From 1949, when the Faculty of Fine Arts was founded; the Baroda Group formed in 1957 · Vadodara (Baroda), Gujarat
Baroda School
Artists around the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, founded in 1949. They learned from craft and folk traditions, and in 1981 several of them were central to a return to figurative, story-telling painting.
How to recognise it
- Narrative and figurative painting, often of everyday life
- Borrowings from miniature painting, folk art and craft
- A wide range of materials: terracotta, hemp, photography
- Humour and middle-class life, above all in Bhupen Khakhar
The Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda opened in 1949 as an alternative to the established art schools, and to the nationalism associated with Santiniketan and the Bengal School. The group of artists around it formed in 1957 under the guidance of N. S. Bendre.
The school’s central idea was “living traditions”: that modern artists needed tradition and had to learn from it. K. G. Subramanyan, its most influential teacher, started a Fine Arts Fair at which local craftspeople taught students their trade. His own work in terracotta grew from it, including the tile mural he made with students and staff in 1962 and 1963 for the Rabindralaya auditorium in Lucknow. The sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, later known for her work in hemp, came out of the same atmosphere. Jyoti Bhatt photographed the lives and art of communities across India, worried that their traditions were disappearing.
In 1981 Jogen Chowdhury, Bhupen Khakhar, Nalini Malani, Sudhir Patwardhan, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Vivan Sundaram showed together in A Place for People. The critic Geeta Kapur’s essay for it argued for narrative and the figure, which Indian art had always used, after decades of abstraction. The exhibition is seen as the start of the Narrative Figurative movement. Khakhar, with his colourful, funny pictures of middle-class life, became a strong influence on younger painters.
What to look for
Stories. Baroda pictures tend to be about people and places, with borrowings from miniatures, folk art and craft. Look for the wit, and for an unusual range of materials alongside paint.