…. Curator’s Pen by Prabuddha Ghosh

J. Swaminathan was a foremost Indian artist, poet and also a writer of colossal character. Despite being a member of the Communist Party of India, Jagdish Swaminathan had ample time to spawn masterpieces. Till date, he remains to be one of the most significant artists of India. Swaminathan was born in the year 1928 on the 21st of June in Simla. He attended school in Delhi and went ahead to join a pre-medical course that he left mid-way. Thereafter, he moved to Kolkata and con tinued doing some odd-jobs for his day-to-day living. His untimely demise in the year 1994 came as shocking news for the global art fraternity. He was an art philosopher and prolific guide and guardian of rural and tribal ethnic art, probably he is the first artist who has recognized and give proper light to this indigenous subject. 1957 witnesses Jagdish as an enrollee at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland. He successfully completed the course and returned to India in the year 1960. This is when he co...

Bikash Bhattacharjee (21st June1940 - 18th December 2006) would often say that he wanted his portraits to be so close to life that the viewer could feel the blood course through the veins of his subjects. And he managed this with remarkable skill. Painter Bikash Bhattacharjee is one of India’s most widely acclaimed painters. He was a realist in technique who used the traditions of Titian and Velasquez in unexpected, often highly symbolic, unsettling and surrealistic ways. Bha ttacharjee accepted the challenge of transforming his consummate skill to evoke the subtleties of surface realism into a pliant tool of creativity without dismantling the received art forms. In 2006, a few days before Bikash Bhattacharjee’s death at the age of 66, MF Husain had described him as “a painter of our time, whose browns are burnt like in Rembrandt”. The praise for the Bengal artist came in the foreword of a book on him. The realist artist would have been happy, after all he had of...

Dhiraj Choudhury was born on 1936 at then Bengal, now Bangladesh. He was a student of Government College, Darjeeling and the Principal Dr. K. D.Ghosh encouraged him to follow up his dreams to become an artist. Later he was admitted to College of Arts and Crafts, Calcutta and Delhi Polytechnic (Delhi College of Art). He has taught from 1962 to 1996 in Women Polytechnic and Department of Painting, Delhi College of Art, University of Delhi. He has ameliorated Calcutta Painters Society by being a member, of Artists Forum, Society of Contemporary Artists, AIFACS, New Delhi. Dhiraj Choudhury has founded ‘Quartet Artist’ and ‘Line’, a group devoted to drawing. Dhiraj Choudhury has more than hundred exhibitions, among few great are international, which is sufficient enough to understand his caliber and popularity as a painter. UK, USA, France, Germany, Switzerland, Singapore are the countries where his foreign shows were arranged by his appreciators. In 1979 an exhibition in Genev...