The 'modern' of Indian art has woven itself around some very potent and receptive expositions. Tracing a veritable path that leads to such learning inevitably opens up a virtual Pandora box, considering the innumerable speculations and subjective interpretations of 'what' and 'who' really constitutes the 'Indian Modern'. Ensign feels a modest need to permeate into the evolutionary pattern of the Indian art practices from the 1900 to the present, as a token of reverence to the Indian Art, which has continued to be a source of ceaseless inspiration and awe for the art connoisseurs all over the world.
The credit coronation ritual as to who heralded modernity in Indian art often sways from the head of Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906), Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) to Rabindranath Tagore(1861–1941). A decisive framework accompanied this marking exercise: a keen association with the western art practices and a persistent need to establish a distinct identity for the artist in the society and formulate an independent aesthetic idiom for Indian art. Raja Ravi Varma eulogized a visual vocabulary essentially Victorian which he subtly configured into the Indian mythological and literary escapades, establishing himself as an invincible popular cult. Sher-Gil infused European sensibility into her topical choice of Indian themes, and appropriated unusual attention to 'downtrodden' and 'poor' in the society, affirming herself as 'modern'. In the simultaneous Pre-independence background, there was a coterie of Indian artists in Bengal, often known as 'revivalist' who were making a first concerted move attempting to create the idiom of 'new Indian art' by the name of Bengal school. In this inspired search for 'Indian-ness', the set of artist leveraging the momentum, studied the techniques, style, pictorial space, material and anatomical details of the Ajanta frescos, Rajput and Mughal miniatures, Kalighat patas, Chinese and Japanese paintings and their theories of art, the lyricism and romance of the pre-Raphaelities and the free-wheeling linearity of Art Nouveau. The artists who showed consummation in their artistic style and vocabulary adhering to the these influences were Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, D.P. Roy Choudhury, A.K. Haldar, Kshitindranath Mazumdar, Sarada Ukil and M.A.R. Chugtai etc. Sustaining their spirit in this environ were some like Rabindranath Tagore and Gagendranath Tagore, who were quintessential individualistic and experimental in their artistic endeavors fathoming a singular modern visual idiom. In the 1920s, the emergence of the Santiniketan favored a bend towards the rural cum folk aesthetics the most prominent exponents of this trend being Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Jamini Roy.
The immediate post-independence Indian art surprisingly vocalized it tenets in a very apolitical and unhistorical rhetoric which has led to the idea of many different notions of the 'Modern' in the preceding century. Indeed the emergence of the Progressive Artists Group (PAG; founded in 1947) in Bombay, synonymous with legendary names like F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza, K. H. Ara, M.F. Husain, S. H. Gade and S. Bakre affirmed this with its palpable absorption with European modernism as a way to shun away from the fruitless pursuit of naturalism or revivalism. Indeed this shifting movement of the art hub from Bengal to Bombay signified an urgent call of an advancing nation that needed to strike the potent arrow to the direction ripe with modernizing possibilities identical with technological transformation and political vitality. The group was joined briefly, in the fifties, by others like Mohan Samant, V. S. Gaitonde and Krishen Khanna. This era is rather marked by the spread of different art movements across the nation which endeavored to delineate a western-oriented modernistic sensibility in their art practices led by Pradosh Das Gupta (Calcutta), K.C.S. Paniker (Madras) and their associates and followers and the artists of Delhi Silpa Chakra(Delhi).
Through the 1950s, a cumulative reaction towards the validity of internationalism in the Indian context started appearing. In the south, influenced by K.C.S. Paniker the painters and sculptors started placing their aesthetic speculations within the sensible indigenous realm. The stylistic mode of figuration and abstract in painting became more unique and distinct and the sculptures started displaying iconicity and frontality besides combined with the use of traditional technique of metal repousse (kavacha tradition). Dhanapal, Kanai Kunai Kunhiraman, Janakiraman, Nandagopal and Nambiar emerged as significant sculptors on the scene from mid-1960s onwards. Borrowing meditative themes from primitivism, sculptors like Meera Mukherjee, Nagji Patel, Himmat Shah and Mrinalini Mukherjee have attempted to blur boundaries between art and crafts and asserted the minority cultural affinity.
In the late fifties and intermittently over the next two decades, the centre of artistic evolution shifted to Baroda, where the Fine Arts department of M. S. University became springboard for varied aesthetic ideologies and innovations. This credited effort was brainchild of a collective artistic energy of practitioners, the Baroda Group (including artists Sankho Chaudhuri, N.S. Bendre, Nasreen Mohamedi, Gulammohammed Sheikh and later Bhupen Khakhar, Ratan Parimoo, Jeram Patel and K.G. Subramanyan), whose experiments in abstraction, Pop Art and Neo-Dada considerably deepened Indian art's engagement with modernism. This art school also brought to fore printmakers like Jyoti Bhatt, KG Subramanyan(who taught here), Rini Dhumal, Laxma Goud. Other prominent printmakers of period immediately following Indian independence include Sanat Kar, Lalu Prasad Shaw, Amitava Banerjee, Somnath Hore and Krishna Reddy.
