#: locale=en
## Tour
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tour.description = Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Noida
### Title
tour.name = KNMA, Noida
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htmlText_37204646_2682_35F1_41C1_5C9F02B4A757.html = PROGRESSIVES: A GENERATION OF PARTITION AND INDEPENDENCE
A dialectic of euphoria and agony shaped the cultural landscape of India during the late 1940s and 50s, following the conflicting experience of Independence and Partition that the nation underwent. A new generation of artists, unrestrained by the populist and revivalist ideas of the anti-colonial era and emboldened by the liberal notions of individual freedom and imagination, sought a new form of expression where Indian modernism found its most crystalline moments. Mainly based in the industrial and cosmopolitan city of Mumbai, FN Souza, MF Husain, and SH Raza, along with a few other painters, formed the Progressives Art Group in 1947 – a historical initiative which soon found its followers in the artists such as Tyeb Mehta, VS Gaitonde, and Krishen Khanna, and sympathisers in the solitary souls like Ram Kumar. This unique aesthetic of ‘Progress’, heroic yet collective in spirit, confidently engaged with the questions of ‘developing the urban’ and ‘strengthening the rural’, working in tandem with the Nehruvian modernization project. Most of these artists visited or migrated to the centres of historical modernism like Paris and London – the ruins of Europe’s imperial power – maintaining a measured distance from the abstract and expressionistic version of modernism propagated from the newly emerged global power, the United States of America.
The KNMA collection started by acquiring paintings made by this unique generation of artists, “the Progressives”. The collection holds iconic paintings like Souza’s Indian Family (1947) and Birth (1955), Husain’s Yatra (1955) or Raza’s Saurashtra (early 1980s). Photographs of many of these artists taken by Richard Bartholomew and Parthiv Shah, along with a few other seminal works, transport one to an era of tremendous archival and historical importance.
PROGRESSIVES: A GENERATION OF PARTITION AND INDEPENDENCE
A dialectic of euphoria and agony shaped the cultural landscape of India during the late 1940s and 50s, following the conflicting experience of Independence and Partition that the nation underwent. A new generation of artists, unrestrained by the populist and revivalist ideas of the anti-colonial era and emboldened by the liberal notions of individual freedom and imagination, sought a new form of expression where Indian modernism found its most crystalline moments. Mainly based in the industrial and cosmopolitan city of Mumbai, FN Souza, MF Husain, and SH Raza, along with a few other painters, formed the Progressives Art Group in 1947 – a historical initiative which soon found its followers in the artists such as Tyeb Mehta, VS Gaitonde, and Krishen Khanna, and sympathisers in the solitary souls like Ram Kumar. This unique aesthetic of ‘Progress’, heroic yet collective in spirit, confidently engaged with the questions of ‘developing the urban’ and ‘strengthening the rural’, working in tandem with the Nehruvian modernization project. Most of these artists visited or migrated to the centres of historical modernism like Paris and London – the ruins of Europe’s imperial power – maintaining a measured distance from the abstract and expressionistic version of modernism propagated from the newly emerged global power, the United States of America.
The KNMA collection started by acquiring paintings made by this unique generation of artists, “the Progressives”. The collection holds iconic paintings like Souza’s Indian Family (1947) and Birth (1955), Husain’s Yatra (1955) or Raza’s Saurashtra (early 1980s). Photographs of many of these artists taken by Richard Bartholomew and Parthiv Shah, along with a few other seminal works, transport one to an era of tremendous archival and historical importance.
