{"id":196748,"date":"2013-10-04T14:57:46","date_gmt":"2013-10-04T09:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=196748"},"modified":"2013-10-04T14:57:46","modified_gmt":"2013-10-04T09:27:46","slug":"face-of-a-nation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/face-of-a-nation\/","title":{"rendered":"Face of a Nation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Photos
Photos courtesy: Delhi art gallery<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nNearly 300 years ago, Indian artists in princely courts were besieged by an influx of European artists seeking their fortunes in India. Lured by the prospect of painting the fabled maharajas and nawabs, these artists \u2014 mostly flocking from Britain, France and Portugal \u2014 brought along European styles of art. Suddenly the traditional watercolour miniature, a form most Indian artists preferred to worked in, was rendered obsolete by the luscious oil-on-canvas. Thus Indian artists turned to portrait painting.
\nHaving researched extensively on the subject and digging around several important sites in the country, the Delhi Art Gallery (DAG) has now put together a show of portraits spanning 250 years. Indian Portraits: The Face of a People<\/em> is as much an anthropological exercise as it is an art show. For the DAG, though, it is part of a larger mission to research, archive and document the history of Indian art and restore what curator Kishore Singh calls \u201ca continuity we lost with our art traditions under the British\u201d.
\nHere, under one roof, is a period of tumultuous change in art styles. The growing demand for portraits produced many greats such as Raja Ravi Varma. Their subjects, though, were no longer men, but also women, who increasingly began to come out of their purdah \u2014 first the courtesans, then the elites and the royals. The Parsis, the most Westernised of Indians, were the first to commission portraits of women. Some of the finest works came from the Bombay Presidency artists, with NR Sardesai producing magnificent portraits. Looking at Sardesai\u2019s painting of his sister, Singh points out, \u201cThis could be a Rembrandt.\u201d
\nWhen the modernists took the reins, they broke away from the realist template to paint more psychological portraits, a phenomenon that began with Rabindranath Tagore and gained greatest momentum in the hands of FN Souza. No longer was the physical likeness that Varma\u2019s school perfected important. The lines were now distorted. Tagore\u2019s androgynous painting of Kadambari Devi and Sunil Das\u2019 haunting Pushpa<\/em> are fine examples: the face is no longer as significant as the artist\u2019s impression of it. Tagore\u2019s works, though, are more ambiguous. \u201cYou cannot exactly call his work portraits in the academic sense. It\u2019s often his own fantasy being painted on canvas,\u201d says art critic Ella Datta. The same goes for the Kolkata-based artist Rabin Mondal, who, Singh says, showed \u201cthe venal quality of mankind\u201d.
\nHe points out that the previous artists did not have the luxury to experiment. \u201cThey worked largely for commissions and had to paint what their subjects liked,\u201d he says. The most coveted commissions were, of course, those of the Indian royals, but more often than not they turned out to be tricky. Singh offers several anecdotes his team unearthed during their research. To begin with, the lure of painting the Nawabs of Arcot and Awadh brought European artists in droves from Madras and Calcutta. But such personages were neither used to posing for hours nor to listening to white men. Even Raja Ravi Varma was once denied a sitting by the Nawab of Hyderabad. On the other hand, the Indian artists keen to pick up the trade would make basic mistakes like painting a child out of proportion or a poor-quality horizon.
\nThe advent of photography was another game changer. Studio photographers often employed painters to paint over the photographs, giving them imaginary backgrounds that the subjects picked. Additionally, \u201cIt was no longer the elites who could record themselves; now even the masses could get their pictures taken,\u201d says Datta. With an increasing number of people getting photographed or painted, more ways of looking at genders, communities and classes emerged. \u201cWhat are the patterns of clothing in different places, why is one maharaja dressed like this and not another, what is a family\u2019s background, we can look at these images from different points of view,\u201d says Singh.
\nThe exhibition brings together a multitude of tales. Tales of people, places, societies and traditions. As a viewer makes his way from one lushly painted canvas to another, surrounded by the stately royals, artists\u2019 self-portraits endowed with heroism, and even a bold caricature of Jawaharlal Nehru, it becomes the most captivating walk through history.
\nThe exhibition is on display till 26 October at Delhi Art Gallery<\/em>
\naradhna@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Delhi Art Gallery\u2019s exhibition of Indian portraits is a fascinating chronicle of our art history, says Aradhna Wal <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":196753,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[7051,5933,7541,7668,7669,7670,7666],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196748"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}