The history of modern printmaking in the country dates back to the 16th century, with the introduction of the first printing press in India by colonial settlers in Goa.

Over the years the usage and demand of printed illustrations increased for various purposes including advertisements, books and propaganda.The publishing and printing industry expanded exponentially in Calcutta by the 18th century under British rule. The Battala prints gained popularity in the 19th century, with Calcutta gradually becoming the printing and publishing hub under the British.

Parallely, many art schools and printing presses were set up throughout the country in places like Madras, Bombay, Jaipur and Lahore for the crafts and design oriented artists. Artistic explorations as well as printmaking for mass reproduction were being practiced in the regions as well.

While in Calcutta, the creative practitioners adopted several artistic and intellectual approaches. In the year 1915, the Bichitra Club, founded by the Tagore family and their peers as a studio for artistic experimentation in painting and printmaking. A primary member of the club, Gaganendranath Tagore, published Adbhut Lok (The Realm of the Absurd) in 1917, an album of his lithographic prints.

Over the subsequent years, more artists associated with the Bichitra Club, like Rabindranath Tagore, Mukul Dey, and Nandalal Bose experimented with printmaking. Kala Bhavan, Shantinikentan, helmed by Bose was one the premier institutes where different techniques of printmaking were taught and practiced by the artists. Gradually, more and more artists at Kala Bhavan like Benode Behari Mukherjee, Ramkinker Baij and Ramendranath Chakravorty experimented and sustained their practices with intaglio and relief prints.

The medium gained popularity over the years and many practising artists from Bengal like KG Subramanyam and Gopal Ghose, working with other media experimented with printing as well.

Artists like Chittoprasad, Somnath Hore, Krishna Reddy and Sanat Kar were some of the prominent artists working with printmaking as a fine art medium in Bengal. Some of the printmakers are afforded by the developing evolution of printing techniques and mediums like pulp prints, viscosity etc.

This exhibition overviews the distinct practices of the artists and the development of printmaking as a medium for reproduction for the masses to a medium of fine art in Bengal.

Benode Behari Mukherjee (1904-1980)

Born in 1904, Benodebehari is remembered today as a distinguished artist and an inspiring teacher. From early life, Benodebehari had to struggle with impaired vision and the threat of losing his eyesight completely. As a child, his education in Kolkata was hampered because of his poor eyesight and he was sent to Santiniketan Brahmacharya Vidyalaya. His passion for the visual arts took him to Kala Bhavana, in Santiniketan where he later joined its faculty and played an integral part in making it into one of the most important institutions for the study of art. He was surrounded by pristine nature which found a place later in his landscape paintings.

Benodebehari’s style of work was simple and ideological. A student of Nandalal Bose, he renounced overt symbolism of mythological descriptions. Instead, he turned to simple representations of his immediate surroundings. Even these reflect everyday life in Santiniketan. Benodebehari worked on different media: tempera, watercolour, oil, woodcut, paper collage, pastel and others. He classified his forms on the basis of the carefully constructed horizontal axis, vertical axis, diagonal axis and curvilinear axis. The postcards demonstrate the usage of all these four kinds of lines. Benodebehari used a complex fusion of idioms drawn from western art as well as from the orient. Far eastern traditions are evident in his calligraphy and in the wash technique he used. The pressure of his brush strokes and ink distribution on handmade paper are remarkable

The artist passed away in 1980.

Chittaprosad (1915 – 1978)

Chittaprosad's works reflect his reformist concerns. They are a depiction of the images that were his preoccupation --- poor peasants and laborers. His hard-hitting caricatures and sketches of the poor dying in the Bengal famine (1943) worked like modern day reportage, and shook the middle class and the British officials out of their apathy.

His reformist concerns showed in his life too, when he refused to use his Brahminical surname 'Bhattacharyya'. Today, collectors and lovers of art treasure Chittaprosad's woodcuts, linocuts and posters immensely. Yet, this artist was once refused admission to the Government School of Art, Kolkata and the Kala Bhawan, Santiniketan. A self-taught artist, he experimented constantly with the art of picture making. A master of many forms, he quickly adapted to the needs of the times and switched to simpler lines and fewer exaggerations of forms.

A contemporary of Zainul Abedin (1917-1976, Bangladesh) and Govardhan Ash, who were known for their brutally honest depiction of human suffering, Chittoprasad was a Communist Party of India activist. Amongst his noted works are the posters and paintings of the Naval Mutiny in Bombay (1946). He even joined the World Peace Movement. Bhattacharya first exhibited in Prague's National Gallery and was heralded bet the international artist community as a master. Confession, a documentary on his life by Pavel Hobl (Czech) won a special prize from the World Peace Council.

