Jamini Roy

Born-    11 April 1887
                Bankura, West Bengal, India

Died-     24 April 1972 (aged 85)
Nationality-     Indian
Field -    Painting

 

Early life

sorce from wikipedia 

Jamini Roy was born in 1887 into a middle-class family of land-owners in a village called Beliatore in the District of Bankura in Bengal .

When he was sixteen he was sent to study at the Government School of Art in Calcutta. He was taught to paint in the prevailing academic tradition drawing Classical nudes and painting in oils and in 1908 he received his Diploma in Fine Art.

However, he soon realised that he needed to draw inspiration, not from Western traditions, but from his own culture, and so he looked to the living folk and tribal art for inspiration. He was most influenced by the Kalighat Pat, with its bold sweeping brush-strokes. He moved away from his earlier impressionist landscapes and portraits and between 1921 and 1924 began his first period of experimentation with the Santhal dance as his starting point.

 

Style

His new style was a reaction against the Bengal School and Western tradition. His underlying quest was threefold to capture the essence of simplicity embodied in the life of the folk people; to make art accessible to a wider section of people; and to give Indian art its own identity. He was awarded the Padma Bhusan in 1954. His work has been exhibited extensively in international exhibitions and can be found in many private and public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He spent most of his life living and working in Calcutta. Initially he experimented with Kalighat paintings but found that it has ceased to be strictly a "patua" and went to learn from village patuas. Consequently his techniques as well as subject matter was influenced by traditional art of Bengal. He preferred himself to be called a patua. Jamini Roy died in 1972. He was survived by four sons and a daughter. Currently his successors (daughters-in-law and grand children and their children) stay at the home he had built in Ballygunge Place, Kolkata. His works can be found in various galleries across the globe as well as in his home.

 

jamini roy's paintings 

 

 

                             Amrita Sher-Gil

Born-             January 30, 1913                          Budapest, Hungary Died-             December 5, 1941 (aged 28)                          Lahore, present day Pakistan                          Nationality     Indian Field-            painter Training-    Grande Chaumiere                         Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1930-34) Early life and education  sorce from wikipedia  Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest, Hungary to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, a Sikh aristocrat and also a scholar in Sanskrit and Persian, and Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, a Jewish Opera singer from Hungary. Her mother came to India as a companion of Princess Bamba Sutherland. Sher-Gil was the elder of two daughters born. Her younger sister was Indira Sundaram (née Sher-Gil), mother of the contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram. She spent most of early childhood in Budapest. She was the niece of Indologist Ervin Baktay. He guided her by critiquing her work and gave her an academic foundation to grow on. He also instructed her to use servants as models. The memories of these models would eventually lead to her return to India. In 1921 her family moved to Summer Hill, Shimla in India, and soon began learning piano and violin, and by age in nine she along with her younger sister Indira were giving concerts and acting in plays at Shimla's Gaiety Theatre at Mall Road, Shimla.Though she was already painting since the age of five she formally started learning painting at age eight. n 1923, Marie came to know an Italian sculptor, who was living at Shimla at the time; later in 1924 when he returned to Italy, Amrita's mother also moved to Italy along with Amrita, and got her enrolled at Santa Annunziata, an Art School at Florence, Italy Though Amrita didn't stay at this school for long, and returned to India in 1924, it was here that she was exposed to works of Italian masters. At sixteen, Sher-Gil sailed to Europe with her mother to train as a painter at Paris, first at the Grande Chaumiere under Pierre Vaillant and later at École des Beaux-Arts (1930–34), she drew inspiration from European painters such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, while coming under the influence of her teacher Lucien Simon and the company of artist friends and lovers like Boris Tazlitsky. Her early paintings display a significant influence of the Western modes of painting, especially as being practised in the Bohemian circles of Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, she made her first important work, Young Girls (see below), which led to her election as an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris in 1933, making her the youngest ever and the only Asian to have received this recognition hence. Career In 1934, while in Europe she "began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India,".. "feeling in some strange way that there lay my destiny as a painter", as she later wrote about her return to India, in the same year.Soon she began a rediscovery of the traditions of Indian art which was to continue till her death. It was also during this period that she pursued an affair with Malcolm Muggeridge. She stayed at their family home at Summer Hill, Shimla, f or a while, before leaving for travel, in 1936, at the behest of an art collector and critic, Karl Khandalavala, who encouraged her to pursue her passion for discovering her Indian roots; subsequently she was greatly impressed and influenced by the Mughal and Pahari schools of painting and cave paintings at Ajanta Caves. Later in 1937, she toured South India and produced the famous South Indian trilogy paintings, Bride's Toilet', 'Brahmacharis' and 'The South Indian Villagers' that reveal her passionate sense of colour and an equally passionate empathy for her Indian subjects, who are often depicted in their poverty and despair, by now the transformation in her work was complete and she had found her 'artistic mission', to express the life of Indian people through her canvas, as she herself admitted. This was distinct from European phase, in the interwar years, when her work showed an engagement with the works of Hungarian painters, especially the Nagybanya school of painting. Sher-Gil married her Hungarian first cousin, Dr. Victor Egan in 1938, and moved with him to India, to stay at her paternal family's home in Saraya, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, thus began her second phase in painting, which equals in its impact on Indian Modern Art, with likes of Rabindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy of Bengal school of art, as the 'Calcutta Group' of artists movement, which transformed it later, in a big way, was yet to start in 1943, and the 'Progressive Artist's Group', with Francis Newton Souza, Ara, Bakre, Gade, M. F. Husain and S. H. Raza among its founders, laid further ahead in 1948, Bombay. In September 1941, the couple moved to Lahore, then in undivided India, and a major cultural and artistic centre. She lived and painted at 23 Ganga Ram Mansions, The Mall, Lahore, where her studio was reported to be on the top floor of the townhouse, she inhabited. She was also famous for her many affairs with both men and women. In 1941, just days before the opening of her first major solo show in Lahore, she became seriously ill and slipped into a coma, and later died around midnight on December 6, 1941, leaving behind a large volume of work, and a mystery behind the real reason for her death has never been ascertained, something expected in view of the overly sensationalised accounts of Amrita's life in the words of her contemporaries. A failed abortion and subsequent peritonitis also have been suggested as the possible causes. She was cremated on December 7, 1941 at Lahore. Amrita Sher-Gil's Pantings

