Still searching for an identity

Kishore Singh / New Delhi November 04, 2009, 0:34 IST

The Bengal School has failed to get its due because of the high profile enjoyed by the Progressives who succeeded them.

For a loosely mandated group, the Progressives have created a legacy that has long outlasted them. It isn’t as if, Krishen Khanna reminds me at a dinner party, it was governed by any rules or laws. It was just a loose group of artists who were reacting to the village-belles-at-village-wells kind of kitschy art that was then the norm. We didn’t want to close our eyes to everything European, he says, but we were also searching for our own realities.

The generally held view is that the belles-at-wells barb was aimed at the Romantics or, more precisely, the Bengal School, who had set the pattern for what defined modern art in India at the turn of the last century. Santiniketan was in its element then, and it cannot be denied that it provided an aggressive thrust to the development of art in the country. The artists who were making waves then were almost all either students or faculty at its Kala Bhavan, and Nandalal Bose is considered one of the finest renaissance artists of not just his time but in the oeuvre of modern Indian art. The Tagores themselves — Rabindranath, Abanindranath and Gagendranath — while hardly in the space occupied by the masters, weren’t exactly amateurs when it came to painting or sculpture.

Santiniketan set the pattern for modern art in India, even creating a template, as it were, to nurture a whole movement that, unlike the Progressives which survived only a couple of years before the artists left for foreign shores and so remained only in name (or memory), the Romantic influence has survived to the day (think Anjolie Ela Menon, or Paresh Maity, or Sanjay Bhattacharya). In the light of which it is strange that the Santiniketan Romantics are rarely referred to in the same breath as the Progressives, or that their prices are hugely skewed in favour of the Bombay artists.

It isn’t that the Romantics have not got their due, but because of the rose-tinted spectacles through which they viewed the world, they have been treated with less than reverence by art collectors. Yet, there is no escaping the impact of their movement, and no collector can claim indifference to the Bengal School, even if its artists have yet to hit the high points (or prices, which becomes the measurable benchmark of their success) of the Progressives.

Many of the Progressive artists were to find their feet later in their careers, so while an M F Husain or an F N Souza were to get into their stride much earlier (in the fifties, certainly), some would escape what now seems almost gauche by comparison, only later (S H Raza, Tyeb Mehta, Ram Kumar), others would keep their style even if it did not grow into the grittier edge of some of the more successful Progressives (K H Ara, Krishen Khanna), while some simply did not care and were to find recognition only later in life (V S Gaitonde).

In comparison, the Romantics did not evolve in their careers, the result of their repertoire limned by a realism that failed to evoke depth. Jamini Roy married a folk tradition with international subjects, but his simplicity of style created a virtual cottage industry of fakers even in his lifetime. Ramkinkar Baij and Binode Behari Mukherjee both resorted to searching for styles that were rooted in their cultural foundations rather than a more universal space, a search that also influenced their peer N S Bendre.

Nandalal Bose straddled many oeuvres and his ideas were far-reaching, but the execution relied on the same simplicity as the heart-rending work one would later find in Chittaprosad or Hiren Das (though their subjects were closer to the roots and the work had a documentary-like quality). This would later metamorphose into the work of a Sunil Das or a Bikash Bhattacharjee, where the depth of the content was treated with a tint of reality or photo-realism, which was at odds in a transformed world where the abstraction of the idea had become paramount.

Treatment of content aside, perhaps less effort has gone into marketing the Romantics as compared with the Progressives, dependent perhaps on the quantity of output in the marketplace – most of what was painted by the early Bengal artists is now in museums. Certainly, there is a factor of stability (and few variations) in their price, but these prices are far lower than the succeeding wave of the Progressives.

For most part and with few exceptions, the Romantics have remained in the sub-Rs 1 crore category, the bulk of such work fetching between Rs 30-70 lakh at auctions. By comparison, most Progressives start at the higher end of the Romantics, and many now routinely sell over Rs 1 crore. There is greater information on the Progressives, as opposed to the anti-market view of the early Romantics, as a result of which bazaar influence has been detrimental to their interest.

Some attempts to right this have had little success – largely auctions of Bengal artists – whether because of a fear of fakes, or because their desirability quotient remains below that of the Progressives. Limited availability alone should have mandated a higher price for these artists, but in a media-controlled and gallery-run environment, it will be some time before the Bengal Romantics get their recognition and their due value.