Bhattacharya passed away in 1978.

Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938)

Born in 1867, brother of Abanindranath Tagore and the eldest son of Rabindranath’s cousin, Gunendranath, Gaganendranath Tagore took a concise interest in drawing, painting and academic studies. Following Gunendranath’s premature death in 1881, Gaganendranath at the age of fourteen, took over as the potential head of the junior branch of the Tagores at Jorasanko. In 1896, subsequent to the partition of family estates, he began to take care of the administration.

Schooled at St. Xavier’s and later trained by Harinarayan Basu, Gaganendranath’s interests spanned photography, lithography, play-acting and book-reading. Gaganendranath was considered one of the significant figures among the masses and the elites, who saw the shift from colonial to orientalist design innovations. He is hailed as a forerunner to the design activism of Nandalal Bose at Santiniketan. Gaganendranath was one of the founder members of the Indian Society of Oriental Art (1907). He committed himself to promoting Indian traditional art in colonial India, playing an active role in the organizational activities of the society. He played a crucial role in setting up the Bengal Home Industries Association, and as a Secretary of the Association, he fostered the crafts of the Eastern region.

Through 1916 - 1918, Gaganendranath discovered a new medium of expression: humour and satire in the form of caricature. Amongst his significant works are ‘Adbhut Lok’, ‘Birupa Bajra’, ‘Naba Hullor’. Some of his other important works and series are, ‘Dadabhayer Deyala,’ later published as ‘Bhodor Bahadur’, illustrations for ‘Jivansmriti’ (1912), sketches of rural Bengal, Ranchi and Puri, employing water-colour as the medium, and ‘Chaitanya Series’. He also experimented with cubism, folk-lore and images of the deceased and the world beyond.

He was paralyzed a year before his death, in 1938.

Gopal Ghose (1913 - 1980)

Born in Shyambazar (Kolkata), Gopal Ghose spent his childhood and adolescence shifting between Shimla, Benares and Allahabad. In 1931, he enrolled as a student at the Maharaja School of Art & Craft, Jaipur, under the guidance of Sailendranath Dey, from where he obtained his Diploma in Painting in 1935. Subsequently, he enrolled at the Government School of Art, Madras, in 1936, under the tutelage of Deviprasad Roy Chowdhury. Beginning with a pictorial language that was inspired by the latter, Gopal Ghose’s work transformed during the 1940s; his sketches of the infamous man-made famine of 1943 and the paintings executed during his association with the Calcutta Group testify his shift to a more contextually relevant pictorial diction. During the early 1940s, he taught at the Indian Society of Oriental Art, Kolkata, before he joining the Government School of Art, Kolkata, where he taught till 1972.

Gopal Ghose’s art received critical attention from Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Stella Kramrisch. In 1956, he was one of the participants in a collective project involving designs by contemporary Asian artists engraved on Steuben Crystal, which were exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 1963, he went on a tour of the United States as part of the Foreign Leader programme of the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs, US Department of State. He had several shows of his paintings across India, and continues to be widely admired for his work by art critics and collectors.

He was diagnosed with lung cancer, and breathed his last on 30th July, 1980.

Krishna Reddy (1925 -2018)

Born in Chitoor, Andhra Pradesh on 15 July 1925, printmaker and sculptor Krishna Reddy studied art at the Vishwa-Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal. From 1947 to 1950 he headed the art section at Kalakshetra, Chennai. Later, with the help of philosopher-writer J. Krishnamurthi, Reddy traveled to Europe, where he spent his most impressionable years. From 1951 to 1952 he studied art at the Slade School of Fine Arts, University of London.

In later years, he worked under Hayter in Paris as Associate Director of the printmaking studio Atelier 17, as well as in the studios of Henry Moore in England, Marino Marini in Italy and Ossip Zadkine in Paris. It was at Atelier 17 that he first began to develop his unique printmaking technique. He pioneered and mastered the color viscosity process, in which a metal plate is etched with acid or prepared with machine driven tools to form several layers. His prints, often done in semi-abstract or abstract, revolve around subjects from nature, besides human figures. A worshipper of nature, he has an ability to invest each engraved plate with an elemental experience that subtly merges with the spiritual.

Awarded the Padma Shree in 1972, Reddy was also recently honored as one of the guest Invitees to the Silvermime National Print Biennial in USA. His works can be found in several private and public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Albertina Museum, Vienna, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

The artist passed away on 22 August 2018 in New York.

