 Mistry, C.D./ Chhaganbhai Dayaram, 509 Mittal, Santosh, 623 Mohamedi, Nasreen, 15, 479, 509, 563, 573, 575, 619 Mohanti, Prafulla, 600 Mondal, Rabin, 527 Mozumdar, Riten, 472 Mukerji, Bishwanath, 254 Mukherjea/Mookherjea/Mukherjee, Sailoz, 9, 49, 50, 65–67, 128–30, 173, 292, 343, 419, 420, 468 Mukherjee, Benode Behari/Benodebehari, 471, 472 Mukherjee, Meera, 606 Mukherji, Leela/ Mukherjee, Leela, 300 Mukherji, Priya, 90, 492, 619 Nandagopal, S., 506 Narayan, Badri, 287 Narayana/Narayanan, Akkitham, 529 Narayanan, 622 Nareen/Nath, Nareen, 507 Nath, T. Kasi, 499

637

Nayar, Ved, 389, 509, 511, 593 Padamsee, Akbar, 7, 8, 22, 50, 66, 67, 72, 82, 86, 88, 260, 281, 283, 297, 298, 470, 516, 518 Pai, Laxman, 88, 260, 287, 292, 337, 425, 426, 446, 479, 507,566, 567, 619 Pal, Amal, 388, 389 Pal, Gogi Saroj, 522, 523, 595, 596 Panchal, Kanti, 508 Pandya, 382 Panikar/Paniker, K.C.S., 19, 49, 92, 260, 261 Paniwal, Budhiprakash, 520 Parekh, Kishor, 494, 629 Parekh, Madhvi, 508 Parekh, Manu, 105, 510, 522, 525, 526, 587 Parimoo, Ratan, 287 Pasricha, Ramnath/Ram Nath, 514 Pasricha, Anjula, 492 Patel, Gieve, 19, 94, 458, 518 Patel, Jeram, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25, 26, 75, 79, 80, 98, 99, 101, 407, 408, 437, 456, 460, 511, 518, 525, 553, 555–58, 563 Patel, Nagji, 94, 509, 518 Patel, Vinod S., 621 Patel, Vinodray R., 90, 170, 479, 623 Patel, Vitthal, 508 Patwardhan, Sudhir, 19, 94 Pochkhanavala, Piloo, 77 Prakash, Brahm, 623, 627 Prakash, Om, 74, 507 Prakash, Savi, 522 Prasad, J.R., 529 Prasher, S.L., 300 Pyne, Ganesh, 524 Rai, Mona, 522 Raiba, A.A./Aziz Abdul, 287 Raj, Tilak, 628 Rajaram, C.P., 300, 347, 348, 430 Rajendran, G./Govindanachari, 529 Rajiah, K.R., 170 Ram, Mawasi, 479, 601 Ram, Nakli, 490, 491 Ramachandran, A./Achuthan, 14, 73, 79,

638

81, 83, 94, 114, 121–24, 386, 441–43, 472, 510, 518, 522, 568 Ranade, Dilip, 516 Rao, Usha, 90 Raphael, Benedict, 500 Rathod, Manu, 526 Raval, R.D., 47, 66, 67, 281, 282, 285, 286 Ray, Nihar Ranjan, 275 Raza, S.H., 7, 15, 50, 81, 85, 86, 93, 95, 107–09, 155, 156, 257, 339, 340, 383, 449, 534 Reddy, D.L.N., 621, 626 Reddy, Krishna, 7, 15, 29, 72, 80, 88, 89, 103, 104, 107, 112, 113, 155, 609–12, 621, 623 Reddy, P.T., 421 Richards, Ceri, 382, 383 Riko, Motoyo, 292 Roerich, Sveteslav, 469 Roy, Jamini, 9, 13, 48–50, 52, 57, 58 Sabarinath, A.C.K. Raja, 529 Sabavala, Jehangir, 465, 466, 583, 584 Sagara, Ishwar/Ishwara, 506, 507 Sagara, Piraji/Rajesh Piraji, 463, 464, 511, 512 Saklat, Katayun/Katayun Rustam, 524 Samant, Mohan, 7, 13, 37, 66–68, 70, 72, 86 Sanathanan, M., 529 Sandhu, Harbhajan, 171 Santosh, 625 Santosh, G.R., 15, 75, 76, 79, 83, 92, 94, 259, 262, 287, 456, 457, 507, 517, 518, 522, 549–52 Sanyal, B.C., 37, 49, 50, 164, 254, 260, 275, 277, 292, 294, 386, 468, 513, 522, 577 Sarangar, 507, 620 Sasikumar, J., 529 Sathe, S.D./Sadashiv Dattaray, 301 Satyan, T.S., 494, 497, 498 Savant, R.V., 292 Sehgal, Amar Nath/Amarnath, 163, 165, 167, 513, 607, 608 Selvam, Paneer, 90, 621

