How Cubism Became Vernacular in India

The American curator William Rubin famously described Cubism as “the most passionate adventure of the 20th century.” The popular style, with its mix of geometric showmanship, collage-like elements and simultaneous perspective, was invented by two of the world’s greatest creative adventurers — Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Just as the Nouvelle Vague redefined cinema, Cubism changed the face of modern art. Many subsequent avant-garde movements, such as Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism, Abstract Expressionism and De Stijl, were born from the bosom of Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon (widely regarded as the first Cubist painting) and Braque’s iconic still lifes and his depictions of musical instruments. But here’s where things get really interesting. Cubism even made its way into India, where its techniques and characteristics were vigorously adopted and reinterpreted by our own artists. As the principles of Cubism mingled with Indian traditions and aesthetics, what emerged was a vernacular form of Cubist language that profoundly influenced the course of modern art in India. Deconstructed Realms: India’s Tryst with Cubism, an ongoing exhibition at DAG in Mumbai, tells this unique story with authoritative flourish and fresh insights. The walls of DAG’s gallery space inside the opulent Taj Mahal Palace hotel are filled with Cubist experiments from masters like Gaganendranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, Ramkinkar Baij, Nandalal Bose, Chittaprosad, Prosanto Roy, Satish Gujral, Rabin Mondal, KG Subramanyan and several others who helped shape the early evolution of Cubism in India. In a book accompanying the exhibition, Ashish Anand, CEO and managing director of DAG, admits that Deconstructed Realms has been in the making for several years. Writing in the prologue, he argues that while Cubism in the West evolved “as a trope for marking social anxiety, in India it also served as something joyful, even poetic.”

So, what explains India’s so-called “joyful” encounter with Cubism? To unlock that question, let’s rewind to the 1920s when British colonialism was a living reality and the nationalist movement was in full swing. It is commonly believed that the 14th annual exhibition of The Indian Society of Oriental Art held in Calcutta in 1922 marked the arrival of Cubism in India. It was the first time that Indian audiences were exposed to the works of global artists, particularly those associated with the Bauhaus school like Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger who had participated in this landmark exhibition alongside their Bengali counterparts such as Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Sunayani Devi. Organised by scholar Stella Kramrisch, who had been recruited by Rabindranath Tagore to teach art history at the newly opened Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, the exhibition-cum-sale proved to be a turning point, most of all for a man called Gaganendranath Tagore (1867–1938). Initially known for his satirical cartoons, the Oriental Art show triggered a critical interest in Gaganendranath’s Cubist phase. In fact, Kramrisch’s note, published a few months before the Calcutta exhibition, was the “first-ever discussion of Gaganedranath’s Cubist paintings,” as curator and art historian R Siva Kumar writes in an essay on him in Deconstructed Realms.

Gaganedranath’s watercolour and ink paintings on view at DAG symbolise the revolutionary efforts of an artist who found, within the tenets of Cubism, a vehicle for infinite creative possibilities and a way to break free from British pedagogy that favoured academic realism. Looking closely at this self-styled Cubist’s life and times, it’s evident that he was less interested in Cubism’s structured design and analytical philosophy than in pursuing the shattered mirror-like shapes and contours of his own imagination. Though overshadowed by his younger sibling Abanindranath Tagore in his own lifetime, Gaganendranath has entered the canon today as a key figure from the Bengal renaissance whose works were being exhibited in London, Paris and other European cities as early as 1914. Despite taking up painting relatively late at the age of 38 (much like his polymathic uncle Rabindranath Tagore), he has left behind a celebrated body of work. A man of considerable “intellect and personal charm,” as Partha Mitter puts it in his book The Triumph of Modernism, Gaganendranath’s embrace of Cubism was deliberate and well informed. According to R Siva Kumar, Bengali artists of that era were clued into Western art movements including Cubism, particularly through books and periodicals and lectures by Western-educated experts like Stella Kramrisch. “There were detailed discussions about both Western and Indian art in Santiniketan and Calcutta back in the day and besides Stella Kramrisch and her lectures, there were artists like Benode Behari Mukherjee who were analysing Cubism and European modernism much more rigorously,” Kumar says in a telephonic interview from his home in Santiniketan.

In Gaganendranath’s works such as University Machine, Colour, Composition and Rabindranath Tagore in the Island of Birds, it can be seen how he fashioned his own version of Cubism by combining his varied interests in light and shadow, geometric patterns and Japanese ink and watercolour techniques. These paintings bear witness to the advent of modernism in India and thus, remain both historically and culturally resonant.

Largely self-taught, Gaganendranath had learnt Japanese brushwork in Calcutta around 1903. Several aspects of his early practice, from photography to his stint as a set designer for Rabindranth Tagore’s plays (Raktakarbi, or Red Oleanders being a famous example), fed into his Cubism. “He had an interest in light and illumination of all kinds. Natural light, like that of the sun and the moon, in flame torches and nocturnal illumination, as well as in eclectic light and night illumination, which was a new phenomenon in India,” reveals Kumar, who’s considered a specialist on the Santiniketan School.

Gaganendranath was interested in science as well, as his friendship with the physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose proves. Legend has it that during his Cubist period he was using a teleidoscope — a device that projected streaks of colour — which aided him in his creative experiments. Gaganendranath’s career ended abruptly in 1930 after he suffered a cerebral stroke that left him paralysed for the rest of his life.

