An exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art showcases the works of Nandalal Bose, an Indian painter who was at the forefront of the Indian modern art movement. A life long student of art, Bose’s education was influenced by the Tagore family of Bengal, artist Abanindranath Tagore in particular. Bose drew the inspiration for his subject matter from Indian history, mythology and the landscape of Bengal. His style was also shaped to a large extent by Japanese paintings and pen & ink drawings, Mughal miniatures and and later the Buddhist paintings of the Ajanta caves. He went on to become the head of Kala Bhavan, the art school, a part of the once famous Vishwa Bharati University at Santiniketan, founded by Rabindranath Tagore. The winner of numerous awards and honors, a significant collection of Bose’s works is housed at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. A brief history of his life, work and the history of the Indian modern art movement in the New York Times.
Word is that contemporary Indian art is the next sensation on the international market. So now’s the time to learn something about where it came from, which the nuanced, storytelling show called “Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose (1882-1966)” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art helps us to do.
Along with detailed information about one artist’s life and times, the show delivers a significant piece of news, or what is still probably news to many people: that modernism wasn’t a purely Western product sent out like so many CARE packages to a hungry and waiting world. It was a phenomenon that unfolded everywhere, in different forms, at different speeds, for different reasons, under different pressures, but always under pressure. As cool and above-it-all as modern may sound, it was a response to emergency.
In India the emergency was a bruising colonialism that had become as intolerable to artists as to everyone else. From the official British perspective, India had no living art. Its indigenous traditions were dead, the stuff of museums, and ethnological ones at that. Western classicism was the only classicism; European oil painting was the only worthy medium. Indian artists had to learn it if they wanted careers, but even then their options were limited.
Naturally some people, British and Indian alike, saw things another way. Ernest Binfield Havell, a British teacher and art historian, did. He recognized Indian art as the grand, ancient, still-vibrant phenomenon it was. And as director of the Government School of Art in Calcutta, he encouraged Indian students to bring their own past, transformed, into the present.
This mission really took fire, however, in a social circle gathered around the Tagore family in Calcutta. One of its members, the artist Abanindranath Tagore, taught at the Government School and developed a type of painting based on Indian rather than Western models. His uncle, the writer Rabindranath Tagore, opened an experimental university at Santiniketan in West Bengal. Devoted to the study, preservation and regeneration of native culture, it would be a modernist seedbed.
Into this venturesome environment came a young painter named Nandalal Bose, first as one of Abanindranath’s prize students, later as a teacher and director of art at Rabindranath’s school. From the start Bose understood the concepts behind the school: the idea that an aesthetic was also an ethos, that art’s role was more than life-enhancing, it was world-shaping.
For a slide show of some of Bose’s paintings on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, see here. More about the artist here.
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