The Modern Picturesque: An Indian Gaze - Curated by Girish Shahane
The Modern Picturesque: An Indian Gaze
Curated by Girish Shahane
The Modern Picturesque presents a selection of paintings that bring Indian perspectives to bear on an aesthetic idea first articulated in late 18th century England which grew popular across Europe in the decades that followed. The picturesque stakes out a middle ground between the beautiful — constituted by order and symmetry — and the sublime, which partakes of vastness and power engendering fear and awe. Picturesque landscapes are attractive to the eye while possessing a certain roughness, irregularity and dynamism.
India was a favourite subject for European painters of the picturesque, who filled exhibition halls and albums with evocatively dilapidated monuments and alluringly costumed natives. While the present display echoes those depictions in certain ways, it also reveals artists who broadly eschewed exoticisation, choosing instead to surround striking architectural forms with the throb and hum of daily life.
The eleven artists featured in the Modern Picturesque are a mix of well-known names and relatively unrecognized voices spotlit by a gallery whose programme is devoted to archival investigation and historical retrieval. Born between 1908 and 1925 and maturing at a time of tension between European and indigenous styles, these painters imbibed both traditions while drawing on an eclectic range of auxiliary sources. We observe B.D. Shirgaonkar’s use of Turneresque swirling semi-abstraction; Laxman Shenvi’s debt to post-impressionists like Cezanne; and K.G. Subramanyan’s employment of techniques derived from Chinese ink wash painting. A pair of untitled watercolours by Dinesh Shah are manifestly inspired by Indian and Persian miniatures, while one of the two, a canted, vertiginous view of a shrine nestled within craggy hills, appears to have absorbed principles of framing from contemporary cinematography.
Many of the vistas feel immediately familiar despite changes wrought by exploding urban density in the decades since they were created, among them Udaipur’s Lake Pichola, the temples of Banaras, Lucknow’s old city, and the seaside promenades of Bombay. If the European picturesque was about temporal and spatial distance, its modern Indian counterpart evokes nostalgia through a sense of intimate proximity.
Girish Shahane