Exploring Indian Modernities by Leïla Choukroune & Parul Bhandari

Author:Leïla Choukroune & Parul Bhandari
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

5 The Rise of the Art District in Kala Ghoda Neighbourhood

At the end of the first half of the 20th century, Bombay, well inserted into international artistic network, is increasingly challenging Calcutta for the status of epicentre of Indian art world. The arrival of intellectual and collectors who fled the rise of Nazism in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s contributed to new experiments at a time when the historical neighborhood of Kala Ghoda was structuring as an early institutional and editorial art district.

While it was still very difficult at this time for young Indian artists to travel outside their country, the arrival of European intellectual and art collectors awakened great interest and exchanges. Among those key actors was Rudolf von Leyden (Rudy) geologist by training, collector, painter, caricaturist, photographer, and art critic who arrived in Bombay in 1933 with his younger brother A. R. Leyden, a sculptor. Rudy would soon become an unavoidable art critic for the Times of India. Emmanuel Schlesinger fled Denmark and arrived in Bombay around the same period. A close friend of Oskar Kokoshka and Egon Schiele, he had to leave behind his collection of more than a 1000 works including paintings by those masters of abstract Expressionism, but his taste for gestural painting followed him to India. He became an important patron and collector in the art scene, which emerged in the 1950s. Before coming to Bombay, Austrian Walter Langhammer was a Professor at the Academy of Vienna. At his home on Nepean Sea Road in Malabar Hill, he started workshops where artists could come to work and discuss. Most of today’s renowned contemporary artists came to study with him and had long conversations on the avantgarde in Europe and on abstract Expressionism. S. H. Raza remembered Langhammer placing before them the reproductions of works of Raphael, El Greco, Monet, and Cézanne alongside Rajput, Mongol and Persian miniatures in order to expose them to various styles, to broaden their horizons. This experience fostered a rethinking of the western modernity as integrating a long tradition of style appropriations in Indian art. Benefiting from the intellectual and financial support of this small community of European migrants, the Progressive Artists’ Group would then be founded in Bombay in the aftermath of Independence.

The network of modern art institutions developed in Bombay during the colonial period became also the ground on which the post-Independence art scene expanded. In Fort, the Kala Ghoda neighbourhood steadily established itself as an institutional, commercial, and intellectual centrality, benefiting from the support of the local artistic community as well as the dynamism of the financial, commercial, and tourist districts that surrounded it. Far from being relocated, the artistic centrality of the southern districts had been reinforced after Independence.

Kala Ghoda, where the Bombay Art society, the Prince of Wales Museum (1901–14) and the Cowasji Jehangir Hall (1911) were already located, brought together new spaces for art exhibition, press, and trade. The city’s first public art gallery, the Jehangir Art Gallery, opened in 1952 next to the Prince of Wales Museum.

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