DAG’s Wonder of India exhibition in NYC is about vignettes of the country’s evolution in the world of modern and contemporary art practises, says Uma Nair
Running in New York, DAG’s Wonder of India exhibition is about vignettes of India’s evolution in the world of modern and contemporary art practises.
According to curator and vice president of DAG, Kishore Singh, the exhibition explores the first views of the country and her people, a canon of art practise that came to be known as Company Paintings, developing vernaculars of playful naivety, movements from impressionism and expressionism to cubism and primitivism as through an Indian lens, and abstraction as a response to its traditional past, in a selection that spans the 19th and 20th centuries attesting to diverse strands of modernism at art centres across India”
In a catalogue designed by the brilliant aesthete Tania Das Gupta this catalogue has vignettes of sheer beauty ,nuggets of nostalgia and plenty to ponder. Begin with a moody gram image of a boat by Prosanto Das that distills hidden embers of delight and the magnitude of magic on the still waters. Its very simplicity and its density of depth in treatment is alluring.
Jamini Roy’s Last Supper a magical moment in the leaf from the Bible and symbolism of Christianity. Roy’s understanding and his translation of technique and narrative -to substitute Jesus and his disciples from white men to Santhals is a statement in the power of the story telling and the beauty of telling the story.
Paritosh Sen’s two works are a rare testimony to his brilliance in compositional control. His woman as a water carrier and his abstracted study of a couple both have a tenuous resonant tenor that you can’t miss.A rare delight is Biren De’s early figurative Musician 1 created in the mood of the art practises in the 1950s. His handling of contour colour create its own iota of inventive idioms for this master who became one of India’s finest abstractionists in the nation.
The piece de resistance of Chittoprasad’s two ink works that reflect the charisma and controlled compositional brilliance of his passion for translating the human condition of the Bengal Famine and the throes of catastrophe.
"Powerful and emotive, his art of caricature emerged as a statement in favour of the oppressed masses and as a denunciation of the ruling class. As a self-conscious, reflective testimony, the drawings and caricatures of this period were a forceful outcry against the tyranny of domination and an indictment of prevailing conditions. Underlying the biting humour was a compassionate humanism and his images were essentially an appeal on behalf of the labouring poor and the marginalised."
Portraits of pathos stare back at us in these two works. They also drive home the horror of the devastation that caused the death of thousands of people in villages and on the sidewalks of the city. These images are like a visual novel; they illustrate how these hapless people lived without food or nourishment and how they were reduced to living skeletons. Whether he draws – a woman – lying on the ground, while others, including children, surround her as she dies a slow death or even a man and a woman, it is the angst-ridden depths of despair. But it is his drawings of the crowds that entice and pull at your heartstrings, they reflect the mood of gloom and doom and how even unknown beings became comrades in tragedy.
Contours and proportion of perspectives demonstrate what a powerful draughtsman Chittaprosad was. To recreate the people in the bond of intense grief and hopelessness seemed to be an act of passion and deep love for the oppressed. He was a prolific artist and his singular gouache of a woman suckling her baby while a couple sells vegetables proves that he excelled in the realist style and understood the fine elements of surrealism in a composition