The Bengal School of Art , commonly referred as Bengal School , was an art movement and a style of Indian painting that originated in Bengal , primarily Calcutta and Shantiniketan , and flourished throughout the Indian subcontinent , during the British Raj in the early 20th century. Also known as 'Indian style of painting' in its early days, it was associated with Indian nationalism ( swadeshi ) and led by Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951), and was also being promoted and supported by British arts administrators like E. B. Havell , the principal of the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata from 1896; eventually it led to the development of the modern Indian painting .
43-506: Lores Genres Institutions Awards Folk genres Devotional Classical genres Modern genres People Instruments Dance Theater Organizations People The Bengal school arose as an avant garde and nationalist movement reacting against the academic art styles previously promoted in India, both by Indian artists such as Raja Ravi Varma and in British art schools. Following
86-460: A dialectical approach to such political stances by avant-garde artists and the avant-garde genre of art. Sociologically, as a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists, writers, architects, et al. produce artefacts — works of art, books, buildings — that intellectually and ideologically oppose the conformist value system of mainstream society. In the essay " Avant-Garde and Kitsch " (1939), Clement Greenberg said that
129-549: A post-modern time when the modernist ways of thought and action and the production of art have become redundant in a capitalist economy. Parting from the claims of Greenberg in the late 1930s and the insights of Poggioli in the early 1960s, in The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks (1983), the critic Harold Rosenberg said that since the middle of the 1960s the politically progressive avant-garde ceased being adversaries to artistic commercialism and
172-400: A unique and unified programme for the creation of a new art movement in India. And like Durer he combined a passion bordering on devotion with an irrepressible analytical mind that compelled him to prise open different art traditions and unravel their syntactic logic, and make them accessible to a new generation of Indian artists. But he did this so quietly and without self-assertive fanfare that
215-511: A young artist, Nandalal Bose was deeply influenced by the murals of the Ajanta Caves . He had become part of an international circle of artists and writers seeking to revive classical Indian culture; a circle that already included Okakura Kakuzō , William Rothenstein , Yokoyama Taikan , Christiana Herringham , Laurence Binyon , Abanindranath Tagore , and the seminal London Modernist sculptors Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein . To mark
258-525: Is another definition of "Avant-gardism" that distinguishes it from "modernism": Peter Bürger, for example, says avant-gardism rejects the "institution of art" and challenges social and artistic values, and so necessarily involves political, social, and cultural factors. According to the composer and musicologist Larry Sitsky , modernist composers from the early 20th century who do not qualify as avant-gardists include Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Igor Stravinsky; later modernist composers who do not fall into
301-638: Is facilitated by mechanically produced art-products of mediocre quality displacing art of quality workmanship; thus, the profitability of art-as-commodity determines its artistic value. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord said that the financial, commercial, and economic co-optation of the avant-garde into a commodity produced by neoliberal capitalism makes doubtful that avant-garde artists will remain culturally and intellectually relevant to their societies for preferring profit to cultural change and political progress. In The Theory-Death of
344-412: Is important to note that "while a special kind of nationalist sentiment is present in the paintings of Abanindranath and in the ideas of Rabindranath, there was always an aversion to direct political confrontation at the core of those sentiments". Artists of this style include Amit Sarkar, Ajoy Ghosh, Sankarlal Aich, Amal Chaklader, Narendra Chandra De Sarkar, Sukti Subhra Pradhan, and Ratan Acharya. Some of
387-546: Is not reducible to a kitsch style or reactionary orientation, but can instead be used to refer to artists who engage with the legacy of the avant-garde while maintaining an awareness that doing so is in some sense anachronistic. The critic Charles Altieri argues that avant-garde and arrière-garde are interdependent: "where there is an avant-garde, there must be an arrière-garde ." Avant-garde in music can refer to any form of music working within traditional structures while seeking to breach boundaries in some manner. The term
