‘The Body Unbound’

Tracing post-Independence India’s Modern Art evolution, a new international show strives to mystify representations of the figure and the bewildering body in modernist art from India. It includes paintings from the early 1940s up to the mid-1980s that trace the development of Indian modernism, and celebrate the artistically productive dialogue between tradition and innovation.

An accompanying note to the exhibition in New York (supported, in part, by the New Delhi-based Vadehra Art Gallery) explains: “Figuration has been a long, sustained tradition in Indian art and Indian artists had already begun to incorporate secular and non-courtly figures into their works prior to Independence.”

‘The Body Unbound’ starts with traditionalist representations of Indian townspeople and villagers by artists including Jamini Roy, K.K. Hebbar, and Nandalal Bose, as well as selections of PAG-era works. It turns to the sensitive representation of metaphysical Man by late Tyeb Mehta and Akbar Padamsee, and the infusion of narrative figuration through the paintings of artists like Sudhir Patwardhan, Gieve Patel, Bhupen Khakhar, and Nalini Malani. Several of them, as mentioned above, were deeply impacted emotionally by the Hindu-Muslim bloodbath that followed violent partition.

Tyeb Mehta, then an art student his early twenties, witnessed horrific images on a Mumbai street that infiltrated much of his practice thereafter. For example, highly stylized and contorted figures are wailing in ‘The Diagonal’ (1975), intersected and left incomplete, their limbs dispersed on the canvas. Unfortunately, it's an image, which remains relevant to this day. Husain, who died last year at age 95, was fondly called the ‘Picasso of India’.

He freely used the broad, bold brush strokes and skillfully simplified facial features made popular by his Western counterparts. Importantly, he depicted essentially Indian subjects in his oil paintings such as ‘Lady With Lamp’, portraying a blue-‘robed woman; her head, covered - in piety, perhaps, albeit her skirt's hemline stretching non-traditionally quite a few inches above her knees!