Manifesto

The Group 1890 was formed in a meeting of artists from various parts of the country held at Bhavnagar on August 25-26, 1962. It derives its name simply from the number of the house of J. Pandya, who was host to the conferring artists.

The Bhavnagar meeting was the outcome of prolonged discussions through personal meetings and correspondence over a period of two years between like minded artists on the situation existing in modern Indian art. Having come to a common understanding regarding the vitiating influences which hinder the unfolding of authentic development in art, it was decided to launch the group 1890 movement.

The Group has no regional or geographical affiliation nor is it confined to any particular age group. It does not advocate any specific mode or manner in art. What it stands for is outlined in its manifesto, discussed at Bhavnagar last year and finally adopted in New Delhi on July 17, 1963.

Manifesto

From its early beginnings in the vulgar naturalism of Raja Ravi Varma and the pastoral idealism of the Bengal school, down through the hybrid mannerisms resulting from the imposition of concepts evolved by successive movements in modern European art on classical, miniature and folk styles to the flight into ‘abstraction’ in the name of cosmopolitanism, tortured alternately by memories of a glorious past born out of a sense of futility in the face of a dynamic present and the urge to catch up with the times so as to merit recognition, modern Indian art by and large has been inhibited by the self-defeating purposiveness of its attempts at establishing an identity.

The self conscious search for significance between tradition and contemporaniety, between representation and abstraction, between communication and expression lies at the root of all eclecticism in art. To us creative expression is not the search for, but the unfolding of personality.

A work of art is neither representational nor abstract, figurative or non-figurative. It is unique and sufficient unto itself, palpable in its reality and generating its own life.

The image proper in art describes itself inevitably through the creative act. It is neither the translation of an experience, feeling, idea or act nor the objective organization of form in space.

The image proper defines its own space, delineation, colour and composition. Any objective criterion of perspective, of harmony and dimension is unreal to it.

To us, the creative act is an experience in itself, appropriated by us and therefore bearing no relation to the work of art, which creates its own field of experience -as the experience of copulation is not the same as that of the offspring. A work of art has to be experienced, the experience not being subject to judgement or assessment.

The incapacity to see phenomena in their virginal state resulting from the conditioning of history creates the illusion that life can be ordained and made to flow from the image of one’s own ego, whereas the creative process has its own volition and genesis, which does not conform to anticipation by man.

The genesis of the form proper is genetically anticipated and not conceptually determined. Its significance therefore lies neither in its capacity to evoke memory responses nor in its relevance to any objective criteria of harmony. Whatever be the history of its becoming, its being emanates its own connotation, the form proper is the free form; its freedom is neither the denial of its history nor its recapitulation.

For us, there is no anticipation in the creative act. It is an act through which the personality of the artist evolves itself in its incessant becoming, moving towards its own arrival.

Art for us is not born out of a preoccupation with the human condition. We do not sing of man, nor are we his messiahs, the function of art is not to interpret and annotate, comprehend and guide. Such attitudinising may be seen heroic in an age where man, caught up in the mesh of his own civilization, hungers for vindication. Essentially, this self-glorification to us is but the perpetuation of the death wish, of the state of unfreedom of man.

Art is neither conformity to reality nor a flight from it, it is reality itself, a whole new world of experience, the threshold for the passage into the state of freedom.