CategoriesStyles and Movements
Progressive Artists' Movement
The Bombay group founded in 1947 by Souza, Raza, Husain and others, which set the course for modern art in independent India.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
In 1947, the year of independence and Partition, six young artists in Bombay formed the Progressive Artists' Group: Francis Newton Souza, Sayed Haider Raza, Maqbool Fida Husain, K. H. Ara, H. A. Gade and S. K. Bakre. They rejected both the academic realism taught at the Sir J. J. School of Art and the revivalist Bengal School, seeking a modern Indian art in dialogue with Expressionism and Cubism. European émigrés in Bombay, among them the critic Rudolf von Leyden, encouraged them.
The members shared an attitude more than a style, and the founders soon scattered. Souza left for London in 1949, painting aggressive, distorted heads; Raza settled in France in 1950 and moved from landscape towards the geometric, symbolic bindu paintings of his later years; Husain fused folk, epic and modernist sources in vivid figurative canvases. V. S. Gaitonde, Krishen Khanna, Akbar Padamsee and Tyeb Mehta later joined its circle.
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