Artists

• A
• B
• C
• D
• G
• H
• K
• M
• P
• R
• S
• T
• V
• Z

A

• K. H. Ara

  1914–1985 · Bolarum, Secunderabad

  Self-made Bombay painter, a former car cleaner, who was a founding member of the Progressive Artists' Group. He is remembered for still lifes and for taking up the female nude as a subject in its own right.

  Progressive Artists' Group

B

• Bhuri Bai

  Pitol, Jhabua district, Madhya Pradesh

  Bhil painter from Jhabua who was the first of her community to paint on paper. Her pictures are fields of coloured dots that hold village life, gods and, in later work, aeroplanes.

  Bhil painting

• Ramkinkar Baij

  1906–1980 · Jugipara, Bankura, Bengal Presidency (now West Bengal)

  The sculptor of Santiniketan, whose Santhal Family of 1938, modelled in cement and laterite, still stands on the campus. It gave tribal peasants the presence that public sculpture had kept for gods and rulers.

  Santiniketan, Indian modernism

• Manjit Bawa

  1941–2008 · Dhuri, Punjab

  Manjit Bawa painted Krishna, Ranjha, Kali, Shiva, birds and animals on flat fields of colour. He was among the first Indian painters to drop the dominant greys and browns for pinks, reds and violets.

  Contemporary figuration

• Nandalal Bose

  1882–1966 · Haveli Kharagpur, Munger district (now Bihar)

  A pupil of Abanindranath Tagore who ran the art school at Santiniketan from 1921 and taught a generation to look at Indian things. He also drew the Haripura posters for Gandhi and decorated the original manuscript of the Constitution.

  Bengal School, Contextual modernism

• Rameshwar Broota

  born 1941 · Delhi

  Rameshwar Broota painted satirical apes through the 1970s, then spent the next four decades on the male body, scraping images out of layered paint with a blade. He has run the art department at Delhi's Triveni Kala Sangam since the 1960s.

  Contemporary figuration

• Sakti Burman

  born 1935 · Calcutta

  A Calcutta-born painter who has lived in France since 1956. He sets Durga and other figures from Hindu mythology into dense, marbled surfaces of rich colour.

  Contemporary figuration

C

• Jogen Chowdhury

  1939–2026 · Daharpara, Faridpur district (now Bangladesh)

  Bengal painter and draughtsman whose line, drawn and redrawn, gave flesh, cloth and furniture the same soft, uneasy weight. He taught at Santiniketan from 1987 and opened a museum of his own work in Kolkata.

  Calcutta Painters, Santiniketan

D

• Ganga Devi

  1928–1991 · Mithila, Bihar

  Mithila painter, a master of the kachni line style, who is credited with making Madhubani painting known outside India. She painted the Ramayana, a woman's life and a roller coaster in America with the same exact line.

  Madhubani (Mithila) painting

• Atul Dodiya

  born 1959 · Ghatkopar, Mumbai

  Mumbai painter who keeps returning to Gandhi and to the city's metal shop shutters. His pictures set borrowed images side by side and let them argue.

  Contemporary Indian art

G

• V S Gaitonde

  1924–2001 · Nagpur

  Vasudeo Gaitonde painted fields of colour and refused to call them abstract; he preferred non-objective. He lived quietly in Delhi, and was given his first retrospective thirteen years after he died.

  Abstraction, Bombay Progressive Artists' Group (associate)

• Amrita Sher-Gil

  1913–1941 · Budapest, Hungary

  Painter trained in Paris who came home to India at twenty-one and had seven years left to work. Her pictures of village life and of women learned from Indian miniatures and the Ajanta murals.

  Early Indian modernism

• Satish Gujral

  1925–2020 · Jhelum, Punjab (now Pakistan)

  Satish Gujral lost most of his hearing as a boy, trained in Lahore, Bombay and Mexico City, and became a painter, muralist, sculptor and architect. His Belgian Embassy in New Delhi has been ranked among the finest buildings of the twentieth century.

  Indian modernism, Mexican muralism (influence)

• Subodh Gupta

  born 1964 · Khagaul, Bihar

  Subodh Gupta builds sculpture out of the steel tiffins, pots and thalis of an ordinary Indian kitchen. His skull of shining vessels stood outside Palazzo Grassi during the 2007 Venice Biennale.

