This year marks the completion of nine decades after the debut exhibition of Jamini Roy바카라s paintings. Today is the 131st birth anniversary of the pioneering modern artist.
Jamini Roy was 42 when his artworks made themselves to public view for the first time ever. Nothing particularly surprising, given that India was largely alien to the concept and practice of open exhibition of paintings or sculptures by living people. (In fact, it was only in 1936 that the country got its first [private] gallery: Dhoomimal, in Delhi.)
So, back in 1929, Calcutta바카라s Government School of Art, from where Roy underwent formal studies under a style that was then avant garde and called the Bengal School, hosted an event that put 56 of his works on display. The historic occasion was also noted by the presence of a top journalist-entrepreneur under the British rule alongside a renowned Indian artist who was the first to travel abroad to study printmaking. That is, Alfred H. Watson, editor of The Statesman newspaper, and Mukul Dey, the first Indian principal of the 1854-founded Government School of Art in the city by the Bay of Bengal.
In retrospect, it wasn바카라t just their physical appearance of the two personalities that added grace to the occasion. They spoke certain things that did turn out to be dense in analysis as well as foresightedness. Or, 바카라prophetic바카라, as art scholar-archivist Satyasri Ukil notes later. So precise were they in their observations about the artistic merits of Jamini (1887-1972), who was born in a small town called Beliatore in what is today Bankura district under Medinipur division of West Bengal.
In what appears to be the earliest printed note of appreciation about Jamini paintings, Dey describes the painter바카라s works as an improvement upon the traditional Bengal art that can open up a new realm of aesthetics altogether. Jamini 바카라succeeded in developing an indigenous line of art and preserving an outlook which is typically Bengali, from a state of decadence,바카라 he notes in the foreword to the 1929 catalogue of the Roy exhibition that Dey had himself sponsored. 바카라He has established his place in the rank of artists as will be evident from the specimens of his works exhibited.바카라
Even more discerning had been Watson바카라s words at the inaugural ceremony. Jamini paintings 바카라will repay study,바카라 the Briton notes in his speech. 바카라I see in it as I see in much of the painting in India today a real endeavour to recover a national art that shall be free from the sophisticated tradition of other countries, which have had a continuous art history,바카라 he says. 바카라You must judge for yourselves how far Mr Roy has been able to achieve the ends at which he is obviously aiming.바카라
Watson foresees a paradigm shift that Indian art is poised at the hands of Jamini, who eventually won the Padma Bhushan award. 바카라From this phase, we will see him gradually breaking away to a style of his own, moulded by many influences, but ultimately resulting in a treatment of mass and line which is almost Egyptian in its outlook. There is a primitive force, perhaps yet not quite sure of itself, but consciously striving to break into individual expression.바카라
It isn바카라t that the speaker is just presuming things. Watson banks his view from hindsight, actually. Jamini바카라s earlier works were done 바카라under purely Western influence바카라, he points out. They consisted 바카라largely of small copies of larger works바카라, yet merited to 바카라be regarded as the exercises of one learning to use the tools of his craft competently and never quite at ease with his models바카라.
To Watson, art, to deserve the name, must be living and expanding. 바카라Whatever direction Indian art may take in the future it cannot, if it is to have value, go wholly back to the past any more than it can become merely imitative of the Western outlook,바카라 he adds.
Ukil, as a researcher, goes on to quote the whole text of Watson바카라s speech in his blog. He does it to also allay what he notes is a wrong bit of record about Jamini바카라that the artist had his first exhibition of works on the British India Street of Calcutta in 1938 (by when Jamini was 51 years old).
The page published in 2000, in further substantiation, says (late) B.C. Sanyal, another towering modernist Indian painter, got the professional chronology wrong on Jamini. Thus the first-ever Jamini paintings with folk idiom had to wait for 71 years to be presented as a piece of historical record, claims the note, while thanking C.B. Gupta of Delhi바카라s National Museum and Chhanda Dasgupta of the national capital바카라s Lalit Kala Akademi 바카라for helping me to track and access some of the important references.바카라