INDIA - PIONEERS OF MODERNISM
WE3VS5
By STEPHEN KINZER, NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER
HOLAMANDAL, India -- The tapping and torching sounds of a sculptor at
work spilled from a shed above the Bay of Bengal on a hot afternoon,
signs that one of India's most ambitious experiments in modern art is
still thriving after more than three decades.
The artist hunched over his bench, Paramasivam Samanna, was one of 40
students at the Government Arts and Crafts school in Madras who resolved
in the early 1960s to devote their lives to art. They pooled their
meager funds to buy a cheap eight and a half acres of land south of the
city, and set out to build a cooperative that would support them and
their aspirations. The first group of seven artists arrived in May 1966.
"There was no road out here then, just a cow track," Samanna remembered.
"We went shopping once a week with a wood cart, so we had to live on dry
grains that wouldn't spoil. Cyclones would blow our houses and our work
away."
Samanna now spends most of his time in Seattle, where he produces the
same kind of whimsical copper, ceramic and bronze sculptures he was
making here. In his visits every few years to his old base at
Cholamandal, he has seen the Indian attitude toward contemporary art
change.
"When we were in school, the only contemporary art we saw was in books
about Picasso and Chagall at the British Council and the USIA," he said,
referring to the U.S. Information Agency. "As late as 1985 there were
hardly one or two art books published in this country. Now there are big
fat ones.
"If a newspaper covered an art opening in 1985, it was a tiny box, but
now you see The Indian Express or The Hindu devoting a whole page with
two or three reproductions. There is a market, and lots of rich people
are buying. It's all quite new."
One reason the Cholamandal group survived to see this happy day is that
its members understood from the start that they could not support
themselves with fine art. Following the Bauhaus credo that art needs to
embrace crafts, they began producing batik fabric printed in imaginative
patterns. For years it was normal for artists here to spend two or three
hours each day on batik preparation or other crafts-related work, free
the rest of the time to pursue their muses.
Today Cholamandal, named after an ancient dynasty that encouraged the
arts, is India's largest self-supporting art colony and one of the most
successful in Asia. Twenty-one of the original 40 artists remain. The
group does not accept new members, but there are usually about half a
dozen younger artists working or studying here.
An airy complex contains studios where the artists work, cottages where
they live, a well-lighted gallery where they show and sell, an open-air
theater and a guest house donated by the West German government. Set in
a grove of beefwood trees a few miles from the coast, it is an idyll of
warm breezes and sandy paths.
Although the artists here still produce some batik, now they are mostly
able to live comfortably from their painting and sculpture. It is widely
recognized as some of the best art produced in postwar India, and is
shown regularly in galleries across the country. Several Cholamandal
artists have also shown in Europe, the United States and South America.
The artists' earnings are not pooled, but a portion goes into a fund
that helps pay their joint expenses. This system, together with the
popularity of many member artists with the growing art-buying public in
India, has made Cholamandal a financial as well as an artistic success.
Many Indian art historians say Western-style painting here began with
Rajah Ravi Varma, a prince from the cultured southern state of Kerala.
In the 1890s, Varma, who had studied under a Dutch art teacher, began
producing realistic-looking pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses. They
were reproduced on calendars that hung in many homes and inspired
countless young people.
In India as elsewhere, there have been painters who have latched on to
nearly every trend in the art world. But the story of 20th-century
Indian art is also the story of a series of regional schools.
The first post-Varma school, which sprang up in Bengal, was influenced
by French Impressionism. Its exponents used flowing lines and diffused,
misty colors to portray historical and metaphysical subjects.
At the end of the 1940's, as the Indian independence movement reached
its turbulent peak, the Bengal movement fell before a new generation
that rejected mystic sentimentalism as outdated and remote from the
modern Indian experience. This movement, based in Bombay, admired
Picasso's figurative style and embraced foreign art as a way to pull
India into the modern world.
Extending or reacting to the Bombay movement, a group of art students
banded together in the early 1960s in Madras, now officially called
Chennai, which lies on India's eastern coast about 380 miles from the
southern tip.
"You can describe their artistic ideas as metaphysical and poetic," said
Josef James, an Indian art critic who has followed the Cholamandal
experiment from its beginning. "They were consumed with the challenge of
finding an Indian response to the sort of art that was coming out of the
West. They were influenced first by Mark Rothko, then De Kooning and
later Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella."
"Madras is where Abstract Expressionism was studied very closely," James
said. But like Abstract Expressionism itself, the Cholalmandal artists
have been elbowed aside by young insurgents who complain that they have
lost their love of color and have never developed an appreciation of the
esoteric aspects of Indian culture.
Still, Cholamandal remains one of India's artistic centers. Its members
radiate a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, as much for the
growth of the art market here as for their own success.
"They are the enlightenment of contemporary art in India," said Santhana
Raj, a prominent painter who recently spent several days here. "They
have combined Western and Eastern influences and generated a cycle of
interest in contemporary art. What has happened and is happening here is
of great importance for the growth of art appreciation in this part of
the world."
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