Active Period: 1947 - 1951

In 1947, Souza initiated the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG). By the time the group became operative, he had already made a name for himself, having dashed off - after his expulsion from the art school - several hundred paintings. …

Apart from Souza there were five other members of the Group. There was Raza who was not only well known, but a much envied and emulated landscape painter in Bombay - irresistibly charming as a person, sophisticated in his technique, lyrical in sensibility. In contrast to Raza, Ara was quite an unsophisticated but impetuous and vital person whose work Souza had found stunning because of its direct, intuitive modernism. In 1948, Husain’s one painting Potters has been put up in the annual art exhibition of the Bombay Art Society and it jumped out from the usual trash because of its vitality. This tall, lanky, bearded Muslim was working away quietly, diffidently in a virtual ghetto, unfamiliar with the upcoming artists’ milieu in Bombay. Souza tracked him down to ask him to join the Group. Gade and Bakre were brought into the Group by Raza and Ara respectively and they decided to limit the number to six so as not to end up with too much of a stylistic scramble.

It is an interesting fact, though rather quickly forgotten, that when Souza initiated the Progressive Artists’ Group, he still had it in mind to give that Group a broad ideological orientation. In its first manifesto Souza, speaking on behalf of the Group, wrote that their intention was to bring about “a closer understanding and contact between different sections of the artists’ community and the people…”[1]. Because of Souza’s continuing relations with the CPI, the first meetings of the Group were held at the premises of the Party office, or at the office of the “Friends of Soviet Union.” Moreover, the title “Progressive” associated them with the Progressive Writers’ Movement which was started by communist writers and fellow-travellers in the thirties.

However, in the catalogue of the Group’s exhibition held in July 1949, Souza had reformulated, on behalf of the Group, the limits of their intention.

"I do not quite understand no, why we still call our Group “Progressive.” We have changed all the chauvinist ideas and the leftist fanaticism which we had incorporated in our manifesto at the inception of the Group…We found this in the course of working an impossibility…the gulf between the so-called people and the artists cannot be bridged.

Today we paint with absolute freedom for contents and techniques, almost anarchic; save that we are governed by one or two sound elemental and eternal laws, of aesthetic order, plastic co-ordination and colour composition." [2]

On the political question, there could not have been no agreement among the Group members. Raza had leftist sympathies but his work was altogether unideological; Husain painted his ghetto environment with great deal of involvement, but he was exceedingly wary of politics. It is no wonder that they arrived at the most obvious common denominator between them: aesthetic order, plastic coordination, and colour composition. Fortunately, it was not, though with that sort of trite terminology it might easily have been, the lowest common denominator.

References

[1] F N Souza, “The Progressive Artists’ Group,” Patriot Magazine, 8 February 1976

[12] Statement in Catalogue, Progressive Artists’ Group Exhibition at Bombay, 7 July 1948

Excerpt from Contemporary Indian Artists by Geeta Kapur (1979), pg 8 - 9.