Modern Indian Painting
|MODERN INDIAN PAINTING | |
|Nomenclatures are not always irrelevant, for example, the term 'modern'. It may mean many things to many persons. So also the term | |
|'contemporary'. Even in the field of the fine arts there is confusion and unnecessary controversy among artists, art historians, and | |
|critics. In fact, they all really have the same thing in mind and the arguments hover round terminological implications only. It is not | |
|necessary here to indulge in this semantic exercise. Roughly, many consider that the modern period in Indian art began around 1857 or so. | |
|This is a historical premise. The National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi covers its collection from about this period. In the west, the | |
|modern period starts conveniently with the Impressionists. However, when we talk of modern Indian Art, we generally start with the Bengal | |
|School of Painting. Both in the matter of precedence and importance, we have to follow the course of art in the order of painting, | |
|sculpture, and the graphics, the last being comparatively a very recent development. | |
|Broadly speaking, the essential characteristics of the modern or contemporary art are a certain freedom from invention, the acceptance of an| |
|eclectic approach which has placed artistic expression in the international perspective as against the regional, a positive elevation of | |
|technique which has become both proliferous and supreme, and the emergence of the artist as a distinct individual. | |
|
|Nomenclatures are not always irrelevant, for example, the term 'modern'. It may mean many things to many persons. So also the term | |
|'contemporary'. Even in the field of the fine arts there is confusion and unnecessary controversy among artists, art historians, and | |
|critics. In fact, they all really have the same thing in mind and the arguments hover round terminological implications only. It is not | |
|necessary here to indulge in this semantic exercise. Roughly, many consider that the modern period in Indian art began around 1857 or so. | |
|This is a historical premise. The National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi covers its collection from about this period. In the west, the | |
|modern period starts conveniently with the Impressionists. However, when we talk of modern Indian Art, we generally start with the Bengal | |
|School of Painting. Both in the matter of precedence and importance, we have to follow the course of art in the order of painting, | |
|sculpture, and the graphics, the last being comparatively a very recent development. | |
|Broadly speaking, the essential characteristics of the modern or contemporary art are a certain freedom from invention, the acceptance of an| |
|eclectic approach which has placed artistic expression in the international perspective as against the regional, a positive elevation of | |
|technique which has become both proliferous and supreme, and the emergence of the artist as a distinct individual. | |
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