Metaphoric City

British author Jonathan Raban described cities as a plastic presence, one that eludes any attempts to impose a fixed idea or image onto its foggy canvas. “It seems to me that living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living,” he wrote. He called this “soft city” a place of illu­sions, aspirations, and mythmaking, in opposition to the hard city of maps, statistics, and demographics.

DAG’s arts and heritage festival, The City as a Museum is a careful balancing of these disparate threads. The festival’s first Mumbai edition juxtaposes its hard, pedantic colonial history with its soft, intriguing aesthetics. Travelling mostly through the different time pe­riods and art movements of British-era Bombay, The City as a Museum centres around lesser-known art narratives in a series of exhibits, interactive walkthroughs, talks, workshops, and field trips. Collectively, these curated experiences hopscotch across familiar heritage sites and institutions, from Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum in Byculla to Grant Road’s Alfred Talkies and Elephanta Caves, an hour away by ferry from Gateway of India.

Anchoring the festival is a milestone collaboration between DAG and Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai’s premier art academy dating back to 1857. Since its inception, the school has been a prestigious springboard for the city’s creative establishment where artists VS Gaitonde, Akbar Padamsee, and Tyeb Mehta were nurtured. This is where the Bombay Revivalist School, an early 20th-century movement where artists embraced an intrinsic Indian identity, blossomed and matured. In the early 1940s, that tide gave way to the impressionisms of The Young Turks collective, headed by PT Reddy. And of course, the Progressives (Souza and co), who broke loose from the school’s con­ventions to pioneer modernism, honed their art fundamentals here.

The festival concluded a four-year run in Kolkata last year. Once the plans to transport the festival to Mumbai were mapped out, Ashish Anand, CEO and MD, says that JJ School’s role in the city’s artistic evolution was undeniable. “In many ways JJ School itself was a start­ing point for so many of the Bombay artists who have affected the history of Indian modern art. This crucial context of colonial art institutions shaping this emergent Indian art style was best served by focusing on the school’s history as well,” Anand explains.

At least four of the 10 programming highlights during the festival revolve around the JJ School of Art. The Muralists, for example, a walkthrough by John Douglas, head of the painting department of JJ School of Art, took participants through the institution’s defining murals, many painted across its corridors and exterior walls, expanding on how the practice became one of the school’s most robust disciplines.

The City as a Museum has been envisioned as a two month-long visual spectacle, its anchor being its opening exhibition, Shifting Visions: Teaching Modern Art at the Bombay School. A sprawling assembly of 170 artworks and archival objects from the school and DAG’s collections (1880-early 1940s), the show charts the progress of the school’s curriculum, training modules, practical methods, and ultimately its students’ arcs as fully formed professional artists.

For almost a year, scholars, school fac­ulty, and researchers from both institu­tions combined brains and resources to piece together this exhibit, Anand says. “The school’s archives hold invaluable treasures of modern art, many of which have never been on public display before. We wanted to facilitate a conver­sation between DAG’s modern art collec­tion from Bombay, archival documents, letters, and photographs, with the school’s own collection of student works to tell a story that is integral to Indian art history,” he adds.

Works by the school’s earliest notable pupils—MF Pithawala, Pestonji Bomanji, MV Dhurandhar, Abalal Rahiman, AX Trindade, GH Nagarkar, and JM Ahivasi—occupy prime spots in the exhibition. Dhobi Talao (1898), Bomanji’s oil landscape of the school’s iconic sur­roundings in the realist style, illustrates an evening scene of cattle resting by a community water tank. The oil canvas, At Chowpatty Beach (1934) by Dhurandhar, the school’s first Indian principal, paints a sensuous throng of women by the Marine Drive shore, gracefully clad in the nine-yard Maharashtrian saris.

The exhibit also includes rare books, charcoal sketches, Plaster-of-Paris rec­reations of Greek and Roman antiquity sculptures, and even an illuminating section on how the school’s nude class, presented first in the 1920s, was the idea of WE Gladstone Solomon, who was its director at the time. Obsessed with rivalling the Bengal School, Solomon dreamt of seeding a revival movement in his Bombay institution. To inculcate an observational and academic accuracy for traditional art expressions, he introduced an Indian painting and design class at the academy. The class was taught by former students Nagarkar and Ahivasi.

