Delhi gallery takes Bengal art to Mumbai

After Delhi, denizens of Mumbai can now see the rich art heritage of Bengal, thanks to Delhi Art Gallery's seminal exhibition.
In its new gallery in Mumbai's Kala Ghoda district, Delhi Art Gallery's exhibition 'The Art of Bengal' featuring over 200 artworks from Bengal will be on till March 15, the organisers said.
"For us, showing the extensive repertoire of the Bengal School in Mumbai was critical to the understanding of the development of modern art in the country, and Kolkata's immense contribution in this," Kishore Singh, head of exhibition at the Delhi Art Gallery said.
The exhibition begins with exhibits of the 19th century when local folk artists began painting on mythological and religious themes traditionally on cloth, known as Kalighat 'pat' (scroll).

Almost during the same period, the Bengal school of Art also flourished with its romantic imagery using the technique of watercolour wash.
The generation is represented in the exhibits, featuring the works of Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Asit Haldar, Kshitindranath Majumdar and D P Roy Chowdhury.

The artists of the 1930s and 40s rejected this school in favour of a new, robust form of Indian art. Creations of these modernist masters like Somnath Hore, Prodosh Das Gupta, Chittaprosad, Rabin Mondal, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Jogen Chowdhury, Nikhil Biswas, Bijan Choudhary, B C Sanyal, Chintamoni Kar and others, are also being displayed.
With Bengal as the connecting thread, this exhibition features artists not merely claiming ancestry to Bengal but those vitally nurtured in its cultural climate.

With its entire collection of over 32,000 pieces of art, the gallery is one of the largest repositories of Bengal art of the past two centuries.