Active Period: 1943 - 1953

The eight participants of the very first exhibition of the Calcutta Group held in 1945 were Prodosh Das Gupta, Kamala Das Gupta (nee T.C. Kamala), Gopal Ghosh, Paritosh Sen, Nirode Majumder, Subho Tagore, Rathin Maitra, and Prankrishna Pal. There is no clear consensus regarding his membership, but Banshi Chandragupta’s works were shown along with other members of the group in their second exhibition held in Bombay (1945, under the auspices of the I.P.T.A.) but since then neither he nor Subho Tagore exhibited with the group again. Abani Sen joined the group just before the fourth exhibition in 1947, and Rathin Mitra was nominated a member in 1949. Immediately before the joint exhibition with the Progressive Artists’ Group of Bombay (held in Calcutta, 1950) Rathin Maitra and Gopal Ghosh had withdrawn from the group and Govardhan Ash was invited to join in their place. This was also the solitary exhibition in which Ramkinkar Baij participated. Sunil Madhav Sen and Hemanta Misra joined the group in 1952 and 1953 respectively as the final recruits.

Beyond 1953, most of the artists of the Calcutta Group evolved into their individual trajectories. Familiarity, therefore, associates their identity with the works of the later period rather than what they produced as members of a collective attempt. Moreover, the lack of any kind of systematic documentation building up an inventory of the visual images, makes it impossible today to form a comprehensible idea of the range and dimension of creative expression during the ten years of the Group. Most of the originals are dispersed or untraceable; what little remains in the form of a few illustrations accompanying contemporary publications are the only source of our knowledge where the authenticity of the date of execution of the work of art remains beyond doubt. Two such sources would be the Calcutta Group handbook/catalogue and the article by Klaus Fischer in the journal “Marg” both published in 1953.

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From the above it is evident that despite a genuine intention to break new grounds and reach a modern expression the Calcutta Group had an overwhelming concern for form and style that overrode the basic necessity of consolidated evolution of a pictorial language, where style is not an end, but the means. Despite (and perhaps more so because of) the incompleteness of the historical process of modernization, for the artists constituting the Calcutta Group the experience of the modern condition of the metropolis must have been of a considerable degree to prompt the possibility of forming a collective deciding to work towards a modern pictorial expression, however loose the formation may have been. This historical situation was sufficient to realize that academism of both the kinds, that of the art-school as well as the ‘burden of tradition’ of the so-called “Bengal school”, would be incapacitous in providing the necessary vocabulary. Further, there was already a strong debate for the defining of the ‘modern’ especially in literature, and the artists of the Calcutta Group could not have missed the excitement and the vitality of the discourse of their contemporaries in other fields. However, the notion of ‘progress’ being equated with a political agenda, and identity of a political art being located in the propagandist efforts (taking cue from that of Soviet Russia) the artists of the Calcutta Group were determined to keep themselves out of the domain of social realism in pictorial practice, no matter how much it may prove to be an alternative in a breakthrough from the twin academic strictures. Even though they had not followed the exact trajectories in the chronological logic of European modern art, they had come up with solutions in terms of form, colour, space, figuration, etc. which sufficiently had the appearance of a catapulting-out from the “baggage of ‘Indian-style’ painting and the tyranny of a ‘spiritual’ Indian aesthetic”.

Excerpt from The Calcutta Group 1943 - 1953, Sanjoy Mallik, Art & Deal, No. 16, Volume 3 No. 2,October-December 2004.

Also available on http://www.theotherspaces.com/Papers/5/default.aspx