  Contemporary

H

• Somnath Hore

  1921–2006 · Chittagong (now Bangladesh)

  Somnath Hore drew the Bengal famine of 1943 for a Communist paper and the peasants of the Tebhaga uprising in 1946, and spent the rest of his life making images of wounds. By the 1950s he was regarded as India's leading printmaker; later he worked in bronze.

  Printmaking, Social realism

• M F Husain

  1915–2011 · Pandharpur, Bombay Presidency (now Maharashtra)

  Maqbool Fida Husain painted cinema hoardings in Bombay before he painted anything else, and never stopped working at that scale. He was the most public Indian painter of the century, and spent his last years living abroad.

  Bombay Progressive Artists' Group, Indian modernism

K

• Bhupen Khakhar

  1934–2003 · Bombay (Mumbai)

  Chartered accountant turned painter who made the barber, the watch repairer and the small-town shop into subjects for serious art. He was also among the first Indian artists to paint love between men openly.

  Baroda School, Narrative figuration, Indian Pop

• Krishen Khanna

  born 1925 · Lyallpur (now Faisalabad, Pakistan)

  Self-taught painter who left a bank job in 1961 to paint the street: bandwallahs, truck drivers, dhaba crowds and, often, Christ. He turned one hundred in 2025 and lives and works in New Delhi.

  Progressive Artists' Group (associated), Delhi modernism

• Bharti Kher

  born 1969 · London, England

  London-born artist in New Delhi best known for her use of the bindi as a material. Her sculptures and panels turn familiar Indian signs into strange new bodies.

  Contemporary art

• Ram Kumar

  1924–2018 · Shimla (now Himachal Pradesh)

  Ram Kumar left a bank job in the late 1940s to paint, and moved from sad city figures to empty landscapes after a trip to Benaras. He was also a Hindi writer, with two novels and several books of stories.

  Abstraction, Bombay Progressive Artists' Group (associate)

M

• Nalini Malani

  born 1946 · Karachi (now Pakistan)

  Born in Karachi a year before Partition, Nalini Malani has spent six decades making work about violence, memory and the women history leaves out. She started as a painter and moved into video, shadow plays and animation.

  Contemporary, Place for People (1981)

• Jivya Soma Mashe

  1934–2018 · Dhamangaon, Talasari taluka, Thane (now Palghar) district, Maharashtra

  Warli painter from the Dahanu hills who, in the 1970s, began painting every day rather than for ritual. After him, Warli painting moved off the walls and onto paper and canvas.

  Warli painting

• Tyeb Mehta

  1925–2009 · Kapadvanj, Kheda district, Gujarat

  A Bombay painter who spent his life on a few images: the trussed bull, the falling figure, Kali, the diagonal. He had seen a man killed in the Partition riots of 1947, and much of the work keeps returning to that moment.

  Bombay Progressive Artists' Group, Indian modernism

• Anjolie Ela Menon

  born 1940 · Burnpur, West Bengal

  Delhi painter of religious subjects, portraits and nudes, built up in thin, translucent layers of oil on masonite. She studied in Paris and travelled to see Romanesque and Byzantine art.

  Contemporary Indian figurative painting

• Nasreen Mohamedi

  1937–1990 · Karachi (now Pakistan)

  Nasreen Mohamedi drew fine ruled lines in ink and graphite on paper, and taught in Baroda for almost twenty years. Since her death in 1990 she has been shown beside Agnes Martin and collected by the Met and MoMA.

  Abstraction, Minimalism

• Benode Behari Mukherjee

  1904–1980 · Behala, Calcutta (Kolkata)

  Santiniketan painter and teacher who made the mural a serious modern form in India. Born blind in one eye and short-sighted in the other, and fully blind after 1956, he kept working.

  Santiniketan, Contextual modernism

• Mrinalini Mukherjee

  1949–2015 · Bombay

  Mrinalini Mukherjee knotted hemp rope into large, soft, unmistakably bodily sculptures that look like goddesses, plants and something in between. Later she worked in ceramic and bronze, and in 2019 the Met gave her a retrospective.

  Contemporary sculpture

P

• Akbar Padamsee

  1928–2020 · Bombay (Mumbai)

  Bombay painter who spent his life on a few subjects, heads, nudes and landscapes, and kept turning them over. He also made prints, photographs and two early abstract films, one of which is lost.

  Bombay modernism, Progressive Artists' Group (associated)

• Sudhir Patwardhan

  born 1949 · Pune, Maharashtra

  A radiologist who painted Bombay and its people alongside his medical work for twenty-five years. He was one of six artists in the 1981 show Place for People, which put the city and its people at the centre of painting.

