Modern Indian Art and Artists: Painters, Works and Schools

The correct answer is A, Travancore. 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. He is remembered for bringing European oil technique and perspective to Indian mythological subjects in works such as Shakuntala, Hamsa Damayanti and Lady with the Lamp. Option B is wrong because Mysore is associated with the Mysore school of painting and with the Wodeyar court, not with Ravi Varma's birth. Option C is a tempting distractor: Ravi Varma did work for the Gaekwad ruler of Baroda, who commissioned several of his canvases, but he was not born there. Option D is wrong because Jaipur belongs to the Rajasthani miniature tradition of the Kishangarh and Jaipur schools. Remember Kilimanoor as the birthplace and Baroda as the court that commissioned him; papers set the two states against each other in the same question.

The correct answer is B, Abanindranath Tagore. 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 faith. Abanindranath led the Bengal School and revived the wash technique. Option A is wrong because Nandalal Bose, though his pupil, is remembered for the Haripura Panels and the decoration of the Constitution manuscript. Option C is wrong because Jamini Roy worked in the Kalighat folk idiom with flat figures and bold lines. Option D is wrong because Gaganendranath Tagore, Abanindranath's brother, is known for caricatures and Cubist experiments. Note the year 1905 as well, the year of the partition of Bengal, because the date of this painting is asked as often as the name of its painter.

The correct answer is B, Nandalal Bose. 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. Option A is the classic trap: Prem Behari Narain Raizada was the calligrapher who wrote out the whole document by hand in flowing italic, but he did not paint the decorations. Option C is wrong because Ramkinkar Baij, also at Santiniketan, was a sculptor whose Santhal Family of 1938 is read as the first modern public sculpture in India. Option D is wrong because Jamini Roy, a Bengal painter of the same generation, had no part in the manuscript. One more name is worth keeping: Beohar Rammanohar Sinha, who decorated the preamble page of the same manuscript under Nandalal Bose.

The correct answer is B, Ramkinkar Baij. 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. Its rough surface and everyday subject broke with the smooth academic statuary of the time, which is why it is read as the beginning of modern Indian sculpture; Mill Call is his other standard answer. Option A is wrong because Devi Prasad Roy Choudhury made the bronze Triumph of Labour on the Marina at Chennai and was the first chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi. Option C is wrong because S. K. Bakre was the sculptor member of the Progressive Artists' Group of 1947. Option D is wrong because Sailoz Mukherjea was a painter. Baij taught sculpture at Kala Bhavana, and his open-air cement and laterite figures are the standard example of modern Indian sculpture in exam papers.

The correct answer is C, 1947. 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. They rejected both the academic realism of the colonial art schools and the revivalism of the Bengal School in favour of a modern idiom. Option A is wrong because 1919 is the year Kala Bhavana, the art school at Santiniketan, was started. Option B is wrong because 1938 is the year of the Haripura Panels and of Santhal Family. Option D is wrong because 1954 is the founding year of the Lalit Kala Akademi and of the National Gallery of Modern Art, both of which came later. A common follow-up asks which member of the group was a sculptor rather than a painter, and the answer is S. K. Bakre.

The correct answer is A, S. H. Raza. 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 square of the Panchatatva. Option B is wrong because V. S. Gaitonde called his work non-objective and used layered washes of colour rather than a single motif. Option C is wrong because Tyeb Mehta is known for the Diagonal series, the Falling Figure and Celebration. Option D is wrong because Akbar Padamsee is remembered for his Metascapes, Prophets and grey nudes, not for the Bindu. Raza was born in Madhya Pradesh in 1922, spent his working life largely in France, and received the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan and the Padma Vibhushan.

The correct answer is B, Amrita Sher-Gil. Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in 1913 to a Sikh father and a Hungarian mother and trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where Young Girls brought her early recognition at the Salon. After returning to India she turned to the Ajanta murals and the Pahari miniatures, and painted Three Girls, Bride's Toilet, Brahmacharis and South Indian Villagers Going to a Market before her death at the age of twenty-eight in 1941. Option A is wrong because Anjolie Ela Menon belongs to a much later generation and works in oil on masonite. Option C is wrong because Sunayani Devi was a self-taught painter of the Tagore family. Option D is wrong because Sarada Ukil was a Bengal School painter who taught in Delhi. She is the youngest of the nine artists whose works are declared national art treasures and may not be taken out of India.