K.G. Subramanyan ( 1924 – 2016 )

Subramanyan was born in 1924 in Kuthuparamba in Kerala, India, and initially studied economics at Presidency College, Madras.During the freedom struggle he was actively involved and was known for his Gandhian ideology. He was even imprisoned and later banned from joining government colleges during the British Rule. The turning point of his life, as an artist, came when he visited Santiniketan to study in Kala Bhavan, the art faculty of Visva Bharati University, in the year 1944. Under the tutelage such pioneers of modern Indian art as Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij, Subramanyan studied there till 1948.

In 1951 he became a lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts in M.S. University in Baroda. He went to study briefly in London at the Slade School of Art as a British Council scholar in 1956. While having already gone back to Baroda as a professor in painting and continuing there, he did a short stint in New York as a Rockefeller Fellow in 1966. In 1980, Subramanyan went back to Santiniketan to teach in his alma mater Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati University, in his capacity as a professor in painting, which he continued till he retired in 1989. In the same year he was made a Professor Emeritus of Visva Bharati.

Subramanyan resided in Baroda, with his daughter Uma, towards the later days of his life and it was here that he died on 29 June 2016.

Mukul Dey (1895 - 1989)

Born in 1895, in Kolkata, Mukul Dey began schooling under the guidance of Rabindranath Tagore in 1905, in Santiniketan. He proceeded to study art informally under Abanindranath Tagore and Gaganendranath Tagore. By the age of 18, his drawings and paintings were exhibited by the Indian Society of Oriental Art (Kolkata) in Paris and London.

He accompanied Rabindranath Tagore to Japan (1916-17) and U.S.A. He trained in intaglio printmaking under James Blanding Sloan in Chicago, where he showed and sold his etchings at the Art Institute of Chicago. Dey had also studied at the Slade School of Art and the Royal College of Art, London.He was elected life member of the Chicago Society of Etchers and member of the Advisory Committee for murals in New Delhi, and India House, London (1927-28).

He received the Jubilee Medal of King George V and Queen Mary in 1936 and their Majesties’ Coronation Medal in 1937 and was the first Principal to initiate the Women’s Department in the Government School of Art, Kolkata (1924).

In 1984, Dey was honoured with `Abanindra Puraskar’ by the Government of West Bengal. In 1987, he was elected a Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, and in the same year, the Rabindra Bharati University conferred an honorary Doctorate on him.

Mukul Dey passed away in 1989 in Kolkata.

Nandalal Bose (1882 - 1966)

Born in 1882, Nandalal Bose was one of the pioneers of modern Indian art and a key figure of Contextual Modernism. A pupil of Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose was known for his ‘Indian style’ of painting. He became the principal of Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan in 1922. He was influenced by the Tagore family, E B Havell, A K Coomaraswamy and Mahatma Gandhi. Bose achieved fame not only for his renderings of plays by Rabindranath Tagore but also for his designing and execution of the venues of the Indian National Congress conventions in Lucknow, Faizpur and Haripura from 1935 to 1938. He was the only artist that Gandhi ever patronized. While he had already been internationally recognized as an important artist, his association with Gandhi elevated him to the status of a national icon. In the year 1954, he was honoured with the Padma Vibhushan award.

Akar Prakar has exhibited his works in numerous exhibitions since 2011 including Postcards by Nandalal Bose at Akar Prakar, Kolkata (2011), Nandalal Bose & Benode Behari Mukherjee at Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi (2012), Nandalal Bose at Akar Prakar, Kolkata (2023) and Mastermoshai Nandalal Bose at Akar Prakar, New Delhi (2024).

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

Rabindranath Tagore influenced the social and political scenario of modern India, thereby bringing about a period of national awakening. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913; and received a knighthood by the British in 1915, which he renounced in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. A renowned poet, writer, painter, reformer and philosopher, he brought about the renaissance of regional literature in India. His work received global acclaim, lending wider visibility to India’s struggle for independence.

Tagore gravitated towards the world of paintings in his late sixties, which was triggered by a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the language of words. Although Tagore did not receive any formal training in painting, the late biographer Prasanta Kumar Paul argued that Tagore, along with his peers, may have received some training in his childhood. Paul also noted that Tagore may have been influenced by Jyotirindranath Tagore (1849-1925). His first exhibition in Europe, in 1930, was well received by viewers. Many of his priceless works, which had been left behind, are placed alongside works of some of the most eminent artists of the 20th century.

Rabindranath Tagore’s ashramic educational institution, Visva Bharati, saw a shift from the colonial to the Indian architectural style. Tagore invited Surendranath Kar, who accompanied him on many of his travels to spend time in Santiniketan to create and design architectural plans under Tagore’s guidance. Tagore died at the age of eighty, on 7th August 1941.

Ramkinkar Baij (1910-1980)

Ramkinkar Baij was the earliest Indian artist to experiment with abstract sculptural forms. His oil on canvas paintings have a singular experimenting quality going beyond its time, unregimented by dogmas and with only one commitment - to be unstintingly creative.

