‘Madras Modern’: An ongoing show explores the last bastion of Indian modernism

livemint.com:

‘Minor Detail’: A group show interprets the meaning of home She goes on to describe how Paniker’s pedagogy opened avenues for technical and creative explorations that became a hallmark of the school, contributing towards the development of the art movement in Madras (now Chennai). Though the movement was named after the city, its fabric was determined by artists coming in from the four southern states—Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka that made up the erstwhile Madras Presidency—thus bringing in different approaches and visual vocabularies.

While the names of Roy Chowdhury, J. Sultan Ali and Paniker are familiar to most art enthusiasts, in the show and the book, one meets many more figures who contributed to the rise of this modern art movement.

In that sense, ‘Madras Modern: Regionalism and Identity’, on view till 6 July, becomes extremely significant. “This kind of north-south divide that we experience regularly impacted the art world back then as well.

For artists, who practised out of the southern states, the familiarity with art centres in Mumbai and Delhi was a little less forthcoming," says Kishore Singh, senior vice-president, DAG. “Though the artist collective, Group 1890, did try to include one artist from the region, Reddeppa Naidu, but it phased away in a year after its exhibition in 1963 held in Delhi.

Artists from the southern states remained neglected in the national mainstream for the longest time, and that is a pity as the art school in Chennai was the oldest in the country." Paniker, as the administrative head of the institution, grappled with the factors behind this neglect for a long time. Both through his personal practice and role as a mentor, the artist tried to arrive at what was