Artist Nandalal Bose sent some delightful postcards to friends and family as well as students. Often, detailed sketches rather than words conveyed the message in these missives.
In one, he divided the postcard into four panels. The first one shows a series of farm animals. The almost telegraphic writing on this panel says: “Dadu, Ma and Baba are fine…” The second panel is illustrated to show a radio, two people lounging about the house, reading a newspaper and knitting, respectively, and a plant. So, the subjects in the picture are in good health and happily employed. Panel 3 shows the “three beards” of a man in the household and talks about the house being given on rent with, of course, a drawing of the badi (house). The fourth panel is a big bunch of bananas, each of which, it seems, was 8 inches long and was eaten by people at the ashram. To pack that much information into a 3.5x5.2-inch piece of paper with just graphite and ink required both mastery over the art of brevity and a sense of humour.
Bose’s postcards are among the 150 works that will be on show at The Art Of Santiniketan exhibition at the DAG Modern gallery in New Delhi. The exhibition will feature sculptures, paintings and postcards by artists Ramkinkar Baij, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Rabindranath Tagore and Bose. The idea is to explain how these artists developed their individual styles, and, in the process, contributed to Indian modernism.
Curator Kishore Singh explains that the Santiniketan of the 1920s-60s sits somewhere between the Bengal School of painting and the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group started by people like M.F. Husain and F.N. Souza. “For a long time, Mumbai has been recognized as the seat of modernism (in India), without giving credit to what was happening at Santiniketan,” says Singh.
The narrative in this exhibition begins from the founding of the Santiniketan school in 1901.
The show traces the shift in Bose’s work as he moved from working at artist Abanindranath Tagore’s studio to Kala Bhavana at Santiniketan in 1922; from stylized drawings to more expressionistic art. The narrative looks at Bose’s collection of postcards, which captured the rhythms of life around him, as well as the Haripura posters Mahatma Gandhi asked him to make.
The narrative then moves to two of Bose’s most famous students: Baij and Mukherjee.
Mukherjee’s story is interesting, and not just because he was blind in one eye from birth and lost his vision entirely in his 50s. It’s interesting because he made large murals inspired by Japanese screens that capture the landscapes around Santiniketan in a manner that’s hauntingly beautiful. Visitors to the show can “see” these through documentaries that will play on loop at the gallery.
The Art Of Santiniketan is on from 16 October-10 December, 10.30am-7pm (Sundays closed), at DAG Modern, 11, Hauz Khas Village. For details, visit www.dagmodern.com