INDEX

Sen Gupta/Sengupta, Niren, 527 Sen, Paritosh, 292, 297, 298 Sen, Piyali, 623 Sengupta, Madhav, 292 Shah, Bhanu, 507 Shah, Himmat, 15, 17, 18, 98, 101, 437, 456, 460, 475, 516, 585 Shamshad/Husain, Shamshad, 523 Shankar, Gouri, 90 Sharma, Om Prakash, 74 Shaw, Lulu/Lalu Prasad, 90 Sheikh, Gulam Mohammed/ Gulammohammed, 19, 94, 450, 451, 456, 508, 518, 525, 619 Sheikh, Nilima, 508, 515, 518, 626 Sher-Gil, Amrita, 6, 9, 13, 41, 48, 52, 57, 65, 66, 91, 130, 265, 268–74, 277, 292, 343, 419, 468, 469, 569 Sihare, L.P., 15, 259, 262, 513 Singh, Arpita, 507, 509, 510, 516, 518, 581 Singh, Jaswant, 350, 597 Singh, J.N., 301 Singh, Matbar, 476, 476, 477 Singh, Paramjeet/Paramjit, 90, 292, 387, 467, 506, 508, 516, 522, 571, 621, 625 Sojwal, Sudheer, 287 Soma, P. Maganbhai, 490 Sonavedekar, 301 Sondhi, Darshan, 385 Soni, Viko, 507 Souza, Francis Newton, 7, 14, 20, 22, 24, 50, 66, 72, 85, 86, 93, 95, 155, 156, 257, 297–99, 340, 452, 453, 455, 516, 534, 547, 548 Srinivasulu, K., 50, 287 Srivastava, Narendra, 624 Steven, Jorge, 511 Subramanyan, K.G., 10, 18, 260, 341, 382, 472, 511, 603, 621 Sud, Anupam, 90, 94, 488, 492, 510, 511, 619, 621, 623, 625, 627 Sultan Ali, J., 444, 446–48, 456, 507

INDEX

Sundaram, Vivan, 19, 94, 462, 518, 522, 569, 570 Suvaprasana, 527 Swaminathan, J., 8, 10, 11, 16–18, 20, 22, 24, 74–76, 81, 83, 104, 382, 383, 386, 435–39, 507, 522, 525, 572, 580 Swaroop, Jyoti, 480 Tagore, Abanindranath, 58, 63, 93 Tagore, Gaganendranath, 58, 277 Tagore, Rabindranath, 9, 13, 17, 48, 58, 266, 270, 277, 601 Tana, Pradumma, 170 Thakore, Jaidev, 626 Tihec, Slavko, 383 Tulli, Sushma, 628 Ukil, Barada, 254 Vaghela, Gautam, 260 Van de Kop, David, 511 Varma, Urmesh, 514, 520 Vasudev, S.G./Setlur Gopal, 590, 591 Venkatachalam, G., 173, 174, 260 Vishwanathan/Viswanathan, T., 90 Viswanadhan/Vishwanadhan, 509, 529, 589, 624 Vohra, S.S., 520 Wakabayashi, Isamu, 383 Yasin, Mohammed, 259, 513 Zarina/Hashmi, Zarina, 624

639