Beyond the Progressives

When the venerable Met - the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York - opens its new wing, The Met Breur, in March 2016, the inaugural exhibition will feature a retrospective by Indian modernist Nasreen Mohamedi. This rare honour acknowledges something we in India have only just begun to realise, that the subcontinent's vast pool of modern art has more talent to offer than merely the Progressives, or those of its earlier Bengal School. Mohamedi's work is extremely spare, restricted to a number of lines of varying densities that create geometric patterns on paper and are being accepted for their sensitivity as well as her ability to paint in a language not restricted by any vernacular tradition, negating any suggestions of encumbrances or roots, which is a refreshingly contemporary rather than a modern reflection of artistic practice.

Nor is Mohamedi the only Baroda artist to emerge triumphant on the global stage. At London's Tate Modern, Bhupen Khakhar will be featured with the most comprehensive exhibition of his career that opens in June 2016 and will run till November. Khakhar, famously India's first openly gay artist who overcame shame about his sexuality to integrate it into his endearing paintings of everyday life, is today being documented for his felicity in several mediums - oils, watercolours and prints - in which he collates vignettes of people who made up society around him. Both Mohamedi and Khakhar did extremely well at the recent Christie's auction in Mumbai with paper works notching up such prices as Rs 1.82 crore and Rs 1.46 crore, respectively.

This spotlight on Baroda comes not a moment too soon. Like the Bengal School, the Baroda collective emerges not from a formal ideology but because it became a platform for a group of extremely talented artists who came together at a providential time to study, teach or work at the Faculty of Fine Arts at MS University. Leading this charge was N S Bendre, India's most significant painter in the pointillist tradition who has influenced generations of artists and who was legendary for first spotting M F Husain in his native Indore. Another artist-teacher from Baroda, Gulammohammad Sheikh, proved his mettle at the same auction with a canvas fetching Rs 1.46 crore, thus creating a buzz around Baroda artists, who seem to be emerging from a cocoon, if rising interest in them is any indication.

Bhupen Khakar’s iconic 1981 painting, You Can’t Please All

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is opening new exhibitions in 2016 on Jaipur-based Himmat Shah who was part of M S University and studied under Bendre, and on Jeram Patel, who continues to live and work from Baroda, though he is ailing. Both are acknowledged masters of their craft - terracotta and burnt wood paintings respectively - but what is less known is their genius for drawing, of which both are masters. To some extent, an exhibition on J Swaminathan's Group 1890 that was launched in Bhavnagar in Gujarat, and which features artists Sheikh, Shah and Patel, besides Jyoti Bhatt and Raghav Kaneria (also from Baroda) among a few others, will focus attention on these artists.

This widening interest is hardly happenstance. For too long, the breadth of Indian art has been represented by too few artists who have made up its marquee, creating almost a hegemony - though hardly one of their making. As our consciousness of the contribution of different art centres and art practices grows, we will recognise what some already knew - that the kaleidoscope of Indian modern art is richly layered and includes many more practitioners whose contribution to the rich legacy is finally enjoying its due. Mohamedi and Khakhar are just a step in that direction.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated