Art and Independence

Art and Independence

Y.G. Srimati and the Indian Style

John Guy

Art and Independence

Y.G. Srimati and the Indian Style

The career of Y.G. Srimati—classical singer, musician, dancer and painter—represents a continuum in which each of these skills and experiences merged, influencing and pollinating each other. Born in Mysore in 1926, Srimati was part of the generation much influenced by the rediscovery of a classical Sanskrit legacy devoted to the visual arts. Soon swept up in the nationalist movement for an independent India, she was deeply moved by the time she spent with Mahatma Gandhi. For the young Srimati, the explicit referencing of the past and of religious subjects came together in an unparalleled way, driven by the conscious striving for an indigenous agenda. This experience gave form and meaning to her art, and largely defined her style. As John Guy demonstrates in this sumptuous volume, as a painter of the mid and late twentieth century, Y.G. Srimati embodied a traditionalist position, steadfast in her vision of an Indian style, one which resonated with those who knew India best.

With 66 illustrations and 63 photographs

Art and Independence

Y.G. Srimati and the Indian Style

Art and Independence

Y.G. Srimati and the Indian Style

John Guy

The publication has been made possible by the generosity of Betty R. Zimmer, New York, to honour the memory of her friend Y.G. Srimati. First published in India in 2019 by Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd 706 Kaivanna, Panchvati, Ellisbridge Ahmedabad 380006 INDIA T: +91 79 40 228 228 • F: +91 79 40 228 201 E: mapin@mapinpub.com • www.mapinpub.com International Distribution Worldwide (except North America and South Asia) Prestel Publishing Ltd. 14–17 Wells Street London W1T 3PD T: +44 (0)20 7323 5004 • F: +44 (0)20 7323 0271 E: sales@prestel-uk.co.uk North America ACC Art Books T: +1 800 252 5231 • F: +1 413 529 0862 E: ussales@accartbooks.com • www.accartbooks.com/us/ South Asia Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd Text © John Guy Illustrations © Michael Pellettieri 2018, except where noted. Photographs from Y.G. Srimati Archive © Michael Pellettieri 2018. Also see, ‘Photographic Credits’, page 139.

All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The moral rights of John Guy as the author of this work are asserted. ISBN: 978-93-85360-40-4 Copyediting: Marilyn Gore / Mapin Editorial Editorial Supervision: Neha Manke / Mapin Editorial Design: Sarayu Narasimhan and Gopal Limbad / Mapin Design Studio Production: Gopal Limbad / Mapin Design Studio Printed at Thomson Press (I) Ltd., Faridabad, India

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

06

Art & Independence: Y.G. Srimati and the Indian Style

09

Early Years 1946–1952

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Mythology and Devotion

39

The Bengal School and Journey from Ajanta

54

Bhagavad Gita and Panchatantra

99

Picturing Sound: The Ragamala Series

108

New York Late Works

117

Life and Times of Y.G. Srimati

125

Exhibition History, Collections and Publications

137

Bibliography

138

Photography Credits

139

Preface and Acknowledgements This book has grown out of a chance encounter in New York with Y.G. Srimati’s partner, the artist Michael Pellettieri in 2008, the year after the artist’s death. In the course of looking for a home for Srimati’s prized musical instruments—four entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection—Michael and I met, and the conversation turned from music, to dance, to painting. I was invited to view Srimati’s painting in the apartment on the Upper West Side that Michael shared with Srimati for three decades. Impressed by the finesse of these works, engaged by the classical subject matter, and moved by the resolutely unfaltering vision of an Indian style they exhibited, the fate of these paintings became a shared concern. Over the coming months, our conversation moved first to how we might secure a number of paintings for The Met, and then, to develop the idea of an exhibition that might celebrate Srimati’s work. Through a combination of purchases and generous gifts, six works entered The Met’s collection. All are included here. The exhibition, An Artist of Her Time: Y.G. Srimati and the Indian Style, went on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in December 2016 and closed the following June (figs 1, 2). Featuring 25 works, the exhibition received wide media coverage and critical acclaim: Holland Cotter described it as “this beautiful and important small show” in his review for The New York Times, while Apollo reviewer Louise Nicolson called it an “unexpected gem”.

