A grand showcase of ‘The Art of Bengal’

A significant collation of enriching Bengal art over a vast span of two centuries, featuring nearly 400 works by more than 100 artists, forms part of a grand exhibition at Delhi Art Gallery.

The showcase charts the growth trajectory and gradual development of art in the state from the 19th century to the new millennium, from academic portraiture and traditional painting form to a more modernist idiom. A curatorial note elaborates: “The Bengal School was influential in changing the course of Indian art, to create a new, robust Indian art idiom closer to reality by the artists of the 1930s and 40s, influenced by the modernist movements in the west.”

Here are the salient features of the show:

• With ‘Bengal’ as the connecting thread, this exhibition – ambitious in scale and scope – features artists not merely claiming ancestry to Bengal but those vitally nurtured in its cultural climate: from the anonymous Bengali engravers and individual salon artists to Europeans such as Olinto Ghilardi, an Italian teacher and painter in 19th century Calcutta who influenced Abanindranath Tagore, to M. A. R. Chughtai from Lahore and K. G. Subramanyan from Madras, whose art owes substantially to Bengal. While not the same as before, Bengal continues to exert its influence on Indian art, and this exhibition is a tribute, as its celebration.
  
  
• The exhibition takes off with Kalighat pats from the 19th century created by anonymous artists who painted their mythological-themed traditional paintings on paper, to academic oil portraits by 19th century British portraitist Benjamin Hudson and landscape by Italian artist Olinto Ghilardi. Seen as the first efflorescence of concentrated art post the entry of European art into Bengal, these were termed ‘Early Bengal Oils’.
  
  
• The exhibition also features similarly rendered and themed works by several academic school trained individual artists such as B. P. Banerjee. From here the exhibition showcases works by the school known as the Bengal School, featuring the works of Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Asit Haldar, Surendranath Ganguly, Hirachand Dugar, M. A. R Chughtai and other exponents of the School-pioneered wash technique.
  
  
• On view are the works of modernist masters as Somnath Hore, Prodosh Das Gupta, Chittaprosad, Rabin Mondal, Bikash Bhattacherjee, Bijan Choudhary, Jogen Chowdhury, Shyamal Dutta Ray, Nirode Majumdar, Meera Mukherjee and many others spanning the 1940s to 1980s and beyond, who looked to voice the inequities and dystopia of society around them.