Delhi
Niramaya Sparsa
12th -21st August, 2022
As we celebrate 75 years of independence from British rule, it becomes all the more important to acknowledge the change in attitude the Bengal school of art brought into the Indian art ecosystem. At a time when local artists across the country aligned themselves to create art that suited British requirements for several decades, a significant reaction against colonial influence was witnessed with the birth of the Bengal School of Art in the early 20th century. During the early 20th century, the revered Bengali poet and intellectual Rabindranath Tagore (who was involved in the Indian nationalist movement led by Gandhi) championed the notion that that creativity could be synonymous with national identity.
Tagore’s nephew, Abanindranath, helped to form The Bengal School of Art alongside a British teacher at the Calcutta School of Art, Ernest Binfield Havell. The Bengal School emerged out of this work as a movement that encapsulated a national artistic aesthetic. It embodied the values that Havell and the Tagores espoused, embracing Indian history and reclaiming control of the country’s culture. Using vernacular materials and a warm, muted colour palette, these artists shunned the realist constraints that the British had introduced and sought to reclaim an Indian audience. In many ways the Bengal school can be seen to had a healing effect on Indian art.
It provided much needed relief from the tyranny of the British ideology. In this process the Bengal School of Art has given us some of the most talented and universally lauded names in Indian art, expressing themselves through lines both fragmented and unbroken, creating worlds full of darkness and colour, carrying on artistic traditions and creating new ones. This exhibition organised by Art Magnum and Golf Green Art Gallery is an ode to the Bengal School and features an eclectic mix of artist who have carried this important legacy forward. The exhibition features important artist like Ramkinkar Baij, Binode Bihari Mukherjee, Somnath Hore, Reba Hore, Jogen Chowdhury, Sunil Das amongst many others.