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In the preparation of this book I take pleasure in recording my gratitude to Michael Pellettieri for allowing access to Y.G. Srimati’s estate, and for undertaking much of the archival work with her personal diaries, exhibition catalogues, performance programmes, press clippings and related ephemera. Sita Ramachandran, Mrs. Y.G.P., and Y.G. Rajendra are thanked for assisting with critical dates in Srimati’s life. Kalyani Madhura Ramachandran, research assistant to the exhibition, provided sterling support. Finally, I am indebted to Betty Zimmer, a close friend of the artist who first met Srimati performing at the New York chapter of the Vedanta Society, in the 1970s. It was Betty who first proposed that a book be prepared to record Srimati’s contribution to modern Indian art, and to bring her to the attention of Indian audiences who had not had the opportunity to enjoy her paintings. Bipin Shah at Mapin Publishing responded enthusiastically to the project and his editorial, production and design team brought this to fruition in record time. The Metropolitan Museum of Art generously shared photography of those works that featured in the exhibition. Additional photography by Jeanette May Studio. To all I record my appreciation. John Guy New York November 2018

Figs 1 and 2  Installation views of the exhibition An Artist of Her Time: Y.G. Srimati and the Indian Style, presented by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 19 December 2016 to 5 June 2017.

Preface and Acknowledgements

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Art and Independence: Y.G. Srimati and the Indian Style

Kumari Srimati was born in Mysore during the auspicious Ganesh Chaturthi festival season on the 25 August, 1926, into a cultured Mandayam family of Mysore Iyengars (Ayyangars).1 From a young age she was immersed in the artistic traditions of southern India. Srimati’s maternal grandfather was a well-known actor and musician, who devoted himself to devotional singing in later life. Her paternal grandfather served as the chief astrologer to the Maharaja of Mysore, who bestowed upon him the title of Y.G., an honorific that his family inherited.2 The second youngest of six children, Srimati spent her childhood years in Bengaluru, where her father encouraged her to pursue the arts, including classical dance which was undergoing a national revival. In the 1930s, both Bengaluru and Chennai were important centres of activity for classical Dravidian culture. Classical music and singing were at the forefront, along with a new and daring innovation, the resurrection—and secularization—of the largely lost traditions of classical temple dance, which was undergoing a national revival under such key innovators as Rukmini Devi Arundale, Uday Shankar, Mrinalini Sarabhai and Ram Gopal. In Bengaluru, Srimati shared classes with Ram Gopal, who was to emerge as the premier male classical dancer of his generation and principal exponent of this art in the West.3 Following her father’s untimely death in 1942, the family moved to Chennai, where her elder brother Y.G. Doraisami assumed the role of head of the household. As a highly cultured man, collector and sometime patron of the arts, Doraisami continued in his father’s role as mentor to Srimati’s artistic development. He actively encouraged her training in classical dance, singing, instrumental music and painting. As a teenager growing up in Chennai in the 1940s, Srimati was swept up in the nationalist movement for an independent India. Their first Chennai home, opposite the Parthasarathy temple in Triplicane (Thiruvallikeni), harboured fugitives who were being pursued by the British for their independence activities in the north, en route to sanctuary in French Pondicherry. According to family sources, this is when she began painting, aged sixteen. Around 1945, the family moved to Sait Colony, Egmore, which would remain the family home thereafter, and serve as Srimati’s studio (fig. 4).

Fig. 3 Srimati accompanying Mahatma Gandhi at an independence rally, Marina Beach, Chennai, 1946.

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Fig. 4 Y.G. Srimati in her studio, Sait Colony, Egmore, Chennai, c. 1950.

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The house at Sait Colony was a short walk from the Government Museum, which housed the finest collection of southern Indian stone sculptures and Chola bronzes to be seen in all of India. Undoubtedly, such ready access to the museum served as a wellspring of ideas for the teenage Srimati, and as an affirming presence as she developed her own artistic direction. Their home became a meeting place for the city’s artistic intelligentsia of the day, including D.P. Roy Choudhury—a champion of the Bengal school and Nandalal Bose’s protégé—who had been appointed the first Indian Principal of Madras School of Art, and C. Sivaramamurti, a young and talented curator at the museum. 4 Srimati was being mentored by some of the premier figures of the Indian art scene of her day.

Srimati’s was a generation greatly influenced by the rediscovery of a classical Sanskrit legacy devoted to the visual arts, including the ancient text on art, Chitra Sutra, and the treatise of performing arts, Natya Shastra.5 These authority texts, dating in their present form to the middle of the first millennium CE, were eagerly read in translation as a key to reinventing much of India’s perceived lost heritage, largely denied for nearly a century under the British Raj. The reality was far more complex, with Western scholars taking a growing interest in Sanskrit and, alongside Indian scholars, being instrumental in the translation of much of this corpus of classical writing, making these fundamental texts accessible to a non-Sanskrit readership for the first time. For the rediscovery of Indian dance, a seminal point had come in 1923 when a young Uday Shankar, then a student studying at The Royal College of Art, London, under the Principal Sir William Rothenstein, an early champion of Indian art in England, was introduced to Anna Pavlova, the famed expatriate Russian ballerina. She recruited him to choreograph and partner her in a series of oriental-themed ballets that brought Indian dance to the West, before it was widely known, or respected, in India (fig. 5). Pavlova’s company had just returned from their first Asian tour the previous year that had included performances in Mumbai and Kolkata.6 Shankar stayed with Pavlova for over a year, then in 1924 moved to Paris to build his own dance company, returning to India in 1930 with a new patron, the Swiss artist Alice Boner, to recruit musicians for his dance company.7 He returned to Paris in 1931 with newly recruited dancers and musicians and toured his company, “Uday Shankar and his Hindu Ballet”, in Europe and the USA for the next seven years. Uday Shankar, an early proponent of the unity of art and politics, returned to India with a nationalist agenda and in 1938 created a dance academy in Almora. When that closed in 1942, he moved to Chennai. In 1948, Shankar produced—largely at his own expense—a spectacularly scaled dance-based film titled Kalpana. It was a pioneering venture in India, drawing inspiration from Fritz Lang’s 1926 Metropolis and other avant-garde Weimer German expressionist films.8 Though it was a commercial failure, the cultural excitement generated by this cinematic milestone,

Fig. 5 Uday Shankar partnering Anna Pavlova in their collaborative choreography of Krishna and Radha, part of her Russian Ballet’s production of Oriental Impressions, Covent Garden, London, 1923.

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along with the many initiatives in the dance world, no doubt afforded the youthful Srimati opportunities to develop a global perspective.

Fig. 6 Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951), The Victory of the Buddha. Watercolour on paper. Lahore Museum, Pakistan.

The study and revival—some would argue re-invention—of classical dance forms in India in the 1930s was led by such pioneers as Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904– 1986) and Sadhona Bose (1914–1973), who established schools of dance in 1936 and 1938 respectively in Chennai and Kolkata. Rukmini Devi’s chance meeting with Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in Mumbai in 1928, during Pavlova’s second Asian tour, offered affirmation of her quest to rediscover a form of classical Indian dance. Rukmini Devi dedicated herself to the reinvention of Bharatanatyam, still at this time a temple dance form associated with female temple servants, devadasi (Servants of God).9 By 1936 she had founded her highly influential Kalakshetra Academy in Chennai, for the promotion of classical dance and music. Srimati met Rukmini Devi, by then already a distinguished Bharatanatyam dancer, in Chennai on a number of occasions in her youth. When the two were reintroduced in New York in the early 1980s, they established a firm friendship. Rukmini Devi invited Srimati to return to India and teach at her Kalakshetra Academy, but the offer was not taken up. In the fine arts, a renaissance of another kind was taking place: the search for an indigenous style, spearheaded by Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951) and the Bengal school of art.10 Tagore, encouraged by E.B. Havell, principal of the Government School of Art, Calcutta from 1896 to 1905, explored traditional Indian painting techniques, as well as East Asian models, in the search for an Indian style. This fusion is epitomized by his The Victory of the Buddha, which explored techniques used in Chinese ink painting alongside those used by Edwardian watercolourists (fig. 6). This image was given wide circulation as the frontispiece of Sister Nivedita and Ananda Coomaraswamy’s seminal 1913 publication Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists, a book richly illustrated by artists trained under the direction of Abanindranath Tagore, including Nandalal Bose,

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K. Venkatappa and K.N. Mazumdar. Srimati was nurtured in this cultural environment, one further energized—and politicized—by an increasingly confident and strident Indian independence movement. That this new art should serve a nationalist agenda was established at the outset by Tagore with his iconic Bharat Mata (Mother India) in 1905 (fig. 7). This emotive image was broadcast nationally with its mass publication in 1910 as a chromolithograph print, published by the Indian Press, Allahabad. Tagore’s Bharat Mata appeared on nationalist literature published by the Indian National Congress Party in the 1930s, now superimposed on a map of the subcontinent and waving the Congress’s tricolour. The study of classical fine arts became a subject of intense interest to contemporary artists in India. In paintings, this was first witnessed by Abanindranath Tagore’s advocacy that Indian artists should look to Indian classical and folk arts to unlock a true Indian style. Tagore published in 1914, first in Bengali and then in English, a short treatise drawing on classically prescribed systems for proportions and measurements. He dedicated the English edition to his art teacher at the Calcutta School of Art, E.B. Havell, an early advocate of Indian artists seeking inspiration and models in traditional Indian arts of the past. 11 Painters at the Tagore family’s progressive Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal, were encouraged to learn from traditional Bengal folk painting, such as was seen in everyday devotional objects of cloth, paper and clay, produced around the Hindu temples of Kolkata and elsewhere. In the quest to regain something of a perceived lost Indian heritage, students were encouraged to draw inspiration from the schools of devotional painting and clay imagemaking that were thriving around the Kalighat temple in Kolkata. 12 The Bengali painter Jamini Roy (1887–1972), a pupil of Abanindranath Tagore at the Government School of Art, Calcutta, was an early exponent of this genre, drawing direct inspiration from the craft-artists of the traditional workshops associated with the Kalighat temple. His response to Kalighat pata, and to the tribal folk dance forms of the Santhal of Bengal, attracted considerable interest. Somewhat paradoxically, in the early 1940s, Roy

