Art school · Vadodara, Gujarat
Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda
The art faculty of the Maharaja Sayajirao University, set up after the university's founding in 1949. Its teachers and students shaped much of Indian modern art from the 1950s on.
See first
- Student exhibitions and degree shows
- Work by the Baroda Group and its teachers, in Indian museum collections
Art came to Baroda through its court. In 1881 Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III invited Raja Ravi Varma, who painted the Maharaja and much else during his stay, and his visit is credited as a spur for the Baroda Museum, built between 1887 and 1894.
The university came into being on 30 April 1949, when Baroda State merged with Bombay, and the Faculty of Fine Arts was part of it from the start. Its first vice-chancellor, Hansa Mehta, wanted an academic culture of open dialogue. She brought in Markand Bhatt, of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, to help set up the faculty. K. K. Hebbar, V. P. Karmarkar and the art historian Hermann Goetz were invited; N. S. Bendre and K. G. Subramanyan joined early, and the sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri taught here.
The Baroda Group, Bendre, Jyoti Bhatt, Subramanyan and Jayant Parikh among them, held its first show at Sayaji Baug in Baroda in April 1956, and showed at the Jehangir in Bombay the next year. Later came Nasreen Mohammedi and Laxma Goud. Over the decades its artists showed at the Paris, São Paulo and Tokyo biennales. The faculty still has a reputation for individual, experimental work.