Two-month exhibition to show how foreign artists saw India between 1857 and 1947

So how did the world see India in an era when travel magazines were rare and when social media was unimaginable and when India was not even an independent nation? Mostly through the works of artists – and later photographers – who traveled to the subcontinent.

The two-month-long exhibition at the Alipore Museum in Kolkata will bring India to life by showcasing the works of nearly 40 foreign artists who spent time in India during two crucial moments in India’s history, the rebellion of 1857 and independence.

The exhibition, titled Destination India: Foreign Artists in India, which runs from February 28 to May 2, is being organized by art company DAG in collaboration with the museum. It focuses on artists who came to India from Germany, Holland, Denmark, France, America, Japan, besides Britain.

“When considering British and other European representations of India, the focus is often on the pioneers. The problem with this traditional trajectory is that it ignores the many interesting artists who came to India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries… They came to India with a different aesthetic sense and different interests. In their works, we find an India – if we can put it that way – that we do not just see, but which We can hear and smell,” said Ashish Anand, CEO and MD of DAG.

Giles Tillotson, the show’s curator and senior vice president of DAG, said: The Hindu This exhibition was important today because it pointed out two shortcomings in the understanding of art of that period.

“One, it is often assumed that foreign artists came to India to make paintings or produce prints, which dried up or ended with the invention of photography, that from the middle of the 19th century, when photography was available, the camera became the dominant medium for representing Indian scenes. This collection of works shows that is not true. Yes, we had some wonderful photographers, but painters kept coming in substantial numbers, and it was really not given attention before,” said Dr. Tillotson.

According to him, the second difference was the belief that Orientalist art was merely a representation of North Africa and West Asia by European artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The curator said, “It was always assumed that they stuck around the Middle East, that they didn’t really reach India. Yet, that’s not true. They are here. So it’s really about setting the record straight in terms of two prevalent, traditional art historical narratives to set those two ideas straight.”

Whereas the artists who came to India in the late 18^th And in the early 19^th Mostly captured in grand monuments and expansive landscapes over the centuries, those who came later – whether British, German, Dutch, Danish, American or Japanese, offered an intimate glimpse of street life.

Artists whose works will be on display include Edward Lear, William Carpenter, Marius Bauer, Hugo Wilfried Pedersen, Olinto Gilardi, Roderick Dempster McKenzie, Mortimer Menpes, Maurice Lewis, John Gleich, WoJ Nieuwenkamp, ​​Yoshida Hiroshi, Boris Georgiev and Holger Hvitfelt Jericho.

“Serving as a reminder that the advent of new technology has not eliminated old forms of artistic production, but rather encouraged artists in new directions, the exhibition brings back and displays artworks from across the subcontinent, many of them almost a century after they were made, while examining the perspective of European artists, who were undoubtedly influenced by the ideas of Romanticism, albeit prejudiced, but if one is to understand the shape of Indian visual culture it is a Was important.” Dr. Tillotson said.