Early modernism in India

The colonial art schools (in Lahore, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras) taught crafts and Victorian academic art. Against this came the Bengal School, and Kala Bhavana (1919) at Shantiniketan, India's first nationalist art school.

Behind those colonial schools was an attitude: the British saw Indians as skilled craftsmen, not as artists with ideas of their own. Work was judged by whether it suited British taste and would sell. The modern Indian artists who followed set out to prove otherwise.

Through the Bauhaus exhibition and art magazines, Gaganendranath Tagore knew Cubism, and painted mysterious halls made of lines. Rabindranath Tagore, late in life, turned the doodles around crossed-out words in his manuscripts into faces and landscapes, in black, ochre, reds and browns.

Gaganendranath did not simply copy Picasso: his vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines made a kind of Indian Cubism of his own.

Nandalal Bose, trained under Abanindranath Tagore, joined Kala Bhavana in 1921-22. His training made him a nationalist in art, but he still let his students and fellow teachers explore new ways of working; much of modern Indian art grew from that freedom. Under him, Benode Behari Mukherjee painted the mural 'The Lives of Medieval Saints' at Hindi Bhavana (1946-47), in fresco buono (painting on wet plaster), with few, rhythmic lines. Ramkinkar Baij made art from the Santhal life around him.

Jamini Roy found parallels between Bengal's folk art and modern artists like Picasso and Klee. His simple, pure, home-made colours were easy for his family to reproduce, yet he signed his works.

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941), trained in Paris, joined Indian miniature and mural traditions with European modernism. Her Haldi Grinder (1940) uses flat patches of bright colour, like Basohli painting and the French painter Gauguin.