Active Year: 1963

Group 1890 the brain child of J Swaminathan grew out of a meeting of artists, mainly from Delhi and Bombay, held at Bhavnagar on 25 - 26 August, 1962. Its name was derived from the number of the house of J Pandya where the artists met. It formulated its manifesto at Bhavnagar and adopted it in New Delhi on 19 July 1963. ….Jeram Patel was the secretary and Swaminathan ‘the ideologue for this entirely male association which stood passionately and romantically for values of modernism that signalled change’. Group 1890 held its first exhibition at Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi from 20 - 29 October 1963.

Octavio Paz, the surrealist poet who was then the Mexican Ambassador to India, wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalogue:

The true subject of this exhibition is the confrontation of the vision of these painters with the inherited image. Contemporary Indian art, if this country is to have an art worthy of its past, cannot but be born from this violent clash. Jawaharlal Nehru opened the exhibition. The exhibition ended with the proclamation that ‘art is reality itself, a whole new world of experience, the threshold for the passage into the state of freedom.

The 1963 exhibition was the first and last. While the Group dismembered, some of its members went on to become illustrious names in the field of art.

Excerpt from Contemporary Art in India - A Perspective, Pran Nath Mago, 2001, pg 71- 73