Art school · Santiniketan, West Bengal
Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati
The art school Rabindranath Tagore founded at Santiniketan in 1919. Under Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij it gave Indian modern art one of its main directions.
See first
- Nandan, the school's own gallery
- The murals and reliefs on campus buildings
- Ramkinkar Baij's outdoor sculptures
- Nandan Mela, held on 1–2 December
Kala Bhavana is the fine arts faculty of Visva-Bharati University. It started in 1919, teaching music and art together; by 1933 the two had separated into their own schools. Tagore invited Nandalal Bose, a pupil of Abanindranath Tagore, to be its principal. Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij joined him, and the three set the school’s course and much of modern Indian art’s with it.
Their idea, as the art historian R. Siva Kumar has put it, was that being Indian did not require copying the past, and being modern did not require a foreign style. In practice the work drew on the place itself, its people and its landscape.
Later teachers included K. G. Subramanyan, Dinkar Kaushik, Somnath Hore and Jogen Chowdhury. It was Kaushik who started Nandan Mela, held each year on 1–2 December for Nandalal’s birthday, when students and teachers set out stalls of their own prints, ceramics and paintings.
Nandalal Bose and his students decorated the original copy of the Constitution of India, which came into force in 1950.