PROGRESSIVES: A GENERATION OF PARTITION AND INDEPENDENCE
A dialectic of euphoria and agony shaped the cultural landscape of India during the late 1940s and 50s, following the conflicting experience of Independence and Partition that the nation underwent. A new generation of artists, unrestrained by the populist and revivalist ideas of the anti-colonial era and emboldened by the liberal notions of individual freedom and imagination, sought a new form of expression where Indian modernism found its most crystalline moments. Mainly based in the industrial and cosmopolitan city of Mumbai, FN Souza, MF Husain, and SH Raza, along with a few other painters, formed the Progressives Art Group in 1947 – a historical initiative which soon found its followers in the artists such as Tyeb Mehta, VS Gaitonde, and Krishen Khanna, and sympathisers in the solitary souls like Ram Kumar. This unique aesthetic of ‘Progress’, heroic yet collective in spirit, confidently engaged with the questions of ‘developing the urban’ and ‘strengthening the rural’, working in tandem with the Nehruvian modernization project. Most of these artists visited or migrated to the centres of historical modernism like Paris and London – the ruins of Europe’s imperial power – maintaining a measured distance from the abstract and expressionistic version of modernism propagated from the newly emerged global power, the United States of America.
The KNMA collection started by acquiring paintings made by this unique generation of artists, “the Progressives”. The collection holds iconic paintings like Souza’s Indian Family (1947) and Birth (1955), Husain’s Yatra (1955) or Raza’s Saurashtra (early 1980s). Photographs of many of these artists taken by Richard Bartholomew and Parthiv Shah, along with a few other seminal works, transport one to an era of tremendous archival and historical importance.
THE BLACK WALL
The Black Wall is not painted black. It inhabits a range of monochromatic works and their nuanced imagery. It is conspicuous because it holds works of different sizes and forms, some massy, some linear, quasi-abstract and abstract, bending towards the non-representational.
The walls of a museum are often overlooked as inconspicuous, permanent, or modular accessories that camouflage and reappear in new but limited configurations. However, at KNMA, they translate, deflect, differ and host an emergence of artworks and artistic propositions, remaining attentive to local, regional, individual and intersecting histories of art. In its two semi-permanent spaces, with layers of painted-over surfaces, within new and old constructions, the walls of KNMA have been unassuming participants and bystanders to exhibition making.
For the ‘Ten Years of KNMA’, we present The Black Wall with works chosen from retrospectives previously organised at the museum. This black wall is an encyclopaedic and lexical resource that anticipates future research and comparative methodologies built upon an extant knowledge base.
The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art turns ten!
We take this exhilarating moment to look back and reflect on our journey. The exhibition celebrates the contemporary art scenes of South Asia, and the work of KNMA that has emboldened the visibility of the region.
KNMA was inaugurated with the exhibition Open Doors in 2010 with fifty artworks from the museum collection shared with the larger public. This is when we ventured into an uncharted terrain, seeking and evolving a model of a contemporary art museum aligned to the needs of a layered art-ecology, shaping and manifesting ourselves amidst several exigencies of expression, in two semi-permanent locations, one, in a shopping mall and the other, in a technology hub. Realising the publics for the museum, taking on novel approaches and propositions, presenting histories, perspectives and voices that are now gradually finding acknowledgement in the discourse on the South Asian art and history, has opened us in directions we had not imagined in our early years.
Through a practice of exhibition-making and varied educational programs, KNMA has registered itself in public memory and mobilised previously unseen archives, collections and documents, propagating values of sharing and institutional openness. The exhibitions at KNMA have been generative sites of assimilating, reading and processing cultural material produced in the recent pasts. With seventy plus mega-exhibitions, 500 plus engaging programs, and facilitating multiple institutional collaborations all across India and globally, KNMA shall continue its giant leaps into the next decade with the encouragement of the art world and its diverse audience.
This exhibition intends to also act as a measure of self-assessment, as we collate, convert and create different formats and content to explore the collection and exhibition archives, extracts from diverse programs, films and registers of networks and intergenerational conversations that the museum has immersed itself into.
The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art turns ten!
We take this exhilarating moment to look back and reflect on our journey. The exhibition celebrates the contemporary art scenes of South Asia, and the work of KNMA that has emboldened the visibility of the region.
