Painters From India

"I shall in future be obliged to resign myself to exhibiting them (her paintings) merely at the Grand Salon, Paris, of which I happen to be an Associate and the Salon de Tuileries known all over the world as the representative exhibition of Modern Art, and to which I have been invited to participate in the past, a distinction I may add that few can boast of."

"Revelations. Ellora magnificent. Ajanta curiously subtle and fascinating-I have for the first time since my return to India learnt something from somebody else's work."

"The Brahmacharis as the most difficult thing she had ever done....don't you think I have learnt something from Indian painting?...I don't know whether it is a passing phase or a durable change in my outlook but I see in a more detached manner, more ironically than I have ever done."

"These little compositions are the expression of my happiness and that is why perhaps I am particularly fond of them."

"I was positively stunned and have straight away become a votary of Mathura art to the exclusion of all the other and later schools."

"It is dreadful to think of Paris in German hands but what preoccupies me still more is what is going to happen to modern French art and the younger artists."

"I was positively stunned and have straightaway become a votary of Mathura art to the exclusion of all the other and later schools. I had some of the things in reproductions but never dreamt they were so magnificent. With the possible exception of Mahabalipuram I don’t think I have seen anything in Indian sculpture that I liked so much."

"The self-portraits display the artist moving from girl to woman to artist as she explored a sensuality that ranges from the heavy-handed to the subtle. Sher-Gil casts herself in a serious light in her Self-Portrait with Easel (1930), moving deliberately from the domestic and the intimate context of the nineteenth-century woman artist to the monumental and majestic poses recalling those of Rembrandt and later Van Gogh. Indira dressed as a European gentleman with Amrita dressed as her female partner."

"At stake was not only a serious and viable artistic career as a woman, but the development of a subjectivity that was being defined through the self-portrait. conscious of being both muse and maker, Sher-Gil took on the position of artist and object with a double consciousness of being both.”"

"Art in India was never the same after her comet like appearance. There are only a few moments in the history of art which pinpoint a new departure, a new direction. Such a moment in the history of modern Indian art was the appearance in the mid-thirties of Amrita Sher-Gil with whose paintings contemporary paintnig in India took shape and demonstrated the possibility of a contemporary style and expression that were, at the same time, of the soil and in direct continuation of the great national past."

"She [Sher-Gil] melded the Western and Indian idioms and did not, like many other artists of her time, attempt to find an authentic ‘Indian’ mode or weave together a nationalist agenda."

"A life cut tragically short, but with more colour perhaps than one may find in her work."

"that she was really a virgin because she'd never experienced the spiritual equivalent of copulation: she had many lovers but they'd left no scar. I'll leave a scar."

"An Indian with a measure of European blood, she returned to India to shed her acquired skin....She saw her country with new vision and has left a legacy of pictures simple and grand...as a tribute to the Indian countryside and its people."

"Rose water and raw spirit...weird amalgam of the bearded star gazer and the red haired pianist pounding away at her keyboard."

"I didn't know how much truth there was to gossip of her being a nymphomaniac, but I was eager to get to know her."

"Light, for me is Hope. Colour, the Universe in which it exists."

"The change needs to be from within us otherwise the generations to come will suffer."

"I want to drive home the message that we have to go beyond Copenhagen, beyond drawing room politics and sensitise ourselves, and try and make a change on an individual level."

"Let us stop a while, while doing what we are doing, and begin to change what we can change…"

"Nature has a million answers. Even as I observe tree trunks, roots, branches, idling in some corner, to be burnt down as wood, it affords an excellent laboratory to the mind. It is exciting, sensuous and intoxicating. If one submits oneself to the form and the raw energy of the tree even when it can no longer bear fruit and leaves, one can see great poetry and lyricism in its intertwining branches and roots. The functional sculptures and paintings are a result of this experiment. The process takes over thereafter, but it is just an ode to nature's beauty."

"As I scrape the bottom of the soul for some ingredients the only way I can explain to myself, about what it all is, is to believe that in some past life (if there is one), I belonged to the rainforests. The mantra there, for survival, is to submit to the natural forces, bow before it, respect its ways, learn and grow. You cannot defy it or go against it. In the rainforests there are labyrinthine darknesses weaving around you but there is always light in streaks, in a glow, in a stream, sunlight…all of which brings hope. You don't bathe in it all the time but it seeks you out. Man is but a speck. The human race, still a speck, in this mighty universe rich with millions of secrets."

"Nature's process of creation, as it exists in its timelessness,in its oneness and peace,has all the answers to man's needs of growth and progress and development. If the human endeavor first absorbs and then adopts these answers in its developmental process, the growth from cities to mega cities and path to progress would not create silent self digging graves of human extinction."

"Life – the break of dawn, the sound of a stream. Twilight. Dusk. Silent or loud, eloquent scream of joy or despair or just an ecstatic dream…"

"She quoted HamsDamyanti. According to her it is this painting that Ravi Varma reached the pinnacle of his art in depicting w:Maharashtra people}Maharashtrian Beauty. Ravi Varma’s talent lay in the mixing of colours and the effect he got when he painted drapery, jewelry and royal clothes. Uma mentions two other paintings of Rani Lakshmibai and princess Tarabai- both of which show Ravi Varma’s remarkable talent in portraiture. She also made a special reference to the painting of Krishna and mother displayed in Mysore Palace. Uma Varma believes Ravi Varma’s unique talent lay in the fact that no one has yet been able to make an exact replica of hi paintings. She has seen many European Masters copied perfectly but both Uma varma and her daughter Radhika say that they are yet to see painting, which could be an exact copy of Ravi Varma’s paintings."

"Who knows if these very pictures, now painted for maharajas, will not find their way to the museums one day."

"...the importance of recovering the customs and the institutions of the past thus inaugurating the archaeological approach to art"

"Varma adapted Western realism to pioneer a new movement in Indian art. In 1894 he set up a lithographic press in order to mass-produce copies of his paintings as oleographs, enabling ordinary people to afford them. That innovation resulted in the tremendous popularity of his images, which became an integral part of popular Indian culture thereafter."

"His depictions of Indian women drew such appreciation that a beautiful woman would often be described as looking “as if she had stepped out of a Varma canvas.”"

"Varma was the first Indian to use Western techniques of perspective and composition and to adapt them to Indian subjects, styles, and themes. He won the Governor’s Gold Medal in 1873 for the painting Nair Lady Adorning Her Hair. He became a much-sought-after artist among both the Indian nobility and the Europeans in India, who commissioned him to paint their portraits."

"This painting [By Varma] takes the view of the 18th century politics …looking at [it] one immediately thinks of the whole …of the great warrior. So he must be congratulated"

"He has become an Indian Kilroy. No matter where you look - whether in a book on the history of Indian art or one on advertising and printing in India or even something like popular taste and the making of the Indian national ethos - Raja Ravi Varma is there."

"Ravi Varma is not only among India's greatest artists, but also a great patriot. His depiction of the beauty of the Indian woman is unequalled in Indian art....When the art gallery of Mysore was under renovation, I got an opportunity to photograph them and my joy knew no bounds! Over the years I got to see many a fine-print reproductions of Ravi Varma's paintings and have tried to photograph the expression of his subjects."

"The more I saw, the more I admired the Master's genius — his uncanny ability, through the magic of his brush to depict mood, emotion and atmosphere and to encapsulate the whole story in the selected scene. I felt even then that a state of the art folio on his works needed to be brought out. Only, I never imagined that it was I who would eventually be doing it."