ENCYCLOPAEDIA VISUAL ART OF MAHARASHTRA ARTISTS OF THE BOMBAY SCHOOL AND ART INSTITUTIONS (late 18th to Early 21st Century)

The three colonial art schools of India established by the mid-19th century at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay have been pivotal in rooting the tradition of European naturalism in the country rupturing the native art practices.[1] To understand the fractures or shifts in visual arts in the pre-colonial and decolonising art of Maharashtra one was required to scour several sources. The data collection in this direction almost makes the researchers’ suffer a prison sentence due to the lack of archiving habits of the artists and the administrators of the past. The arrival of the Drushyakala Khand by Hindusthan Prakashan Sanstha (Saptahik Vivek) in 2013 produced in Marathi presented a plethora of 300 odd biographies of painters, sculptors, and applied arts professionals along with insight into two centuries of visual art from c. 1760 to c. 1960. It is an art-historical gift to the Marathi artworld through immense efforts by editors Suhas Bahulkar and Deepak Ghare with contributions from several artist-writers. A mammoth feat accomplished of creating the encyclopaedia that ran for several years. In May 2015, the work to translate it into English began with the support of the Pundoles financially and presided over by a team of art historians and artists like Pheroza Godrej, Dr Sudhir Patwardhan, and Dilip Ranade in different capacities. The outcome is now presented to us in the form of a thick volume of about 900 pages richly packed with 321 colour plates and 1200 odd black and white illustrative images annotating the thoroughly written texts. Titled as Encyclopaedia- Visual Art of Maharashtra: Artists of the Bombay School and Art Institutions (Late 18th to Early 21st century) the catalogue clearly states its scope and is free of jargons. The historically selected areas classified in the encyclopaedia choose to highlight a concept of Bombay School and its oeuvre and discount other possibilities. A difficult yet pertinent take by the editors to envelope an entire discourse of creative practices under one umbrella term- The Bombay School (BS). The encyclopaedia attempts an overview of regional visual arts on the lines of the chronological narrative survey of World Art, The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich, a seminal text, and an accessible introduction to the visual arts. However, the encyclopaedia focuses on anthological entries on individual artists and some landmark institutional contributions to the field. An art enthusiast is fairly exposed to the building blocks of visual arts of Maharashtra

Binding Hardbound, Language English