KNMA was inaugurated with the exhibition Open Doors in 2010 with fifty artworks from the museum collection shared with the larger public. This is when we ventured into an uncharted terrain, seeking and evolving a model of a contemporary art museum aligned to the needs of a layered art-ecology, shaping and manifesting ourselves amidst several exigencies of expression, in two semi-permanent locations, one, in a shopping mall and the other, in a technology hub. Realising the publics for the museum, taking on novel approaches and propositions, presenting histories, perspectives and voices that are now gradually finding acknowledgement in the discourse on the South Asian art and history, has opened us in directions we had not imagined in our early years.
Through a practice of exhibition-making and varied educational programs, KNMA has registered itself in public memory and mobilised previously unseen archives, collections and documents, propagating values of sharing and institutional openness. The exhibitions at KNMA have been generative sites of assimilating, reading and processing cultural material produced in the recent pasts. With seventy plus mega-exhibitions, 500 plus engaging programs, and facilitating multiple institutional collaborations all across India and globally, KNMA shall continue its giant leaps into the next decade with the encouragement of the art world and its diverse audience.
This exhibition intends to also act as a measure of self-assessment, as we collate, convert and create different formats and content to explore the collection and exhibition archives, extracts from diverse programs, films and registers of networks and intergenerational conversations that the museum has immersed itself into.
ARTISTS. PEDAGOGUES. VISUAL POETS
Learning, viewing, making, sensing, imagining and immersing life in art is both a privilege and a choice that commands rigour and commitment over decades. Practices of artist-pedagogues grouped together in this section were firmly grounded in the rhythms of everyday life. As visual poets, Nandalal Bose, Benodebehari Mukherjee, Somnath Hore, KG Subramanian, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Krishna Reddy, A Ramachandran, Ganesh Haloi and Anupam Sud were inspirational figures, who created a novel discourse around their practice of teaching and art making that still holds sway over generations of artists.
Historical lineages of modern and contemporary South Asian art continue to be read, rooted and routed through art schools and informal and experimental pedagogic programmes in the region. The transference of artistic vocabularies, impulses and empathies, schools of thought and their speculative interpretations occurs slowly and in unforeseeable ways. Juxtaposing these artists' oeuvres in unprecedented ways, we at KNMA engaged with their inheritances and were in the process left astounded by the unexpected encounters and discoveries. As observers, storytellers and aestheticians, these pedagogues take us through the intensity of words and power of images.
PROGRESSIVES: A GENERATION OF PARTITION AND INDEPENDENCE
A dialectic of euphoria and agony shaped the cultural landscape of India during the late 1940s and 50s, following the conflicting experience of Independence and Partition that the nation underwent. A new generation of artists, unrestrained by the populist and revivalist ideas of the anti-colonial era and emboldened by the liberal notions of individual freedom and imagination, sought a new form of expression where Indian modernism found its most crystalline moments. Mainly based in the industrial and cosmopolitan city of Mumbai, FN Souza, MF Husain, and SH Raza, along with a few other painters, formed the Progressives Art Group in 1947 – a historical initiative which soon found its followers in the artists such as Tyeb Mehta, VS Gaitonde, and Krishen Khanna, and sympathisers in the solitary souls like Ram Kumar. This unique aesthetic of ‘Progress’, heroic yet collective in spirit, confidently engaged with the questions of ‘developing the urban’ and ‘strengthening the rural’, working in tandem with the Nehruvian modernization project. Most of these artists visited or migrated to the centres of historical modernism like Paris and London – the ruins of Europe’s imperial power – maintaining a measured distance from the abstract and expressionistic version of modernism propagated from the newly emerged global power, the United States of America.
The KNMA collection started by acquiring paintings made by this unique generation of artists, “the Progressives”. The collection holds iconic paintings like Souza’s Indian Family (1947) and Birth (1955), Husain’s Yatra (1955) or Raza’s Saurashtra (early 1980s). Photographs of many of these artists taken by Richard Bartholomew and Parthiv Shah, along with a few other seminal works, transport one to an era of tremendous archival and historical importance.