430-615: Is used loosely to describe the work of any musicians who radically depart from tradition altogether. By this definition, some avant-garde composers of the 20th century include Arnold Schoenberg , Richard Strauss (in his earliest work), Charles Ives , Igor Stravinsky , Anton Webern , Edgard Varèse , Alban Berg , George Antheil (in his earliest works only), Henry Cowell (in his earliest works), Harry Partch , John Cage , Iannis Xenakis , Morton Feldman , Karlheinz Stockhausen , Pauline Oliveros , Philip Glass , Meredith Monk , Laurie Anderson , and Diamanda Galás . There
473-592: The intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists promote progressive and radical politics and advocate for societal reform with and through works of art. In the essay "The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist" (1825), Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues 's political usage of vanguard identified the moral obligation of artists to "serve as [the] avant-garde" of the people, because "the power of
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#1732772295652516-538: The "nine artists" whose work, "not being antiquities", were to be henceforth considered "to be art treasures, having regard to their artistic and aesthetic value". He was given the work of illustrating the constitution of India . Nandalal Bose was born on 3 December 1882 in a middle-class Bengali family at Haveli Kharagpur , in Munger district of Bihar state. The family originally hailed from Jejur , Hooghly District of West Bengal . His father, Purna Chandra Bose,
559-421: The 1930 occasion of Mahatma Gandhi 's arrest for protesting the British tax on salt , Bose created a black on white linocut print of Gandhi walking with a staff. It became the iconic image for the non-violence movement. His genius and original style were recognised by artists and art critics like Gaganendranath Tagore , Ananda Coomaraswamy and O. C. Ganguli . These lovers of art felt that objective criticism
602-742: The 1938 Haripura Session of the Indian National Congress . In his introduction for the Christie's catalogue, R. Siva Kumar wrote- Nandalal Bose (1882–1966) occupies a place in the history of Modern Indian art that combines those of Raphael and Durer in the history of the Renaissance. Like Raphael, Nandalal was a great synthesizer, his originality lay in his ability to marshal discrete ideas drawn from Abanindranath Tagore , Rabindranath Tagore , E. B. Havell , Ananda Coomaraswamy , Okakura Kakuzo and Mahatma Gandhi into
645-497: The Avant-Garde ( Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia , 1962), the academic Renato Poggioli provides an early analysis of the avant-garde as art and as artistic movement. Surveying the historical and social, psychological and philosophical aspects of artistic vanguardism, Poggioli's examples of avant-garde art, poetry, and music, show that avant-garde artists share some values and ideals as contemporary bohemians . In Theory of
688-473: The Avant-Garde ( Theorie der Avantgarde , 1974), the literary critic Peter Bürger looks at The Establishment 's embrace of socially critical works of art as capitalist co-optation of the artists and the genre of avant-garde art, because "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work [of art]". In Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (2000), Benjamin H. D. Buchloh argues for
731-697: The Avant-Garde (1991), Paul Mann said that the avant-garde are economically integral to the contemporary institutions of the Establishment, specifically as part of the culture industry . Noting the conceptual shift, theoreticians, such as Matei Calinescu , in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987), and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995), said that Western culture entered
774-407: The artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times. As a stratum of
817-458: The artistic vanguard oppose high culture and reject the artifice of mass culture , because the avant-garde functionally oppose the dumbing down of society — be it with low culture or with high culture . That in a capitalist society each medium of mass communication is a factory producing artworks, and is not a legitimate artistic medium; therefore, the products of mass culture are kitsch , simulations and simulacra of Art. Walter Benjamin in
860-418: The arts is, indeed, the most immediate and fastest way" to realise social, political, and economic reforms. In the realm of culture, the artistic experiments of the avant-garde push the aesthetic boundaries of societal norms , such as the disruptions of modernism in poetry, fiction, and drama, painting, music, and architecture, that occurred in the late 19th and in the early 20th centuries. In art history
903-473: The avant-garde traditions in both the United States and Europe. Among these are Fluxus , Happenings , and Neo-Dada . Brutalist architecture was greatly influenced by an avant-garde movement. Nandalal Bose Nandalal Bose (3 December 1882 – 16 April 1966) was one of the pioneers of modern Indian art and a key figure of Contextual Modernism . A pupil of Abanindranath Tagore , Bose