However, Solomon noticed that hu­man anatomy was often a weak point in the drawings of several students, reveals Douglas. “Students would typically use clothes and drapery to hide torsos, feet, and thighs in their work. This is why Solomon allowed undraped figures to be studied in a class to improve technique,” he says. After the nude class was for­malised, students such as MV Athavale regularly produced live figure studies. One untitled pencil portrait by the artist shows a woman’s bare back, every arch and sinew in her slender body clear to the viewer.

Mastering the nude form would en­hance the practices of perfecting murals, too, and support the overall development of Indian design. As the school’s revival­ist streak matured, Solomon sought an outside commission for his students. His effort paid off when the school was awarded the project to decorate the Impe­rial Secretariat of New Delhi with a ceiling mural in the classic Bombay Revivalist fashion, which it completed in 1926.

Before Solomon, his predecessors had, in their own way, pushed the cur­riculum in new directions. “Two teaching figures were significant in the school’s infant years, John Griffiths and John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard Kipling’s father,” says Douglas. Well-versed in Eu­ropean formalism, both were graduates of the South Kensington School of Art, London, and arrived at the school in 1865. The duo’s biggest legacy was the establish­ment of the decorative painting and archi­tectural sculpture course, which instilled academic realism as a core tenet among the school’s initial class of students.

Between 1872 and 1885, Griffiths undertook an epic commission to repro­duce the murals of Ajanta-Ellora caves. Over the course of multiple winters, he journeyed to the Buddhist temples in Aurangabad with a group of students, painstakingly painting 300 copies of these murals, which can be seen in the main JJ school exhibit. In his work, Paintings in the Buddhist Cave, Temples of Ajanta Vol.1, he writes: “As it is, the deco­rative work of the Bombay School of Art, its study and practice of original design were greatly influenced by these works.” After observing his students at work, Griffiths concluded that no European artist, regardless of skill, could have done justice to the ancient murals.

“Every head of the school wanted to do something different to set themselves apart from those in whose footsteps they followed,” says Douglas. As the 1940s neared, principal Charles R Gerrard took The Young Turks’ rejection of the school’s conventions in stride and encour­aged their counter cultural interest in expressionist modes. The gentle breezes blowing over Bombay had all but nudged the school’s revivalist tendencies into the past, replacing it with exciting frontiers of a new modernist dawn.

Away from the academic lore around JJ School of Art, The City as a Museum went the longest distance for an excursion to the Elephanta Caves on a ferry. Once on the island, art historian Giles Tillotson annotated the appeal of its rock-cut Shiva shrines to British painters during the heyday of the Empire.

Such walks and field visits pulled Mumbai’s frenzied outdoors into the festival’s considered contemplations of art. There was one tour around the Byculla bylanes of Bhau Daji Lad, while another was part of a two-day homage to Tyeb Mehta and MF Husain, during the last leg of the event. Part one, Places of Imagination: Tyeb, Husain, and Their World of Moving Pictures, headed to the old theatre, Alfred Talkies, on Grant Road, owned by Mehta’s family and a place where he worked. Part Two, Places of Imagination: Tyeb, Husain, and their City took a spin around Mohammed Ali Road. The walk ended with a Bohri iftar at Mohammedi Manzil. Says Anand, “Mehta lived opposite Mohammedi Manzil, at Lehri House, and often spoke about the influence this place had on his work. JJ School, where he studied is close by, as is [his friend] MF Husain’s home in Badr Bagh, where he painted some of his earliest cinema billboards.” In a city of inherent theatricality, there are stages waiting to be lit at the most unexpected corners.

(Shifting Visions: Teaching Modern Art at the Bombay School by DAG and Sir JJ School of Art is on display at the JJ School of Art, Mumbai, till April 20)

 

 

art and cultureMumbaiShifting VisionsSir JJ School of ArtTeaching Modern Art