PEERS, COLLECTIVES AND INTERLOCUTORS
At KNMA, we have had the privilege to explore and follow the cues from one exhibition to another. The solo-presentation of Surendran Nair’s journey as a student at the Govt. College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum, and then at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda, during the late 1970s and 80s led us to the group exhibition Pond Near the Field that further mapped the local art-scene around these art colleges. These intersecting histories also brought to focus the connected oeuvres of KP Krishnakumar, KM Madhusudhanan, CK Rajan, and NN Rimzon; all alumni of the Trivandrum art college, a place where they, along with Nair, spent their formative years to initiate and evolve a radical art practice. Their interventions had a considerable impact on the post-Emergency Indian art, particularly with the short-lived Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors’ Association led by Krishnakumar.
This small cross-section presents the studies and portraits of peers and artist-friends done by this influential collective. Their works, camaraderie and conversations are in pursuit here to create a portrait of the post-Emergency Malayali youth, who made significant changes in the academic pedagogy of the time and the times to follow.
PEERS, COLLECTIVES AND INTERLOCUTORS
At KNMA, we have had the privilege to explore and follow the cues from one exhibition to another. The solo-presentation of Surendran Nair’s journey as a student at the Govt. College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum, and then at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda, during the late 1970s and 80s led us to the group exhibition Pond Near the Field that further mapped the local art-scene around these art colleges. These intersecting histories also brought to focus the connected oeuvres of KP Krishnakumar, KM Madhusudhanan, CK Rajan, and NN Rimzon; all alumni of the Trivandrum art college, a place where they, along with Nair, spent their formative years to initiate and evolve a radical art practice. Their interventions had a considerable impact on the post-Emergency Indian art, particularly with the short-lived Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors’ Association led by Krishnakumar.
This small cross-section presents the studies and portraits of peers and artist-friends done by this influential collective. Their works, camaraderie and conversations are in pursuit here to create a portrait of the post-Emergency Malayali youth, who made significant changes in the academic pedagogy of the time and the times to follow.
THE BLACK WALL
The Black Wall is not painted black. It inhabits a range of monochromatic works and their nuanced imagery. It is conspicuous because it holds works of different sizes and forms, some massy, some linear, quasi-abstract and abstract, bending towards the non-representational.
The walls of a museum are often overlooked as inconspicuous, permanent, or modular accessories that camouflage and reappear in new but limited configurations. However, at KNMA, they translate, deflect, differ and host an emergence of artworks and artistic propositions, remaining attentive to local, regional, individual and intersecting histories of art. In its two semi-permanent spaces, with layers of painted-over surfaces, within new and old constructions, the walls of KNMA have been unassuming participants and bystanders to exhibition making.
For the ‘Ten Years of KNMA’, we present The Black Wall with works chosen from retrospectives previously organised at the museum. This black wall is an encyclopaedic and lexical resource that anticipates future research and comparative methodologies built upon an extant knowledge base.
THE BLACK WALL
The Black Wall is not painted black. It inhabits a range of monochromatic works and their nuanced imagery. It is conspicuous because it holds works of different sizes and forms, some massy, some linear, quasi-abstract and abstract, bending towards the non-representational.
The walls of a museum are often overlooked as inconspicuous, permanent, or modular accessories that camouflage and reappear in new but limited configurations. However, at KNMA, they translate, deflect, differ and host an emergence of artworks and artistic propositions, remaining attentive to local, regional, individual and intersecting histories of art. In its two semi-permanent spaces, with layers of painted-over surfaces, within new and old constructions, the walls of KNMA have been unassuming participants and bystanders to exhibition making.
For the ‘Ten Years of KNMA’, we present The Black Wall with works chosen from retrospectives previously organised at the museum. This black wall is an encyclopaedic and lexical resource that anticipates future research and comparative methodologies built upon an extant knowledge base.