The development of infrastructural facilities in form of some institutions providing basic studio and technical facilities has given much- needed impetus to the printmaking activity all over the country. Garhi Studio (started in 1974) and Lalit Kala Regional Centres Delhi (1955), Chennai (1978), Lucknow (1983), Calcutta (1984), graphic department at Delhi College of Art, Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, the Print Studio and Academy of Fine Arts in Mumbai and the Kanoria Centre for Arts in Ahmedabad are some amongst them. Besides under the guidance of Jagmohan Chopra of Delhi Silpi Chakra and banner of Group-8, the first all-Indian show was held in New Delhi in 1969, followed by many others. Similarly the Indian Printmakers Guild, formed by capital's young printmakers in 1990 has been active in producing diverse prints by its members like Ananda Moy Banerji, Dattatraya Apte, Jayant Gajera, K.R. Subbanna, Kanchan Chander, Moti Zharotia, Sushanta Guha, Sukhvinder Singh, Subba Ghosh, and Shukla Sawant besides Anupam Sud, Jai Zharotia.
Chhaap, a printmaking workshop in Baroda established on a cooperative basis in 1999, promoted by the artists and printmakers Gulammohammed Sheikh, Vijay Bagodi and Kavita Shah also promotes printmaking activity. The printmaking activity had witnessed a special crisis owing to its labor and material intensive nature, but gladly the regressive shadows have lately disappeared and once again printmaking is being realized as a spectacular mainstream practice.
Came the seventies and eighties marked with concurrent political and national disruptions and there arose a spontaneous reaction amongst the art community, and artists like Tyeb Mehta, Rameshwar Broota, Ganesh Pyne, Gieve Patel, Gulammoahammed Sheikh, Manjit Bawa, Bhupen Khakhar and Jogen Chowdhary tried to make a new political comment using the Hindu mythic icons. The final art product was configured in backdrop of this new energized state of affairs, addressing the agonies and dilemmas of a nation and its people bathed in the newly-fangled autonomous verve. In the meanwhile, feminist wave grappled the brewing scenario with the accumulated endeavors of artists like Arpita Singh, Saroj Pal, Nalini Malani, Navjot Altaf, Anjolie Menon, Madhvi Parekh etc. and their interventionist expressional mode continues to dominate the contemporary Indian art scene even more, accentuated with the experimental art practices delineating the subjective 'self'.
The period ascending the post 1980 contour accounts for some of the most dramatic changes witnessed in the post-colonial India. The rampaging germs of phenomena's like liberalization, globalization, consumerism opened up multitude of options-experiences produced never before aided by elevating levels of mind, media, opportunities and mobility. The boom era of international art auctions has lately dawned upon the Indian art, with Subodh Gupta's sculptural installations fetching record price. Artists have also received required impetus courtesy trans-national projects, grants, fellowships, international curatorial collaborations and residencies.
Artists like Atul Dodiya, Baiju Parthan, Jitish Kallat, Natraj Sharma and Sudarshan Shetty have embarked on conceptual experiments by the means of deploying devices and icons drawn from the realm of mass and popular culture, sign-systems ubiquitous in the society. A trend towards 'Internationalism' has percolated the Indian art scene as the artist's concerns have become more global and the expressional mode more universal. The notion of art has come to be defined in terms of accelerated interface shaped by technological acceleration giving competing versions of reality and re-defining the existing conventional means of aesthetic contemplation. Most of the artists then have tried to situate themselves in such conflicting 'post-modern' times by multilayering their existing engagements with experimental apparatus and producing virtual, ephemeral spaces through installations, digital imagery and videos( Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani, L.N. Tallur to name a few). There are others who in a sensitive vein weave aesthetic narrative around 'the identity of self' as an image of wholeness as well as a victim bend on the forces of aggression and consumerism giving rise to performance based body art. These new 'art situations' fall beyond the purview of the established studio-gallery-museum system, gesticulating new forms of response including baffling the conditioned viewer.
The post-modern idiom in Indian art is relatively in its nascent stage, gathering earth to firmly establish its feet until another 'ism' comes and sways the wave with itself again. But as Friedrich Hegel states 'art to belong to the spirit it is made in', the new set of alternate art genre too recognizes and interprets the post-haste socio-political-cultural renewal process of an equally mutating nation today vis-à-vis its sensibilities.