As one of the largest repositories of the art from Bengal, Delhi Art Gallery presents its major exhibition, The Art of Bengal, a significant collation of Bengal art over two centuries, featuring over four hundred works by 104 artists. The exhibition charts the growth and development of art in Bengal from the 19th century to 2000, from academic portraiture and traditional Indian painting to a modernist idiom. It begins with Kalighat pats from the 19th century created by anonymous artists who painted their mythological-themed traditional paintings on paper, to academic oil portraits by 19th century British portraitist Benjamin Hudson and landscape by Italian artist Olinto Ghilardi. Trained local artisans began reflecting the influence of these western academic painters in their paintings with religious iconography now rendered with western techniques of oil painting and perspective. Seen as the first efflorescence of concentrated art post the entry of European art into Bengal, these were termed ‘Early Bengal Oils’. The exhibition features several of these, as well as similarly rendered and themed works by several academic school trained individual artists such as B. P. Banerjee. From here the exhibition showcases works by the school known as the Bengal School, featuring the works of Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Asit Haldar, Surendranath Ganguly, Hirachand Dugar, M. A. R Chughtai and other exponents of the School-pioneered wash technique.

As one of the largest repositories of the art from Bengal, Delhi Art Gallery presents its major exhibition, The Art of Bengal, a significant collation of Bengal art over two centuries, featuring over four hundred works by 104 artists. The exhibition charts the growth and development of art in Bengal from the 19th century to 2000, from academic portraiture and traditional Indian painting to a modernist idiom. It begins with Kalighat pats from the 19th century created by anonymous artists who painted their mythological-themed traditional paintings on paper, to academic oil portraits by 19th century British portraitist Benjamin Hudson and landscape by Italian artist Olinto Ghilardi. Trained local artisans began reflecting the influence of these western academic painters in their paintings with religious iconography now rendered with western techniques of oil painting and perspective. Seen as the first efflorescence of concentrated art post the entry of European art into Bengal, these were termed ‘Early Bengal Oils’. The exhibition features several of these, as well as similarly rendered and themed works by several academic school trained individual artists such as B. P. Banerjee. From here the exhibition showcases works by the school known as the Bengal School, featuring the works of Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Asit Haldar, Surendranath Ganguly, Hirachand Dugar, M. A. R Chughtai and other exponents of the School-pioneered wash technique.

The Bengal School proved strongly influential in influencing the course of Indian art, if atleast in being rejecting in order to create a new, robust Indian art ‘closer to reality’ by the artists of the 1930s and 40s, who were influenced by the modernist movements in the west. The exhibition features the works of modernist masters as Somnath Hore, Prodosh Das Gupta, Chittaprosad, Rabin Mondal, Bikash Bhattacherjee, Bijan Choudhary, Jogen Chowdhury, Shyamal Dutta Ray, Nirode Majumdar, Meera Mukherjee and many others spanning the 1940s to 1980s and beyond, who looked to voice the inequities and dystopia of society around them.

With ‘Bengal’ as the connecting thread, this exhibition – mammoth in scale and scope – features artists not merely claiming ancestry to Bengal but those vitally nurtured in its cultural climate: from the anonymous Bengali engravers and individual salon artists to Europeans such as Olinto Ghilardi, an Italian teacher and painter in 19th century Calcutta who influenced Abanindranath Tagore, to M. A. R. Chughtai from Lahore and K. G. Subramanyan from Madras, whose art owes substantially to Bengal. While not the same as before, Bengal continues to exert its influence on Indian art, and this exhibition is a tribute, as its celebration.