  Narrative figuration, Place for People (1981)

• Ganesh Pyne

  1937–2013 · Calcutta (Kolkata)

  Calcutta painter of dark, small, intensely worked temperas drawn from folk tales, myth and memory. He avoided attention and showed rarely.

  Bengal School (later), Society of Contemporary Artists, Calcutta

R

• S H Raza

  1922–2016 · Kakkaiya, Mandla district (now Madhya Pradesh)

  A founder of the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group who spent six decades in France. He began with expressionist landscapes and ended with the bindu, a single dark point he painted for the rest of his life.

  Bombay Progressive Artists' Group, Abstraction

• Jamini Roy

  1887–1972 · Beliatore, Bankura district, West Bengal

  Academically trained Calcutta painter who gave up portraits in the 1920s to learn from village scroll painters. His flat, bold-lined pictures in earth colours were meant for ordinary homes.

  Bengal modernism, Kalighat and patua-inspired painting

S

• Paritosh Sen

  1918–2008 · Dhaka (now Bangladesh)

  A founder of the Calcutta Group who studied in Paris, showed his work to Picasso in 1953, and changed styles every few years after. He also designed a Bengali typeface and wrote Zindabahar, sketches of his Dhaka childhood.

  Calcutta Group, Indian modernism

• Gulammohammed Sheikh

  born 1937 · Surendranagar, Gujarat

  Baroda painter, poet and teacher whose pictures gather many places and times into one surface. He has worked for more than six decades as painter, poet and teacher.

  Baroda School, Narrative figuration

• Jangarh Singh Shyam

  1962–2001 · Patangarh, Mandla (now Dindori) district, Madhya Pradesh

  Pardhan Gond artist from Patangarh who was among the first to bring Gond painting onto paper and canvas. The style that grew from his work is called Jangarh Kalam.

  Gond painting (Jangarh Kalam)

• Arpita Singh

  1937–2026 · Baranagar, West Bengal

  Delhi painter whose crowded, patterned pictures put women's ordinary days, and the threats around them, at the centre. Textiles, miniatures and folk art run through work that grew darker with time.

  Delhi modernism, Narrative figuration

• F. N. Souza

  1924–2002 · Saligão, Goa

  Goan painter who co-founded the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay and spent most of his working life in London and New York. His heads, nudes and religious subjects are drawn with a rough, deliberate violence.

  Progressive Artists' Group

• K. G. Subramanyan

  1924–2016 · Kuthuparamba, Kerala

  Painter, muralist, teacher and writer who shaped the Faculty of Fine Arts at Baroda and later returned to teach at Santiniketan. He held that folk, craft and modern art belonged in the same conversation.

  Baroda School, Santiniketan

T

• Abanindranath Tagore

  1871–1951 · Jorasanko, Calcutta (Kolkata)

  Painter, teacher and children's writer whose ideas became the Bengal School. He turned away from the academic oil painting taught under the Raj and looked to Mughal and Rajput pictures, and later to Japan and China, for a way of painting that felt Indian.

  Bengal School

• Gaganendranath Tagore

  1867–1938 · Jorasanko, Calcutta (Kolkata)

  Elder brother of Abanindranath, who began inside the Bengal School and walked out of it. He became a caricaturist, and the one Indian painter before the 1940s to work in the language of Cubism.

  Bengal School, Early Indian modernism

• Rabindranath Tagore

  1861–1941 · Jorasanko, Calcutta

  The poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1913 began painting in his sixties and left well over two thousand paintings and drawings. Most began as the crossings-out in his manuscripts.

  Indian modernism

V

• Thota Vaikuntam

  born 1942 · Boorugupalli, Karimnagar district, Telangana

  Thota Vaikuntam paints the men and women of rural Telangana in primary colour, the women in vermilion bindis, the men with toddy pots on their shoulders. He has painted the same villages for half a century.

  Contemporary figuration

• Raja Ravi Varma

  1848–1906 · Kilimanoor, Travancore (now Kerala)

  A painter from Kilimanoor in Travancore who put Indian epics into European oils. His press in Bombay turned those pictures into cheap prints, and for many families the gods still look the way he painted them.

  Academic realism

Z

• Zarina

  1937–2020 · Aligarh, United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh)

  Zarina Hashmi studied mathematics, learned printmaking in Thailand, Paris and Tokyo, and spent most of her life in New York making spare prints about home and its loss. Her best-known work pairs woodcuts with Urdu words.

  Minimalism, Printmaking