Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern Fine Arts | June 2017

detail “There is none so very much alive among Indian artists today as Devi Prasad Roy Chowdhury. Among the first inheritors of Dr. Abanindranath Tagore’s noble art- heritage, he has outdistanced his compeers. The early resplendent glow of modern Bengal art is all but spent out. Abanindranath, at the twilight of life, stands on the summit of a matchless art endeavour - almost canonized... The deep spiritual art of the master was ritualized. Abanindranath paid the penalty of genius; he was parodied. The Bengal art renaissance, like the Brahmo Samaj, was cathartic in origin and purpose, very welcome and very necessary. But it soon achieved its purpose. It swept away the vulgar banalities of the Ravi Varma tradition; it resuscitated Indian art. But like all reforms, it suffered from overemphasis and became stereotyped in the process.” P.R. Ramachandra Rao [1943]. Chowdhury & His Art. Bombay: New Book Company; p.1. “…the Bengal school at its highest and purest, with Abanindranath, Gogonendranath and Nandalal, had soared to unattained idealistic heights in painting. Their superb culture had ‘x-rayed’ the soul of art and transcended the merely incidental skeleton of physical accuracy. Art ceased to be just imitative; it became a visualisation of the artist’s emotion, plumbing the appearance of things. Physical exactitude was adventitious, almost irrelevant. Nature was no longer the sine qua non : the artist revealed a deeper and more innate truth, far beyond its visible manifestations. His appeal was more fundamental and to an ageless future, unbothered by mechanical accuracy or verisimilitude. Thus the best of the Bengal idealists distilled the quintessence of artistic truth and achieved a sublime simplicity, so pitifully caricatured by their slavish emulators.” Ibid ; p.3.