The PAG Revolution

In 1947, after gaining its independence from the British Empire, India experienced tremendous national historical, social, and cultural changes. Riding on the crest of this wave of transformation was the Progressive Artists' Group, formed to consciously seek new visual imagery which could describe the new Indian reality during and after this tumultous era.

Founding members declared that they intended to go forward, and being “progressive”, summarily denouncing the influence of past Indian artists as too sentimental and old-fashioned. With an intentional, unabashed homage to European contemporaries, the artists created pieces that drew parallels of the tension between the local and the global by creating art within the framework of international modernism. Each worked in dramatically different styles, from Expressionism to abstraction, as well as the creation of imagery and landscapes unmistakenly Indian. PAG artists included:

K. H. Ara was the first contemporary Indian artist to paint the female nude as a subject realistically, not in the abstract as did many of his colleagues. The influences of European artists Cézanne and Matisse are evident in his still life pieces painted in the 1940's and 50s. His favored media initially were watercolors and gouaches, which would at times resemble oils in the impasto effect; although he later painted successfully in oils.

Bal Chhabda, a self taught Mumbai-based artist who began paining in oils in the late 1950s. His works seem abstract, although one can see traces of shapes and forms that produces faintly discernible boundaries of the form in lyric dispositions.

VS Gaitonde is considered one of India’s foremost abstractionists. Gaitonde's works are known for evoking subliminal depths. Plain, large surfaces with paint layered subtly characterize his work. His paintings have a quality of light that seems to be complete in its self.

MF Husain is a self-taught artist who began his career painting film billboards. Husain is a uniquely celebrated and honored figure in contemporary India. His work is figurative using a visual language that blends folk, tribal and mythological imagery and a modernist aesthetic that draws equally from music, dance, sculpture and cinema.

Krishen Khanna, learned to paint at evening classes conducted at the Mayo School of Art, Lahore. In the wake of India's partition he moved to Simla and thereafter to Delhi where he currently lives and works. Khanna is known for his gestural style and thick impasto surfaces.

Ram Kumar took classes at the Sarada Ukil School of Art, and then went to Paris and studied further there under Andre Lhote and Fernand Léger. He was befriended by S.H. Raza who was living in Paris at the time. Ram Kumar paints abstract landscapes, usually in oil or acrylic.

Akbar Padamsee’s painting style is difficult to articulate, for his work ranges from the figurative to the non-objective. Regardless, the reverberating expressions of form, volume, space, time, and color in many of his works are both cerebral and sensual. Padmasee is best known for his Metascapes.

S.H. Raza’s works are mainly abstracts in oil or acrylic, with a very rich use of color. They often feature the "Bindu" (the dot or the epicenter of Hindu philosophy).

FN Souza was the first avant-garde artist from India to achieve widespread recognition in the West. Souza is best known for his inventive human forms--particularly his expressionist heads--and impious Christian themes (see blog below).

Though the Progressive Artists’ Group dissolved in 1956, it was profoundly revolutionary in changing the idiom of Indian art forever.