A sculptor's world

Where does one place Group 1890, the short-lived but influential collective of Indian artists, within the spectrum of art movements? A new book tries to answer this question. An excerpt

It was Ramkinkar Baij who would prove to be a turning point, for both breaking away from imposed tradition as well as using unorthodox materials in Santiniketan to get over the difficulty of finding stone to carve in Bengal. Having worked closely with progressive European sculptors visiting Santiniketan who did not bother much with neo-classical conventions, Baij trained himself to work with cement and mortar, often in a monumental size, to be placed in public spaces. He was perhaps the first artist to experiment with abstract forms with no recognisable subject…

By the 1930s and '40s, the art scene in India was changing considerably and sculpture too was undergoing a revival. Modern ideas began to shape individual expression...

As forms and mediums underwent a change, traditional mediums were rediscovered. A new generation of post-Independence sculptors began to carve wood to produce figurative artworks that were not entirely realistic. Soon, they came to be embellished with found objects - metal pieces, nails, wires, plastic, glass and so on. With materials like wood and terracotta - formerly the preserve of folk artists and toy makers - the line between traditional and modern art began to blur. Mrinalini Mukherjee deserves mention here for reviving the lost wax method or dokhra. Her pieces carry an echo of folk traditions noted for their modernist forms and ideas.

  When Markand Bhatt was asked to establish the Faculty of Fine Arts at M S University, Baroda, he brought in Sankho Chaudhuri as the head of its sculpture department. It was he who went on to influence students over the next twenty years. Himself a student of Ramkinkar Baij, it is significant that of the nineteen awards handed out for sculpture at the national exhibitions between 1955-64, nine went to sculptors from Baroda. And one of these who studied under his guidance was the sculptor Raghav Kaneria.

Soon after, Raghav Kaneria found himself a member of J Swaminathan's Group 1890. When the group formed, Kaneria was its only sculptor, his medium of preference being metal. But going by the premise that a work of sculpture is the art of making two- or three-dimensional representations in, usually, stone, wood metal or plaster, we can view Jeram Patel within that ambit too, alongside Jyoti Bhatt and, of course, Himmat Shah.

A simple viewing of Kaneria's titles - Despair, Scarecrow, Primitive Rhythm, Cactus, Angry Fish, Soldier, Web Form, Insect - is enough to reveal his themes that revolved around growth and the natural world. Fond of the organic theme, Kaneria - who was born into a farmer's family in a small town called Anida in Gujarat - stayed connected to his roots: his father worked in the fields and his mother did artwork designs for houses in the neighborhood. His reason for studying sculpture in art school was based on the simple premise that the university provided sculpture students with free materials to work with… Scrap metal, easily available in the industries nearby, became his choice of medium and he was happy to receive commissions from iron and steel industries, those such as Jyoti Ltd and Mukund, where he could work with an unlimited supply of industrial scrap…

But Kaneria was not the only one in the Group 1890 catalogue working with found objects. In a very different, distinctive manner, his artist-colleague, similarly trained at M S University under N S Bendre, had learnt during a stint in Italy that he could use more than just paint on canvas to create a work of art. These found objects lent a third dimension and brought a fresh perspective to bear on canvas. Taken with the idea, Jyoti bhai began to stick metal scrap, other junk, glass pieces, nails, jute and sand on his canvases. These works took the shape of landscapes, or abstract versions of them. For Bhatt, this proved an innovative way to render his ideas over his flat canvases, and it was these works that were first exhibited in 1963.

Nor were those the only collages on view at the exhibition. For, exhibited beside them were Himmat Shah's burnt paper collages. Shah's body of work consisted of paper collages with holes singed into them by lit cigarettes and surrounded by blobs of bright enamel paint with foil, thread and other objects pasted on paper which was then laid on another paper. A close look reveals the layers that he had created, laying, perhaps, the foundation for his evolution as a terracotta sculptor later (though he did work with other materials too).

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Reprinted with permission from DAG Modern. The exhibition Group 1890: India's Indigenous Modernism can be viewed at DAG Modern, New Delhi, till December 14