The fifties were the halcyon days in the trajectory of Indian art, the era before the art world lost its innocence! And with that innocence were all the concomitant qualities of a pre-pubescent awakening. Artists were struggling to shake off the shackles of a recent colonial past, not quite certain as to how they should respond to the newly found freedom. There was Shantiniketan and its influence on the one hand and the harsher attractions of the artistic revolutions in modernist Europe on the other. Indian artists were caught between the two. Some painters remained trapped in the idyllic and mannerist attempts at a search for Indian roots looking to miniatures and murals from the past and folk art from the present. Oil painting had already made its debut with artists such as Ravi Varma and Amrita Sher-gil having created large bodies of work which formed the bedrock for future trends.
Let us look at the art milieu at the time. Any burgeoning art scene rests upon the holy trinity of artist, critic and patron with the gallery or dealer as the intermediary. The atmosphere in Delhi during the Fifties was akin to a salon presided over by the reigning arbiters of the time, gentle earnest and somewhat dilettante. Unknown to many, the brilliant young Satish Gujral was working in a little room in Constitution House painting his powerful paintings of the partition and a young Ram Kumar camped in a Karol Bagh barsati! Institutions such as the Lalit Kala Akademi (LKA) and the National Gallery of Modern Art were set up in the absence of a market and played an extremely important role under the inspired management of stalwarts such as Mulk Raj Anand, Karl Khandalawala and Richard Bartholomew, people of great knowledge and vision. Sadly, the LKA was to later degenerate into mediocrity giving way to powerful private players who now continue to shape the future of Indian art.
Perhaps because of the lack of a market and its inevitable commercialisation, artists of the Fifties were idealists who truly believed in art for art?s sake. Critics such as Charles Fabri, Richard Barthalomew and Krishna Chaitanya wrote about art with intense seriousness. With the exception of Dhoomimal?s, a bookshop which sometimes showed and sold paintings and the fledging Kumar Gallery, there were no commercial outlets for art. Bhabesh Sanyal had come to Delhi from Lahore and helped to set up the All India Fine Arts Society which became the main venue for exhibitions, where the occasional buyer was generally a diplomat! In 1957 my first exhibition was held in a Delhi Garden where Husain helped me put up the paintings on bamboo stands! Later the exhibition moved to Bombay to the Bhulabhai Institute, which was truly the crucible of the modern movement. Set in the rambling old house of Madhuri Desai, theatre and art flourished there and both Gaitonde and Husain had studios on a screened off verandah.
In 1948, the Progressive Artists Group had broken onto the scene in Bombay, eschewing the academic training that had been stuffed down their throats by the British rulers ? but gladly embracing the modernist Europeans led by Picasso and his contemporaries in Europe, thus giving artists a new direction for the coming decade ? the Fifties. This injection of modernism actually compounded the prevailing confusion, which only began to resolve itself in the late sixties.
Now Bombay clearly emerged as the most important centre in the fifties with many of the moderns such as Souza, Samant, Husain, Gaitonde, Padamsee, Raza, Tyeb and Ara, working out of the metropolis. In parallel were the traditionalists who were attempting to ?modernise? the Indian idiom, with artists such as Chavda, Raval, Bendre, Palsikar, and Hebbar enjoying the patronage of the fashionable rich of Bombay who were slowly beginning to buy Indian art to decorate their Malabar Hill mansions. The foreign portraitist Langhammer, and artists like Ara and B Prabha enjoyed immense popularity and it?s with these artists that an art market was born. The Fifties also marked the beginning of the immense future adulation of Husain by an adoring public. Criticism enjoyed a great surge in Bombay with critics like Ezekiel and Dyaneshwar Nadkarni reigning supreme for several decades. Shawn Mandy?s gentle family paper The Illustrated Weekly provided a forum where art was often granted a colour page or two. Corporate houses such as the Tatas, Burmah Shell, Air India and Larsen and Toubro were the first to make serious collections and to respond to the moderns. Chemould started to convert its framing shop into a gallery and the Bombay Art Society held annual exhibitions at the Jehangir Art Gallery modelled on the Royal Academy in London.
Simultaneously important work was being done in Madras under KCS Panicker at the Madras School of art with the paintings of Ramanujam Sushil Mukherjee and DP Roy Chowdhury making a solid contribution that, at the time, failed to find an audience or patronage.
In Bengal, the influence of Shantiniketan was felt throughout that decade with Abanindranath Tagore, Nandlal Bose, Binod Behari Mukherjee and Ram Kinkar Baij becoming the living icons for the Bhadralok, part of an extraordinarily inclusive cultural renaissance led by Rabindranath Tagore that embraced literature, poetry and music along with art and sculpture. Jamini Roy?s determination to bring art to every household with his folk inspired paintings and in fact created the first ?modern? paintings perhaps that were totally rooted in an Indian idiom. His contribution is better understood today. However, the patronage continued to be institutional rather than individual with Lady Ranu Mukherjee?s Fine Arts Academy being an important hub for art in Calcutta, where artists could gather and exhibit.
The Indian art scene has evolved today from the slightly amateurish ambience of Fifties to one of cutting edge professionalism. In this context one recalls the Fifties as a period when most artists lived in modest circumstances often relying on teaching as a profession. The art community was closely knit before the commodification of art redefined the whole ethos that now rests on bitter professional rivalries and the manipulations of an art market in which the artist is both protagonist and victim.