Art Review :
Indian Modernism via an Eclectic and Elusive Artist
By Holland Cotter
New York Times, August 19, 2008

..."In India the emergency was a bruising colonialism that had become as intolerable to artists as to everyone else. From the official British perspective, India had no living art. Its indigenous traditions were dead, the stuff of museums, and ethnological ones at that. Western classicism was the only classicism; European oil painting was the only worthy medium. Indian artists had to learn it if they wanted careers, but even then their options were limited.

Naturally some people, British and Indian alike, saw things another way. ERNEST BINFIELD HAVELL, a British teacher and art historian, did. He recognized Indian art as the grand, ancient, still-vibrant phenomenon it was. And as director of the Government School of Art in Calcutta, he encouraged Indian students to bring their own past, transformed, into the present."

Read more :
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/arts/design/20bose.html

Image :
"Annapurna," 1943.
By Nandalal Bose
Wash and tempera on paper, 17 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches.
National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.