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#1732772295652946-472: The best known artists of present-day Bengal are Jogen Chowdhury , Mrinal Kanti Das , Gopal Sanyal , Ganesh Pyne , Manishi Dey , Shanu Lahiri , Ganesh Haloi Jahar Dasgupta , Samir Aich, Bikash Bhattacharjee , Manindra Bhushan Gupta , Sudip Roy, Ramananda Bandopadhyay and Devajyoti Ray . R. Siva Kumar , who has been studying the work of the Santiniketan masters and their approach to art since
989-416: The category of avant-gardists include Elliott Carter , Milton Babbitt , György Ligeti , Witold Lutosławski , and Luciano Berio , since "their modernism was not conceived for the purpose of goading an audience." The 1960s saw a wave of free and avant-garde music in jazz genre, embodied by artists such as Ornette Coleman , Sun Ra , Albert Ayler , Archie Shepp , John Coltrane and Miles Davis . In
1032-416: The cultural values of contemporary bourgeois society . In the U.S. of the 1960s, the post–WWII changes to American culture and society allowed avant-garde artists to produce works of art that addressed the matters of the day, usually in political and sociologic opposition to the cultural conformity inherent to popular culture and to consumerism as a way of life and as a worldview . In The Theory of
1075-480: The early 80s, refutes the practice of subsuming Nandalal Bose , Abanindranath Tagore , Ram Kinker Baij and Benode Behari Mukherjee under the Bengal School of Art . According to Siva Kumar, 'This happened because early writers were guided by genealogies of apprenticeship rather than their styles, worldviews, and perspectives on art practice'. His ideas on this issue are formulated in the catalogue essay of
1118-514: The essay " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction " (1939) and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) said that the artifice of mass culture voids the artistic value (the aura ) of a work of art. That the capitalist culture industry (publishing and music, radio and cinema, etc.) continually produces artificial culture for mass consumption, which
1161-406: The exhibition Santiniketan: The Making of a Contextual Modernism . Avant garde In the arts and literature , the term avant-garde (from French meaning ' advance guard ' or ' vanguard ' ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art , and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to
1204-521: The influence of Indian spiritual ideas in the West , the British art teacher Ernest Binfield Havell attempted to reform the teaching methods at the Calcutta School of Art by encouraging students to imitate Mughal miniatures. This caused controversy, leading to a strike by students and complaints from the local press, including from nationalists who considered it to be a retrogressive move. Havell
1247-642: The manner of Hindu deities, holding objects symbolic of India's national aspirations. Tagore later attempted to develop links with Japanese artists as part of an aspiration to construct a pan-Asianist model of art. Through the paintings of Bharat Mata, Abanindranath established the pattern of patriotism. Some of the notable painters and artists of Bengal school were Nandalal Bose , M.A.R Chughtai, Sunayani Devi (sister of Abanindranath Tagore), Manishi Dey , Mukul Dey , Kalipada Ghoshal , Asit Kumar Haldar , Sudhir Khastgir , Kshitindranath Majumdar , Sughra Rababi . The Bengal school's influence in India declined with
1290-535: The mediocrity of mass culture , which political disconnection transformed being an artist into "a profession, one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing [the profession of being an artist]." Avant-garde is frequently defined in contrast to arrière-garde , which in its original military sense refers to a rearguard force that protects the advance-guard. The term was less frequently used than "avant-garde" in 20th-century art criticism. The art historians Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris argue that arrière-garde
1333-500: The mid-19th century, as a cultural term, avant-garde identified a genre of art that advocated art-as-politics, art as an aesthetic and political means for realising social change in a society. Since the 20th century, the art term avant-garde identifies a stratum of the Intelligentsia that comprises novelists and writers, artists and architects et al. whose creative perspectives, ideas, and experimental artworks challenge
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1376-593: The rock music of the 1970s, the "art" descriptor was generally understood to mean "aggressively avant-garde" or "pretentiously progressive". Post-punk artists from the late 1970s rejected traditional rock sensibilities in favor of an avant-garde aesthetic. Whereas the avant-garde has a significant history in 20th-century music, it is more pronounced in theatre and performance art, and often in conjunction with music and sound design innovations, as well as developments in visual media design. There are movements in theatre history that are characterized by their contributions to
