NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART

NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART

Subject : Culture

Context : After Opening its doors on January 5, the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) has planned a series of programmes, including free weekend visits, at the museum.

Concept :

• The upcoming calendar year at the national institution includes retrospectives of Nandalal Bose, Ramkinker Baij and Amrita Sher-Gil, and an exhibition of Tantra Art.

Ramkinkar Baij

• Ramkinkar Baij (1906-1980), one of the most seminal artists of modern India, was an iconic sculptor, painter and graphic artist.
• He was born in Bankura, West Bengal
• In 1925, he made his way to Kala Bhavana, the art school at Santiniketan and was under the guidance of Nandalal Bose.
• Along with Nandalal Bose and Benodebehari Mukherjee, he played a pivotal role in making Santiniketan one of the most important centres for modern art in pre-Independent India.

Contributions to modern art:

• He assimilated the idioms of the European modern visual language and yet was rooted in his own Indian ethos.
• He experimented restlessly with forms, moving freely from figurative to abstract and back to figurative.
• His themes were steeped in a deep sense of humanism and an instinctive understanding of the symbiotic relationship between man and nature.
• Both in his paintings and sculptures, he pushed the limits of experimentation and ventured into the use of new materials

 Nandala Bose

• Nandalal Bose was a disciple of Abanindranath Tagore. He became the principal of Kala Bhavan, Shanti Niketan in 1922.
• Nandalal Bose also originally painted the Indian flag, slightly different from its present form, and it was inspired by the freedom struggle.
• He became principal of the Kala Bhavan at Tagore’s International University Santiniketan in 1922.
• He was also asked by Jawaharlal Nehru to sketch the emblems for the Government of India’s awards, including the Bharat Ratna and the Padma Shri.
• He is also known to have taken up the task of beautifying the original manuscript of the Constitution of India.

  Amrita Sher Gil :

• Known as India’s Frida Kahlo.
• Born in Hungary to a Sikh Aristocrat, mother was a Jewish opera singer from Hungary.
• Early paintings display a significant influence of the Western modes of painting with special influence of works of Hungarian painters, especially the Nagybanya School of painting.
• The first important painting was “Young Girls“. This painting led to her election as an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris in 1933, making her the youngest ever to have received this recognition.
• She was greatly impressed and influenced by the Mughal and Pahari schools of painting and the cave paintings at Ajanta.
• In 1937, she produced famous South Indian trilogy of paintings – “Bride’s Toilet“, “Brahmacharis” and “The South Indian Villagers”.
• The Government of India has declared her works as National Art Treasures, and most of them are housed in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.

  National Gallery of Modern Art :

• NGMA was established in 1954, at the Jaipur House, New Delhi.
• It is run and administered as a subordinate office to the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.
• The NGMA has two branches, one at Mumbai and the other at Bengaluru.
• One of its objectives is to acquire and preserve works of modern art from the 1850s onward.