Today is the death anniversary of legendary artist Nandalal Bose. A pioneer of modern art in India, Nandalal Bose died on April 16, 1966. Nandalal Boseis credited with designing the original manuscript of the Indian Constitution and emblems of India’s highest civilian award Bharat Ratna. He also designed the Padma Shri. The contribution of Nandalal Bose to Indian art is unparalled. He is known for being the man behind the creation of a new age art movement in India.

Nandalal Bose: The legendary artist 

• As a young artist, Nandalal Bose was influenced by the murals of the Ajanta Caves, built around 400-650 AD, described as one of the finest examples of Indian art.
• Nandalal Bose sketched the emblems for the Government of India’s awards, including the Bharat Ratna and the Padma Shri
• Nandalal Bose and his disciple Ramkinkar took up the historic task of decorating the original manuscript of the Constitution of India.
• Nandalal Bose’s students included legends like Benode Behari Mukherjee, Ramkinkar Baij, Beohar Rammanohar Sinha, KG Subramanyan, Henry Dharmasena, Pratima Thakur, Ramananda Bandopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, Dinkar Kaushik among others.

All India Edited by Debjani ChatterjeeUpdated: April 16, 2021 10:53 am IST

Source – https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/remembering-nandalal-bose-the-legendary-artist-on-his-death-anniversary-today-2414886

The post Remembering Nandalal Bose, The Legendary Artist, On His Death Anniversary first appeared on Indian Art News.

Nandalal Bose, who died in 1966 at age 83, is remembered in India as the “father” of that country’s “modern art.” This encomium might seem puzzling to anyone who sees the exhibition devoted to his life and career at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.To someone familiar with the values and conventions of Western art history, Bose’s output seems anything but “modern.” It’s certainly Indian, and in certain phases it appears to depart from traditions that go back centuries, but overall his oeuvre is difficult to square with our concept of “modern.”
However, as one discovers the political and social context in which Bose worked, the notion of modernity begins to seem less incongruous. His art, which he created in a variety of styles and media, does indeed represent a modern India attempting to escape the paternalistic embrace of its colonizer, Britain.
Some of his paintings celebrated notions of Indian culture that appealed to the founders of modern India, especially longtime friend and patron Mahatma Gandhi. Yet it wouldn’t be fair to call Bose a political propagandist. Rather, he was an artist who tried to give his country an indigenous “modern” art that didn’t owe anything to European or American models. And in that he succeeded.
For the uninitiated, of whom I was one, Bose turns out to be a fascinating artist, and a prolific one as well. After he died, his family gave nearly 7,000 of his works to the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. It’s from this trove that the approximately 100 paintings and works on paper in this exhibition, “Rhythms of India,” have been selected.
The show is a collaboration among the New Delhi Museum, the Indian government, and the San Diego Museum of Art. It’s the first survey of Bose’s art in the United States, and a particularly good fit for the Art Museum, which owns a substantial body of Indian art from earlier periods.
Bose was also influential as a teacher, at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan in eastern India, north of Calcutta. The university was founded by celebrated Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, who recruited Bose, a fellow Bengali, for the job. The late Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray was one of his more famous students.
Bose’s art must be considered against the background of the movement to assert India’s cultural and political independence from Britain, finally achieved in 1947. This is why Bose supposedly turned away from Western art practice, even including the use of oil paint. He wanted to revivify Indian tradition without slavishly copying it.
From the evidence of this exhibition, it’s hard to determine whether Western influence didn’t in fact creep into his work. There’s nothing obvious, such as impressionism or the most radical innovations of modernism, but there are striking parallels.
For instance, several bold linocut prints, including a vivid white-on-black image of a striding Gandhi that refers to his famous 1930 “salt march,” look suspiciously Western. There are a number of wonderful diminutive “postcard drawings” in ink and pencil, the more expressionist of which evoke van Gogh’s intense linearity.
For me, the most delightful works are the colorful tempera posters that Bose painted for an Indian National Congress convention in early 1938. These depict people who represent various aspects of Indian village life – musicians, a hunter, a man wrestling with a bull, a mother feeding her child.
Bose drew these images with remarkable assurance and fluidity, as if they had been dashed off intuitively, without thinking. In that regard, they made me think immediately of Matisse. Likewise, Bose’s colors are dense, vibrant washes of pigment that could be easily read at a distance.
Normally comparisons with European contemporaries would be odious, but in this case they serve to affirm that Bose had worked out his own version of “modern” without borrowing from his colonial overlords. He wasn’t averse, though, to borrowing from other Asian cultures, especially that of Japan. Several of the sumi-e ink drawings made late in his career are redolent of Japanese vision and technique.
Such severe digressions from Indian tradition are naturally most noticeable within the full range of the show because they’re not what one expects. Numerous other tempera paintings, some composed as multipanel murals, attest to Bose’s devotion to India’s past in his quest for spirituality.
In particular, he was inspired by the fifth-century Buddhist cave paintings at Ajanta in west-central India, which he had studied and reproduced during a three-month visit there in 1909.
The range of Bose’s imagination and technical versatility is impressive, yet there is always the feeling that he was after something deeper than superficial visual effects. One recognizes this in works as varied as the tempera called Evening, the ethereal mixed-media painting of the goddess Sati, wife of Shiva, and the lively ink-and-watercolor Fishes in the Current.
There isn’t any playing to the gallery here, or to the market, or to contemporary taste. Bose’s art is perfectly internalized, as intellectually and emotionally authentic as one is likely to encounter in today’s age of hype.
To carry the spirit of Bose’s art into more contemporary times, the museum has mounted a small companion show from its own collection, “Multiple Modernities,” in Gallery 227 on the second floor.
This consists of more than 25 drawings, prints and watercolors made both during Bose’s time and after his death.
Seven are especially noteworthy; they’re drawings by Rabindranath Tagore, remembered mainly as a poet, who took up visual art late in life. One of these, in color, is a portrait head of a woman who might be Stella Kramrisch, the internationally reputed expert on Indian art who was curator of the Art Museum’s collection from 1954 until she died in 1993.
The works in “Multiple Modernities” run the gamut of modernist expression, including abstraction. Yet even here the voice of historical India that Bose tried to preserve remains distinct and recognizable.

