Art & Culture GK Questions with Answers – Page 21

Raza, a founder member of the Progressive Artists' Group, moved to Paris, won the Prix de la critique there in 1956, and from the 1970s built his canvases around the Bindu, the black seed point from which, in his words, form and energy radiate, often combined with the triangle and…

The Progressive Artists' Group was founded in Bombay in 1947, the year of independence, by Francis Newton Souza, and its six members were Souza, M. F. Husain, S. H. Raza, K. H. Ara, H. A. Gade and the sculptor S. K. Bakre.

Baij worked at Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan and modelled Santhal Family in 1938 in cement and laterite in the open air, showing a Santhal couple with their child and dog moving house.

Nandalal Bose, who headed Kala Bhavana at Santiniketan, was asked to illuminate the handwritten Constitution, and he and his students painted the borders and the headings of its pages with scenes from Indian history, from the Indus seals to Gandhi's march.

He painted Bharat Mata in 1905, during the Swadeshi movement that followed the partition of Bengal, showing the motherland as a calm four-armed figure in saffron robes holding a book, sheaves of paddy, a piece of white cloth and a rudraksha garland, the four gifts of learning, food, clothing and…

Raja Ravi Varma was born in 1848 at Kilimanoor, a palace in the princely state of Travancore in present-day Kerala, and he painted many portraits for the Travancore court.

Jangarh Singh Shyam of Patangarh in Madhya Pradesh took the Gond wall and floor decoration on to paper and canvas, filling his animals, trees and deities with dots and dashes, and the manner he created is called Jangarh Kalam after him; a generation of Gond painters followed it.

The Pattachitra palette is made at home from natural matter: white is ground from the conch shell, black from the soot of a lamp, red from hingula, yellow from haritala and blue from indigo, and the gum of the wood apple binds them to the cloth, which is finally given…

Sohrai is the harvest and cattle festival painting and Khovar the marriage painting of the Hazaribagh belt of Jharkhand, made by women who brush on coloured earths or scratch through a top layer of white clay to reveal the dark layer beneath, a technique called sgraffito; the tradition carries a…

The chauk is the ritual square that the married women of the household paint for a wedding, and within it they place Palaghata, the goddess of fertility, so that the painting is itself a blessing on the marriage.

Kalamkari means work of the pen, and its two centres lie in Andhra Pradesh: at Srikalahasti the design is drawn freehand with a bamboo pen and is temple-centred, while at Machilipatnam it is printed with carved wooden blocks for furnishing and dress.

Phad is a long scroll painted on cloth in the Shahpura and Bhilwara area of Rajasthan, traditionally by the Joshi families, and it carries the epics of the folk deities Pabuji and Devnarayan; the Bhopa priest-singer unrolls it at night and sings the story before it.

Jivya Soma Mashe of the Warli country in Maharashtra was the painter who began to paint every day rather than only at weddings and rituals, which is how Warli art moved from the wedding wall to paper, canvas and exhibitions abroad; he received the Padma Shri. Option A is wrong…

Pichwai is not a Madhubani style at all; it is the painted cloth hung behind the image of Shrinathji at Nathdwara in Rajasthan, showing the seasons and the festivals of the deity.

Raghurajpur, with the neighbouring Dandasahi, is the village of the Chitrakar families who paint Pattachitra, engrave palm leaf and make the painted masks and the Jagannath vesha panels; almost every house in it is a workshop.

Patta means cloth and chitra means picture, so Pattachitra is literally painting on cloth, made on a canvas of layers of cloth pasted together with tamarind seed paste and chalk and rubbed smooth with a stone.

The Warli painter builds everything from three shapes: the circle for the sun and the moon, the triangle for the mountain and the pointed tree, and the square for the sacred enclosure.

Madhubani painting, also called Mithila painting, belongs to the Mithila region of north Bihar around Madhubani, Darbhanga and Sitamarhi, and is also practised in the Terai of Nepal.

Bali Trutiya, also written Bali Tritiya, is an Odia festival kept mainly by married women of Odisha in the month of Bhadrab.

Both temples belong to the Gurjara-Pratihara style, the western Indian form of the Nagara tradition that grew under Pratihara rule between the eighth and the eleventh centuries.