Indian art: The lasting strokes of Group 1890
Group 1890 was a brilliant, if brief, movement in India’s art history
Curated By: Kishore Singh
The documenter
Jyoti Bhatt
b. 1934
Jyoti Bhatt has always claimed innocence about why he was included in the group, but as a young artist from MS University’s first batch of art students, he had a curious mind that enjoyed working across mediums. He was inspired by the Cubist style of his teacher, NS Bendre, and experimented with it but gave it up after a scholarship to Italy. There, he was fascinated by the adaptability of adhesives and worked with sand, Plaster of Paris and oil to lend texture to his canvases. However, he renounced that too in favour of paper collages, printmaking and photography. Following the group’s exhibition, Bhatt left for the US on a fellowship to study graphics and printmaking, but remained aligned to its ideology. His photographs of the group are an important part of its archive.
Islands (Isole) Oil and Plaster of Paris on canvas 1963
Jyoti Bhatt
b. 1934
Jyoti Bhatt has always claimed innocence about why he was included in the group, but as a young artist from MS University’s first batch of art students, he had a curious mind that enjoyed working across mediums. He was inspired by the Cubist style of his teacher, NS Bendre, and experimented with it but gave it up after a scholarship to Italy. There, he was fascinated by the adaptability of adhesives and worked with sand, Plaster of Paris and oil to lend texture to his canvases. However, he renounced that too in favour of paper collages, printmaking and photography. Following the group’s exhibition, Bhatt left for the US on a fellowship to study graphics and printmaking, but remained aligned to its ideology. His photographs of the group are an important part of its archive.
Islands (Isole) Oil and Plaster of Paris on canvas 1963
