A retrospective explores identity as expressed by the Madras Art Movement

The Madras modernists of the '50s may have been the most important art school to have been largely neglected

When freedom was still a new circumstance for India, a group of artists in the southern swathes of the country busied themselves with the identity question: what did it mean to be Indian and how to explore that in one’s work? 

Ashrafi Bhagat, Art historian

Among them was S G Vasudev from Karnataka who felt the need to create visual art that was at once indigenous and modern. In his home state, men of letters, including his friend Girish Karnad, were writing in their own language, Kannada. For two years, Vasudev eschewed everything of Western provenance and surrounded himself with art from the region. Out went the books on Picasso and Modigliani, and in came Tanjore and Mysore-school paintings. “I felt that what you see in the morning does influence you,” says the Bengaluru-based artist. “Contemporaries of mine found similar things that inspired them.” That is how the Madras Art Movement, as we know it now, began in the 1960s and continued into the 1980s.

Absence, C Douglas

The winds of regional modernism gathered momentum in the late ‘50s in Chennai, encouraged by KCS Paniker, principal of the Government College of Arts and Crafts. Other principals, the sculptor D P Roy Chowdhury before Paniker and S Dhanapal after him, had also added to these ideas. The “Madras” here is almost akin to the North Indian imagination of the word, as synecdoche for the southern states. Only, in this case it extends to states beyond the “South”. The Madras modernists included students from Bombay, Gujarat and Bengal. Anywhere between 40 and 60 sculptors, painters and printmakers were coached to search for strains of “Indianness” and told about the importance of the “line” driving all art.

Untitled, K Ramanujam

Unlike the Bombay Progressive artists who took no single direction, the modernists of Madras, at least in the early years, chose the idiom of showing traditional themes in inventive ways. As such, local masks and toys are glimpsed in the paintings of K Sreenivasulu, whereas the browns, blacks and greys of R B Bhaskaran’s canvases evoke a broad tribal sense. Relative to movements in Bombay, Bengal or Baroda, however, the Madras school has been slow to receive critical attention. The college lacked an art criticism department, which limited the discourse and historiography of the less-known but important style. 

Untitled, K Sreenivasulu

At the turn of the 21st century, art historian Ashrafi Bhagat began engaging with works from the movement. She had been taking a mandatory refresher course for professors while teaching at Stella Maris College in Chennai, in which many talks referred to the presence of folk art in literature. “There had to be such examples in visual art as well. I started looking up artists and found a very strong tradition of folk art in the modernity of Madras,” she says over the phone from Chennai. Her research resulted in books, lectures and now an exhibition of more than 

Untitled, K V Haridasan

60 works which will be showed at the DAG Mumbai space in Kala Ghoda. 

In a sign that recognition for the Madras artists is widening, a retrospective of Vasudev’s work is showing simultaneously at NGMA Mumbai, just a short walk from DAG Mumbai. The artist’s canvases, copper works and tapestries spread over six levels demonstrate the impact that the Kannada script, literature and poetry have had on him. He paints while listening to classical music, for example, and has made a series of sketches based on A K Ramanujan’s poems. The roots of such interplay were in the Cholamandal Artists’ Village, which several artists from the Madras college built by buying bits of land at a time. 

Mary and Christ, S Dhanapa

Like so many movements before it, this group too was dominated by men. Still, the college and village were not without women. There was Anila Jacob who topped her year and is known for her bronze sculptures, the painter V Arnawaz who put up exhibitions in New Delhi and Italy, and Premalatha Seshadri who steered away from the strictly indigenist doctrine and sought inspiration in Zen Buddhism. Seshadri’s method is indicative of how Madras modernism would evolve. Later Madras artists did not shy away from international idioms to which their predecessors had been averse. R M Palaniappan, who joined the college in the mid-1970s, for instance, speaks of influences as diverse as Shiva temples and Hollywood war films. “Internationalism was very important to our work but our lines also have the ‘Madras’ kind of impact.” 

‘Madras Modern’ will be exhibited at DAG Mumbai, Kala Ghoda from July 20 to October 12