If Gaganendranath Tagore was arguably India’s first Cubist — mind you, Stella Kramrisch herself had branded him as the ‘Indian Cubist’ back in the 1920s — then it was Ramkinkar Baij who was the first artist to have fully grasped the principles of Cubism, as originally conceived by Picasso and Braque. “Ramkinkar’s earliest Cubist-influenced works suggest that he had a clearer idea of the original representational goals of Cubism,” observes Kumar, stating that although Ramkinkar already knew of the movement the Cubist elements did not appear in his art until around the 1930s. Ramkinkar’s exquisite, Cubist-infused watercolours in the DAG show stand testament to his restless mind constantly seeking new ways of depicting the world around him. At various stages of his illustrious career, the artist-sculptor’s style continued to oscillate between classicism (take the Yaksha and Yakshi sculptures at the entrance of the Reserve bank of India building in New Delhi) and expressionism (his earliest life-style sculptures in Santiniketan, such as Santhal Family and Mill Call). Baij once called his art “fiercely independent”. As Ashish Anand reminds us, “Ramkinkar and others in Bengal as well as elsewhere in India experimented with different styles and movements, including Cubism, to create art that was eventually distinctively their own.”

LIKA ALL MAJOR art movements, Cubism began as an outlier, its first strokes met with derision rather than acclaim. The term itself was coined partly thanks to Henri Matisse, who scoffed at Georges Braque’s L’Estaque landscapes that he saw as nothing more than ‘little cubes.’ Cubism was born in the West as a reaction against the inherited representational language of Renaissance art. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the fathers of Cubism, wanted to explore the relation between reality and its visual representation afresh. Picasso, in particular, was inspired by African masks when toying with Cubism, perhaps best reflected in the highly stylised and abstracted innovations of Demoiselles D’Avignon. “In simple terms, the question was, ‘Can we have a language that gives primacy to the elements that constitute a work of art rather than the world we represent?’ The question of representation remained central to the first cubists like Picasso and Braque. But all the artists classified as “cubists” did not subscribe to this notion,” remarks R Siva Kumar, adding that most Cubism-inspired Indian artists were using it to add an extra dimension to their evolving practice and vision. “Some pushed it towards abstraction or purely geometric. Others found in it nothing related to the representational world while there were those who exploited the distortion noticed in Cubism to articulate their own inner experience of life. Most Indian artists belonged to this group, including Ramkinkar,” says Kumar.

Divided into four sections, Deconstructed Realms conjures a fascinating cast of characters that have helped lit up the journey of Cubism in India. The Cubist exuberance that we find in artists like Satish Gujral, NS Bendre and Jyoti Bhatt is hardly surprising, given their versatile nature and relentless genius in adapting to different genres and mediums throughout their life. In fact, Bendre had introduced Cubism to his students in Baroda and even fervently painted in the Cubist style between 1955 and 1960. Then, you have Avinash Chandra and GR Santosh for whom Cubism was a passing phase and perhaps, a catalyst for their later signature style that merged mystical thought and Tantric symbolism with visceral abstraction.

Gaganendranath Tagore’s protégé Prosanto Roy (1908-1973) finally comes into his own in the DAG show. Having worked closely with Gaganendranath and Abanindranath Tagore, Prosanto Roy’s journey echoed their trajectory in many ways. Despite being eclipsed by some of his contemporaries in his era, Roy’s extraordinary work demonstrates his idiosyncratic approach to Cubism. “Like the Tagore brothers, he too visited the magical realm of fantasy through his superbly painted watercolours with the fragmented planes extolling an ethereal beauty,” says Anand. In a stark contrast, Chittaprosad who probed the harsh realities of life in Bengal, is represented here by paintings that allude to his more genteel Cubist past. Stepping out of his comfort zone, you can catch Chittaprosad deviating from his usual realism and indulging in bold colour and cheerful compositions. “Chittaprosad’s political commitments and interest in modernist languages went hand in hand,” says R Siva Kumar, adding with a smile, “Every leftist artist need not paint like Russian or Chinese socialist realists.”

A Cubist exhibition is not exactly that without someone like MF Husain and other Progressive Artists’ Group regulars showing up at some point — which is apt because Husain remained a Cubist pretty much all his life and his connection to Cubism being so strong in the public imagination that he was dubbed the barefoot ‘Picasso of India.’

Though Deconstructed Realms presents over 40 artists and more than 100 works from every corner of India, it makes one thing clear — Bengal was an important centre for the production of art as the former capital and historic heart of British India. It was here that Cubism found its footing, before it quickly spread across India in various ways. “The exhibition’s focus is pan-Indian and highlights the role of artists from Bombay, New Delhi, Baroda, Hyderabad, Madras and elsewhere who adopted different elements of Cubism into their practices,” affirms Ashish Anand, whose mother Rama Anand founded DAG in Delhi in 1993 and which has since become a leading force in India’s high-stakes modern art scene. Anand adds, “I find it critically important to examine how Cubism was not merely transferred to India as a Western art movement, but adopted through its own hybrid language that has contributed to its visualisation in a manner that Indian modernists can take pride in.”

Movements never end, neither did Cubism. As Deconstructed Realms shows, they simply linger on and mutate into ‘little cubes’ — to use Matisse’s infamous jibe — of possibilities and permutations.

(Deconstructed Realms: India’s Tryst with Cubism is on view at DAG, Mumbai, till September 6)

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