GREAT PAINTERS of INDIA
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Maqbool Fida Husain (17 September 1915 – 9 June 2011)[2] was a modern Indian painter of international acclaim, and a founding member of Bombay Progressive Artists' Group.
Husain is associated with Indian modernism in the 1940s. His early association with the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group used modern technique, and was inspired by the "new" India after The Partition of 1947. His narrative paintings, executed in a modified Cubist style, can be caustic and funny as well as serious and sombre. His themes—sometimes treated in series—include topics as diverse as Mohandas K. Gandhi, Mother Teresa, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the British raj, and motifs of Indian urban and rural life. Early in his painting career, and until his death, he enjoyed depicting the lively and free spirit of horses in many of his works.Husain is the most celebrated and internationally recognized Indian artist of the 20th century. Husain is primarily known for his paintings, but is also known for his drawings and his work as a printmaker, photographer, and filmmaker. Some of his later works stirred controversy, as they depicted traditional deities of India in non-traditional ways including nude portrayals of the deities.
He also directed a few movies. In 1967, he received the National Film Award for Best Experimental Film for Through the Eyes of a Painter.[3] In 2004, he directed Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities, a film he worked on with his artist son Owais Husain, which was screened in the Marché du Film section of the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.[4]
Raja Ravi Varma[3][4] (29 April 1848 – 2 October 1906) was a celebrated Malayali Indian painter and artist. He is considered among the greatest painters in the history of Indian art for a number of aesthetic and broader social reasons. Firstly, his works are held to be among the best examples of the fusion of European techniques with a purely Indian sensibility. While continuing the tradition and aesthetics of Indian art, his paintings employed the latest European academic art techniques of the day. Secondly, he was notable for making affordable lithographs of his paintings available to the public, which greatly enhanced his reach and influence as a painter and public figure. Indeed, his lithographs increased the involvement of common people with fine arts and defined artistic tastes among common people for several decades. In particular, his depictions of Hindu deities and episodes from the epics and Puranas have received profound acceptance from the public and are found, often as objects of worship, across the length and breadth of India.[citation needed]
Raja Ravi Varma was closely related to the royal family of Travancore of present day Kerala state in India. Later in his life, two of his granddaughters were adopted into that royal family, and their descendants comprise the totality of the present royal family of Travancore, including the latest three Maharajas (Balarama Varma III, Marthanda Varma III and Rama Varma VII).
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Mohan Samant (born Manmohan Balkrishna Samant in Mumbai [then Bombay] in 1924 - New York City, 2004) was an early Indian modernist painter and member of the Progressive Artists Group. He was also a lifelong player of the sarangi, an Indian bowed string instrument.
Samant was born Manmohan Balkrishna Samant into a middle-class Brahmin family in Goregaon, a suburb of Mumbai (then Bombay), India, in 1924. The fourth child of eight, he grew up in a cultured environment. Samant's father, Balkrishna Ramchandra Samant, was a headmaster and his mother a homemaker. His younger sister, Vasudha Patil, an accomplished novelist, has written that their parents encouraged the family's interest in music, art, theater, movies, travel, and writing, and Samant displayed an early proficiency in and dedication to both music and the visual arts.[1]
Samant received his diploma from the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1952, where he studied under S.B. (Shankar Balwant) Palsikar. In 1954 he was awarded the Governor's Prize and the silver medal for water colors at the Bombay Art Society Annual Exhibition.[2]
In 1952, Samant joined the Progressive Artists' Group[3] and exhibited with them in several shows, including the 1953 exhibition, Progressive Artists' Group: Gaitonde, Raiba, Ara, Hazarnis, Khanna, Husain, Samant, Gade, at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai.[4] He also participated in the Bombay Group, a successor to the Bombay PAG. According to artist Baburao Sadwelkar, the Bombay Group, which included Samant as well as Hebbar, Ara, Chavda, Kulkarni, Laxman Pai, Har Krishnan Lall, and Sadwelkar, had "six big exhibitions [between 1957 and 1964], which were received extremely well."[5] Samant did not mention the Bombay Group in interviews or recorded conversations, but a review from The Times of India[6] confirms that he had works in their November 1956 exhibition.
In 1956, Samant was awarded the Gold Medal at the Bombay Art Society's group exhibition, another at the Calcutta Art Society show, and the Lalit Kala Akademi All India Award. That same year, he took part in the seminal exhibition, Eight Painters: Bendre, Gaitonde, Gujral, Husain, Khanna, Kulkarni, Kumar, Samant, curated by Thomas Keehn, and in the Venice Biennale.[7] Samant spent 1957-58 in Rome on a scholarship awarded by the Italian government. In February 1959, a Rockefeller Fellowship took him to New York City, where he would remain until 1964.[8]
Exhibitions during Samant's first New York period included what is considered the first showing of the Progressive Artists' Group in America, Trends in Contemporary Painting from India: Gaitonde, Husain, Khanna, Kumar, Padamsee, Raza, Samant, Souza, curated by Thomas Keehn and held at the Graham Gallery, New York,[9] as well as A Collection of Contemporary Art, Art in Embassies Committee, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1961), Recent Acquisitions, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1963), and Dunn International: 102 Best Painters of the World, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada and the Tate Gallery, London (1963).[10]
The organizers of the legendary Dunn exhibition in 1963—whose international selection committee included Alfred Barr of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures—chose works by Edward Hopper, Robert Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning, among other giants of contemporary art. Samant was one of only two newcomers included in the exhibition, and was singled out for special recognition in the Time article on the show.[11] He was profiled again in the magazine a year later.[12] Samant spent 1965–68 in Mumbai. In 1968, like S.H. Raza and F.N. Souza before him, he left India permanently. He settled in New York, where he continued to work and exhibit internationally. In 2000, Samant received the Asian American Heritage Award for lifetime achievement in the arts. In January 2004, not long after a retrospective in India, Samant died in New York.[13]
Samant participated in the seminal international exhibitions of twentieth-century Indian modernism. Ranjit Hoskote, internationally renowned Indian poet and art critic, wrote in 2008 that Mohan Samant was "the missing link in the evolutionary narrative of contemporary art in India."[14] As observed by Jeffrey Wechsler in his essay on Mohan Samant and his place in twentieth-century modernism, "Samant's practice was the antithesis of a signature style. Throughout his career, he delved into divergent materials and techniques and constantly shifted imagery. While some of his processes and forms can be perceived on a regular basis over long periods of time, there was no hewing to a given image, endlessly repeated." He stated that "I find that stagnation in style and the search for the same forms cause an artist to suffer an immense amount of laboriousness in his work. Samant's art is, instead, determinedly far-reaching and inquisitive, and is inspired by the whole history of human visual creativity. Samant stated straightforwardly that his sources derived from five thousand years of art from varied civilizations. These included the cave paintings of Lascaux, Egyptian wall paintings and hieroglyphs, Indian miniatures and murals, Precolumbian ceramics, African sculpture, and the modernism of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Paul Klee."[15]
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