1419-483: The same institution. In June 1903 he married Sudhiradevi, the daughter of a family friend. Nanadalal wanted to study art, but he was not given permission by his family. Unable to qualify for promotion in his classes, Nandalal moved to other colleges, joining the Presidency College in 1905 to study commerce. After repeated failures, he persuaded his family to let him study art at Calcutta's School of Art. As
1462-402: The significance of his work is yet to be fully grasped even in India. Some of his notable students were Benode Behari Mukherjee , Ramkinkar Baij , Beohar Rammanohar Sinha , K. G. Subramanyan , A. Ramachandran , Pratima Thakur , Jahar Dasgupta , Satyajit Ray , Dinkar Kaushik , Amritlal Vegad , Kiron Sinha, A.D.Jayathilake (1756) . Nandalal Bose, who left a major imprint on Indian art,
1505-734: The socio-cultural functions of avant-garde art trace from Dada (1915–1920s) through the Situationist International (1957–1972) to the postmodernism of the American Language poets (1960s–1970s). The French military term avant-garde (advanced guard) identified a reconnaissance unit who scouted the terrain ahead of the main force of the army. In 19th-century French politics, the term avant-garde (vanguard) identified Left-wing political reformists who agitated for radical political change in French society. In
1548-467: The spread of modernist ideas in the 1920s. As of 2012, there has been a surge in interest in the Bengal school of art among scholars and connoisseurs. Bimal Sil was a contemporary of Abanindernath Tagore. He painted in water colours. His paintings are found in private collections only. The Bengal School of Art, which emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, has produced a significant legacy in
1591-661: The task of beautifying/decorating the original manuscript of the Constitution of India . He died on 16 April 1966 in Santiniketan of natural causes. Today, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi holds 7000 of his works in its collection, including a 1930 black and white linocut of the Dandi March depicting Mahatma Gandhi, and a set of seven posters he later made at the request of Mahatma Gandhi for
1634-478: The world of Indian art. Its deep impact on the cultural landscape of India and its role in shaping the trajectory of modern Indian art cannot be overstated. Led by eminent artists such as Abanindranath Tagore , Nandalal Bose , and Rabindranath Tagore , the Bengal School emerged as a powerful movement that sought to revive traditional Indian artistic practices and forge a unique national identity. However, it
1677-612: Was at that time working in the Darbhanga Estate. His mother Khetramoni Devi was a housewife with a skill in improvising toys and dolls for young Nandalal. From his early days Nandalal began taking an interest in modelling images and later, decorating Puja pandals. In 1898, at the age of fifteen, Nandalal moved to Calcutta for his high school studies in the Central Collegiate School. After clearing his examinations in 1902, he continued his college studies at
1720-607: Was known for his "Indian style" of painting. He became the principal of Kala Bhavan , Santiniketan in 1921. He was influenced by the Tagore family and the murals of Ajanta ; his classic works include paintings of scenes from Indian mythologies, women, and village life. Today, many critics consider his paintings among India's most important modern paintings. In 1976, the Archaeological Survey of India , Department of Culture, Govt. of India declared his works among
1763-732: Was necessary for the development of painting and founded the Indian Society of Oriental Art . He became principal of the Kala Bhavana (College of Arts) at Tagore's International University Santiniketan in 1921. He was also asked by Jawaharlal Nehru to sketch the emblems for the Government of India's awards, including the Bharat Ratna and the Padma Shri . Along with his disciple Rammanohar , Nandalal Bose took up
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1806-458: Was supported by the artist Abanindranath Tagore , a nephew of the poet Rabindranath Tagore . Tagore painted a number of works influenced by Mughal art , a style that he and Havell believed to be expressive of India's distinct spiritual qualities, as opposed to the materialism of the West. Tagore's best-known painting, Bharat Mata (Mother India) , depicted a young woman, portrayed with four arms in
1849-675: Was the first recipient of a scholarship offered by the Indian Society of Oriental Art, founded in 1907. In 1954, he became the first artist to be elected Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi , India's National Academy of Art. In 1954, Nandalal Bose was awarded the Padma Vibhushan . In 1957, the University of Calcutta conferred honorary D.Litt. on him. Vishvabharati University honoured him by conferring on him
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