The correct answer is B, Kalighat pat of Bengal. Jamini Roy trained in the academic manner at the Government School of Art in Calcutta but abandoned it for the Kalighat pat, the cheap brush-drawn pictures sold to pilgrims near the Kalighat temple, and for Bengal scroll painting. From them he took the sweeping single line, the flat earth colours and the large eyes of his Mother and Child and Santhal dancers. Option A is wrong because Madhubani is the wall and paper painting of the Mithila region of Bihar. Option C is wrong because Warli painting, in white on a mud ground, belongs to the Warli people of Maharashtra. Option D is wrong because Phad is the long painted scroll of the Bhopa bards of Rajasthan. Roy received the Padma Bhushan in 1955, and his work also stands on the list of nine artists whose paintings are national art treasures.

The correct answer is C, 1954. The Lalit Kala Akademi, the national academy of art, was set up in 1954 at New Delhi, with the sculptor Devi Prasad Roy Choudhury as its first chairman; the National Gallery of Modern Art at Jaipur House in New Delhi dates from the same year. The Akademi gives the National Akademi Awards and the Lalit Kala Ratna. Option A is wrong because 1950 is the year the Constitution came into force, not the year of the Akademi. Option B is a close distractor, since the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the academy for music, dance and drama, was founded in 1953, a year earlier; the Sahitya Akademi for letters, like the Lalit Kala Akademi, belongs to 1954. Option D is wrong because 1961 is the year the Film and Television Institute at Pune was founded. Keep the three academies together in memory: Sangeet Natak Akademi 1953, and the Sahitya Akademi and the Lalit Kala Akademi both in 1954.

The correct answer is A, Chennai. Cholamandal Artists' Village was founded in 1966 on the coast south of Chennai by K. C. S. Paniker and other artists of the Madras art movement, and it is described as the first self-supporting artists' commune in India, where painters and sculptors lived together and sold batik and metalwork to fund their studios. Option B is wrong because Bengaluru is associated with the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath. Option C is wrong because Kochi is the home of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, first held in 2012, which is an exhibition and not a residential village. Option D is wrong because Hyderabad has no commune of this kind, though it houses the Salar Jung Museum, which is often confused into such questions. The pairing that papers set is the year 1966 with Paniker and with Chennai, so fix all three together; the Madras art movement is its background.

The correct answer is B, M. F. Husain. Maqbool Fida Husain, a founder member of the Progressive Artists' Group and often called the Picasso of India, made the short film Through the Eyes of a Painter, which took the Golden Bear for a short film at the Berlin festival in 1967; he later directed the feature Gaja Gamini. He is remembered for his horses and for his Ramayana and Mahabharata series, received the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan and the Padma Vibhushan, and was nominated to the Rajya Sabha. Option A is wrong because F. N. Souza, who founded the group, was a painter and writer who moved to London. Option C is wrong because Satish Gujral was a painter, muralist and architect who designed the Belgian embassy in Delhi. Option D is wrong because Krishen Khanna, a member of the group, painted bandwallas and did not make films. Husain was born at Pandharpur in Maharashtra in 1915 and began his working life painting cinema hoardings in Bombay.

The correct answer is B, Devi Prasad Roy Choudhury. Roy Choudhury, a pupil of Abanindranath Tagore who became the first Indian principal of the Government School of Art at Madras, modelled Triumph of Labour, the group of four men straining at a rock that stands on the Marina beach at Chennai, and also the Martyrs' Memorial outside the Patna secretariat. He was appointed the first chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1954. Option A is wrong because Ramkinkar Baij, though the other great sculptor of the period, made Santhal Family and Mill Call at Santiniketan. Option C is wrong because K. C. S. Paniker was a painter who founded Cholamandal. Option D is wrong because Nandalal Bose was a painter, not a sculptor. Separate the two sculptors by their cities: Ramkinkar Baij at Santiniketan, Devi Prasad Roy Choudhury at Madras and Patna.