The post Art: A ‘modern’ Indian first appeared on Indian Art News.

KOLKATA: Original handmade prints created by famed artists are climbing on the price front. In a recent auction, Somnath Hore’s and Chittoprasad’s prints have fetched Rs 2 lakh-plus. This underlines the perception about the print medium, which was ignored a few years back, is now drawing closer attention. Mentionably, print prices have grown ten-fold in the last ten years.
“Prints are normally turned out in multiple copies. People felt earlier that works which are in more than one copy don’t deserve much value. But, bronze sculptures, as an international convention, almost always sees around ten original copies. And, many artists enjoy making copies of their well-known works. This also helps greater availability of the pieces.
“Interestingly, paintings have also seen copies. The renowned Jamini Roy, in his later years, executed copies of a painting with the help of his son. This was an attempt by Roy to spread out to a larger group of people. He also signed the paintings to drive home that they are his own works,” an art market source told ET. The famous Hemen Mazumdar, too, made copies of his popular and favourite paintings, sometimes in different sizes,” the source said.
Prints, in any case, as a tradition are produced in several copies or editions as they are known in the art world. The prints are generally made in five, ten or 15 copies. Sometimes, they can also go up to 50 prints. The earlier artists would usually not come up with more than 10 prints, mainly because the market for them was very limited.
“Today, a person buying prints can be fairly confident of finding a market for them. The realisation has now dawned among buyers that prints are original creations by artists and enjoy a value of their own. Sometimes, artists generate prints in different colours which could command more value,” the source said. According to the source, there are artists who also turn out monoprints, which implies that they are just in a single copy. This is like a painting which, generally, is produced as a single piece. This was recently demonstrated in Kolkata through Shyam Sharma’s works. Arun Bose is also known for his monoprints.
Kolkata’s oldest gallery Chitrakoot is soon putting up a show of prints which would encompass artists like Nandalal Bose, KG Subramanyan, Lalu Prasad Shaw, Amitabha Banerjee, Sanat Kar, Somnath Hore and Haren Das among others. Bikash Bhattacharjee and Ganesh Pyne had also produced a print each which are going to be displayed in the exhibit. Works by older labels such as Ramen Chakravarty and Basudeb Roy together with Chitpur prints will also be shown.
“India boasts of top notch print makers. The quality of works produced in graphic media can be seen in the works of Haren Das, Chittoprasad, Somnath Hore, Arun Bose and several others. They can match up to the leading print makers internationally,” the source observed.

The post Handmade prints lure big money to art mart first appeared on Indian Art News.

KOLKATA: Leading auctioneer Osian’s is coming up with the fifth edition of its ABC (Art, Books and Cinema) series sale soon. The auction sports a total estimated value of Rs 24-25 crore, comprising 201 lots. Of these, 132 are paintings, 20 are books, while the rest embraces movie memorabilia.

The 132 lots of paintings encompass 25 contemporary works and the rest are modernist, post-war modernist and Bengal School. A Ram Kumar figurative from 1967 is estimated at Rs 2-2.5 crore, while a 1980 Raza Bindu is pegged in the band of Rs 1.6-2 crore. In the same breath, an MF Husain untitled is hovering in the range of Rs 80 lakh to Rs 1 crore and Krishen Khanna’s ‘The Rider’ will go under the hammer in the range of Rs 36-45 lakh.

The contemporaries find Atul Dodiya’s ‘Random Verse’ priced at Rs 72-90 lakh and a Surendran Nair watercolour, Darwaaza Kholo, which is estimated at Rs 16-20 lakh. The Bengal School section is being led by the three Tagores, Rabindranath, Abanindranath and Gaganendranath. The Tagorean pieces are estimated between Rs 16 lakh and Rs 20 lakh.

In step, a large drawing by Nandalal Bose from the Ajanta series dated 1909-10 is valued at Rs 10-12 lakh and a set of 20 pencil and ink drawings by Jamini Roy are placed at Rs 12-15 lakh. The auction is also offering a Gaitonde drawing in the bracket of Rs 10 lakh. In the list are also a Bikash Bhattacharjee at Rs 48-60 lakh and Jogen Chowdhury’s ‘Two Women’ from 1994 going for Rs 40-50 lakh.

“We are also bringing some works by Palsikar, an influential teacher of the 1950s, who taught artists like Bendre, Kulkarni and Kolte. The Palsikar works are ranging anywhere near Rs 6-7 lakh mark. In tandem, the auction is placing under the hammer a set of 47 rare drawings by Serbjeet Singh on the Kashmir War, titled ‘Jojila’. Singh did these works at the site of the war in 1948. The drawings are priced at Rs 24-30 lakh,” Osian’s chairman Neville Tuli told ET.

Mr Tuli added: “The momentum is returning now on a much deeper level. This is also being spurred by financial institutions and museums which are renewing their collecting habits for Indian, Asian and Arab art. There is a major infrastructural change which is happening across the world as art is now being recognised as a credible capital asset for all medium and long-term portfolio. This auction will take forward the development of Indian film memorabilia market and show the continuous strength of the domestic art scene.”

The post Tagore, Husain, Raza to go under hammer at Osian’s ABC auction first appeared on Indian Art News.