1947 to 1956 · Bombay (Mumbai)
Progressive Artists' Group
The Bombay Progressive Artists' Group, formed in 1947, months after Partition, to break with the Bengal School and make an Indian modern art on international terms. It had no shared style.
How to recognise it
- No house style: each member went his own way
- European modernism, from Post-Impressionism to Cubism and Expressionism, turned to Indian subjects
- Souza's expressionist figures at one end, Gaitonde's pure abstraction at the other
- Indian imagery and landscape, especially in Husain and Tyeb Mehta
Six artists founded the group in Bombay in 1947: F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza, M. F. Husain, K. H. Ara, H. A. Gade and S. K. Bakre, the only sculptor. It was months after Partition, and the founders often named it as the push they needed. They wanted to leave behind the revivalist nationalism of the Bengal School and build an Indian avant-garde that could stand internationally. Their stated aim was to “paint with absolute freedom for content and technique, almost anarchic”.
The group showed three times: at the Bombay Art Society’s salon on Rampart Row, Kala Ghoda, in 1948; in Calcutta in 1950; and in 1953. By then the original line-up had scattered. Souza left for Britain and Raza for Paris by 1950, and Bakre later moved to Britain too. Husain, Gade and Ara carried on with newer associates, among them V. S. Gaitonde, Krishen Khanna, Mohan Samant and Bhanu Athaiya, the only woman artist associated with the group. Ram Kumar, Akbar Padamsee and Tyeb Mehta were also linked to it. It disbanded in 1956.
What held them together was an attitude, not a look. Mehta, for example, moved from trussed bulls and rickshaw pullers to his Diagonal series of the 1970s, and later to Falling Figures, drawn from a killing he saw in the riots of 1947.
What to look for
Each painter separately; there is no Progressive style to recognise. These are among the most familiar names in modern Indian art, and a signature is the easiest part of a painting to copy. Ask where a work has been: which exhibitions, which books, which earlier owners.