Osian's Auction Catalogue India The Passionate Detachment | February 2001

THE PASSIONATE DETACHMENT 130 Select Pioneers of Indian Modernism Printmaking as an Artistic Medium (with special focus on Bengal) A Love for Nature & Romantic Expressionism Social Responsibility as the Motivating Principle Experiments & Expressionism From the pioneers of the 1920s, such as Gaganendranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore & Jamini Roy to the rebels of the 1940s, such as Ramkinkar Baij, Chittoprosad & F.N.Souza, Indian modernism gained a new energy and sense of ambition whereby questions of national identity, previously dominant, came to be slowly countered by the experimental mindset of breaking free from all traditional norms and canons. For most the European modernist orthodoxy became the new language through which previously unresolved issues of national identity came to be tackled anew.