Born in Bankura in West Bengal in 1910, Ramkinkar Baij studied at the Kala Bhavan, Vishwa Bharati University, Santiniketan in 1925. Trained by two European sculptors, one of whom was a disciple of Bourdelle, who were on a visit to Santiniketan on an invitation by Tagore, his style was still uniquely his own. Groomed by his mentors, Nandalal Bose and Tagore, the clay modeler turned artist. Working at a time when traditional art was transitioning to modern art, Baij's work proved to be crucial to Indian art history. Nature and Baij's own folk background turned out to be the crucial influences in the formation of his own style. Later, he headed the Department of Sculpture at the Kala Bhavan.

He integrated elements of Santhal tribal art and life into his own work and enhanced them by an understanding of Western expressionism that was gleaned from books at the library of the Kala Bhavan. A retrospective of his works was held at the National Gallery of Art, New Delhi in 1990. His works are in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, and in several private and public collections.

Baij died on August 2, 1980, in Kolkata.

Ramendranath Chakravorty (1902-1955)

Ramendranath Chakravorty’s formal art education began at the Government School of Art in 1919. In two years he left Calcutta and to join the newly founded Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan in 1921.

After short stints at Andhra National Art Gallery (Kalashala) of Musolipatnam and Kala Bhavana, Ramendranath joined Government School of Arts, Calcutta, as the Head Assistant Teacher in 1929, during the principal-ship of Mukul Dey. From 1943 to 1946 he was the Officiating Principal there and he introduced the Graphics Department in 1943.

Ramendranath became the Principal of the School in 1949. In 1937 Ramendranath travelled to London for higher studies in painting at Slade School of Art, London and the following year has a solo show in London. From this time onward (until his untimely death in 1955) he exhibited his works extensively all over the world. He also organized exhibitions of Indian artists both in India and abroad.

Sanat Kar (1935)

Born in Calcutta in 1935. Graduated from the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta in 1950. In 1952, along with fellow-students Kar formed a group called The Artists’ Circle. He taught at Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati in Santiniketan in 1958.

Kar was a founder member of the Society of Contemporary Artists in 1960. He began experimenting with etching in the early ‘60s. His fruitful explorations of material for plates arose from the need to cut costs and so he was the first artist in India to work with wood blocks for etchings, then moved on to plywood and finally, Sun mica and engraving on cardboard. The interesting feature of his work was that he married successfully the character of work on a metal plate to his wood blocks without sacrificing the character of wood. From the late ‘80s began painting with tempera.

Kar’s figurations have innocence and a feeling of poetry. A dreamlike quality pervades his work. It is in his texturisations that he achieves great mastery. The shimmering colors. The grainy surfaces, the mottled, scratched, doodled lines create their own visual magic.

He has had several solo shows in India and overseas and participated in International Prints Biennale and travelling exhibitions in Europe, USA, USSR, Japan. He has been awarded with Kala Vibhusan National Title Award, 1997, Siromoni Purashkar, 1996 and West Bengal State Lalit Kala Award, 1993. Major Collections in Lalit Kala Akademi, National Gallery of Modern Art and Glenberra Museum, Japan.

Somnath Hore (1921 - 2006)

Somnath Hore was born in 1921, Chittagong (now in Bangladesh). He received a diploma in printmaking from the Government College of Art and Craft in Calcutta, while being closely associated with the Communist Party.  He went on to carry out visual documentation and reportage of the Bengal famine in 1943 for the Communist Party magazine Jannayuddha (People's War). Socialist ideologies formed around the Tebhaga movement in 1946 in Bengal influenced the early phases of his artistic career.  By the 1950s he was regarded as one of the premier printmakers in India and headed the Graphics and Printmaking Department at Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, after returning from Delhi where he was in charge of the Printmaking Department of the Delhi Polytechnic in 1958. 

He showcased his works in numerous national and international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, Italy in 1962 and the Sao Paolo Biennale, Brazil in 1963 to name a few. The ‘wound series’ that he started making in the late 1960s as a response to the Naxalite movement and the social unrest around the world, was a unique technique of prints on paper pulp. By the mid-1970s, he turned to wax modelling, subsequently which was transferred to bronze. He was awarded the Lalit Kala Ratna Puraskar by Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi in 2004. The National Award (Painting) by Lalit Kala Akademi in 1960, the National Award (Graphics) by Lalit Kala Akademi in 1963. He was honoured Professor Emeritus at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan in 1984. In the same year, he was awarded the Gagan-Aban award in Kolkata. Somnath Hore passed away in 2006 at the age of 85 in Santiniketan.