                       Abanindranath Tagore

Born-     7 August 1871               Calcutta, West Bengal, India Died-     5 December 1951 (aged 80) Nationality-     Indian Field-     Painting, writing

Personal life and background

sorce from wikipedia

Abanindranath Tagore was born in Jorasanko, Calcutta, British India to Gunendranath Tagore. His grandfather was Girindranath Tagore,the second son of "Prince' Dwarkanath Tagore. He is a member of the distinguished Tagore family, and a nephew of the poet Rabindranath Tagore. His grandfather and his elder brother Gaganendranath Tagore were also artists.


Tagore learned art when studying at Sanskrit College in the 1880s. Around the age of twenty years of age, in 1890, Abanindranath attended the Calcutta School of Art where he learnt to use pastels from O. Ghilardi, and oil painting from Charles Palmer, European painters who taught in that institution.In 1889 he married Suhasini Devi, daughter of Bhujagendra Bhusan Chatterjee, a descendant of Prasanna Coomar Tagore. At this time he left the Sanskrit College after nine years of study and studied English as a special student at St. Xavier's College, which he attended for about a year and a half.
He had a sister Sunayani Devi.

Painting career

In the early 1890s several illustrations were published in Sadhana magazine, and in Chitrangada, and other works by Rabindranath Tagore. He also illustrated his own books. He is nephew of Rabindranath Tagore. About the year 1897 he took lessons from the Vice-Principal of the Government School of Art, studying in the traditional European academic manner, learning the full range of techniques, but with a particular interest in watercolour. At this time he began to come under the influence of Mughal art, making a number of works based on the life of Krishna in a Mughal-influenced style. After meeting E.B. Havell, Tagore worked with him to revitalise and redefine art teaching at the Calcutta School of art, a project also supported by his brother Gaganendranath, who set up the Indian Society of Oriental Art.


Abanindranath tagore's paintings