PROGRESSIVES: A GENERATION OF PARTITION AND INDEPENDENCE
A dialectic of euphoria and agony shaped the cultural landscape of India during the late 1940s and 50s, following the conflicting experience of Independence and Partition that the nation underwent. A new generation of artists, unrestrained by the populist and revivalist ideas of the anti-colonial era and emboldened by the liberal notions of individual freedom and imagination, sought a new form of expression where Indian modernism found its most crystalline moments. Mainly based in the industrial and cosmopolitan city of Mumbai, FN Souza, MF Husain, and SH Raza, along with a few other painters, formed the Progressives Art Group in 1947 – a historical initiative which soon found its followers in the artists such as Tyeb Mehta, VS Gaitonde, and Krishen Khanna, and sympathisers in the solitary souls like Ram Kumar. This unique aesthetic of ‘Progress’, heroic yet collective in spirit, confidently engaged with the questions of ‘developing the urban’ and ‘strengthening the rural’, working in tandem with the Nehruvian modernization project. Most of these artists visited or migrated to the centres of historical modernism like Paris and London – the ruins of Europe’s imperial power – maintaining a measured distance from the abstract and expressionistic version of modernism propagated from the newly emerged global power, the United States of America.
The KNMA collection started by acquiring paintings made by this unique generation of artists, “the Progressives”. The collection holds iconic paintings like Souza’s Indian Family (1947) and Birth (1955), Husain’s Yatra (1955) or Raza’s Saurashtra (early 1980s). Photographs of many of these artists taken by Richard Bartholomew and Parthiv Shah, along with a few other seminal works, transport one to an era of tremendous archival and historical importance.
PROGRESSIVES: A GENERATION OF PARTITION AND INDEPENDENCE
A dialectic of euphoria and agony shaped the cultural landscape of India during the late 1940s and 50s, following the conflicting experience of Independence and Partition that the nation underwent. A new generation of artists, unrestrained by the populist and revivalist ideas of the anti-colonial era and emboldened by the liberal notions of individual freedom and imagination, sought a new form of expression where Indian modernism found its most crystalline moments. Mainly based in the industrial and cosmopolitan city of Mumbai, FN Souza, MF Husain, and SH Raza, along with a few other painters, formed the Progressives Art Group in 1947 – a historical initiative which soon found its followers in the artists such as Tyeb Mehta, VS Gaitonde, and Krishen Khanna, and sympathisers in the solitary souls like Ram Kumar. This unique aesthetic of ‘Progress’, heroic yet collective in spirit, confidently engaged with the questions of ‘developing the urban’ and ‘strengthening the rural’, working in tandem with the Nehruvian modernization project. Most of these artists visited or migrated to the centres of historical modernism like Paris and London – the ruins of Europe’s imperial power – maintaining a measured distance from the abstract and expressionistic version of modernism propagated from the newly emerged global power, the United States of America.
The KNMA collection started by acquiring paintings made by this unique generation of artists, “the Progressives”. The collection holds iconic paintings like Souza’s Indian Family (1947) and Birth (1955), Husain’s Yatra (1955) or Raza’s Saurashtra (early 1980s). Photographs of many of these artists taken by Richard Bartholomew and Parthiv Shah, along with a few other seminal works, transport one to an era of tremendous archival and historical importance.
THE BLACK WALL
The Black Wall is not painted black. It inhabits a range of monochromatic works and their nuanced imagery. It is conspicuous because it holds works of different sizes and forms, some massy, some linear, quasi-abstract and abstract, bending towards the non-representational.
The walls of a museum are often overlooked as inconspicuous, permanent, or modular accessories that camouflage and reappear in new but limited configurations. However, at KNMA, they translate, deflect, differ and host an emergence of artworks and artistic propositions, remaining attentive to local, regional, individual and intersecting histories of art. In its two semi-permanent spaces, with layers of painted-over surfaces, within new and old constructions, the walls of KNMA have been unassuming participants and bystanders to exhibition making.
For the ‘Ten Years of KNMA’, we present The Black Wall with works chosen from retrospectives previously organised at the museum. This black wall is an encyclopaedic and lexical resource that anticipates future research and comparative methodologies built upon an extant knowledge base.