Fig. 7 Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951), Bharat Mata. Kolkata, 1905. Watercolour on paper. Rabindra Bharati Society, Kolkata, on permanent loan to the Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata.

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enjoyed active patronage from Lady Casey, the wife of the last British GovernorGeneral Lord Casey, and his aide de camp, John Irwin. Irwin co-authored the first essay written on Jamini Roy in 1944, 13 and later became Keeper of Indian Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The second stream of Indian revivalism was built on a well-established practice of British schools of art meticulously copying the surviving classical murals of India, most notably those in the fifth-century Buddhist rock-cut interiors of Ajanta. The Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Mumbai, under the direction of John Griffiths (1832–1918), who had trained at the Royal College of Art, London, undertook multiple campaigns between 1877 and 1881 to faithfully copy many of the finest Ajanta murals (fig. 8). Griffiths and his students completed some 300 canvases, and Griffiths published the finest as The Paintings in the Buddhist CaveTemples at Ajanta, Khandesh, India (1896). Many of these are today preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.14 Painters of the Bengal school also took up the cause, although their motivation was somewhat different. Tagore’s prize student Nandalal Bose (1882–1966) pioneered the Indian response to the murals of Ajanta and Indian mythology as a wellspring of imagery and ideas for Indian artists searching for models for their own classicism (fig. 9). Increasing access to the Ajanta murals in published form, most notably thanks to Ghulam Yazdani’s pioneering studies undertaken while Director of Archaeology in the Nizam’s territories from 1914 to 1943, meant that more artists could respond to Bose’s call. Srimati explored the rich legacy of the Ajanta murals in a series of paintings, beginning in the mid-1940s, which nuanced her style in innovative ways. She also adapted the style and figure types on occasions to bring a fresh interpretation to non-Buddhist subjects, as seen in her Apsara with Harp (c. 1944, pl. 16) and Charudatta Presenting a Pearl Necklace to Vasantasena (c. 1952, pl. 15). In 1946, a series of events began unfolding that were to shape Srimati’s life and gave further direction to her art. Already an accomplished classically trained vocalist and musician, Srimati was invited to sing the devotional songs (bhajans) that accompanied the opening of a number of the independence rallies addressed by Mahatma Gandhi in Chennai (fig. 3). She performed these in a variety of Indian languages—Tamil, Hindi and Kannada—to underscore the cultural unity so passionately advocated by the Mahatma. She was deeply moved by her encounters with Gandhi. By August 1947, India had secured full independence; five months

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ABOVE Fig. 8 Mural depicting the Kalyanakarin Jataka, Cave 1, Ajanta, late fifth century. Oil on canvas copy of the original by the Bombay School of Art under the direction of John Griffiths, 1870s. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS.31–1885).

BELOW Fig. 9 Nandalal Bose (1882–1966), Parthasarathy, Krishna as Arjuna’s Charioteer. 1912. Watercolour on paper. Indian Museum, Kolkata.

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later, on 30 January 1948, Gandhi was assassinated in New Delhi by a Hindu fundamentalist. These momentous events, and her personal experiences with Gandhi, strongly shaped much of the orientation and agenda of Srimati the painter. The politicization of Srimati as a nationalist artist began early, growing up in a politically charged climate and nurtured by cultural and intellectual elders. The art movement that became the Bengal school, driven by the Tagore family, had found a spiritual home at Santiniketan. Students of this school radiated out across the subcontinent, recruiting others to their style. Students were attracted from afar to Santiniketan, including L.T.P. Manjusri, then a Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka, who studied there in the 1930s under Nalandal Bose. On his return to Sri Lanka in 1937, Manjusri engaged in studying and learning from the mural painting tradition of Sinhalese temples.15 The youthful Srimati shared in this passion for engaging with the past as a means of giving identity to India’s present. In pursuit of her own artistic language, Srimati embarked on a search for indigenous models to shape her style, and Indian themes to inform her content. Srimati’s magisterial painting Sanghamitra’s Mission to Sri Lanka (pl. 22) was directly inspired by a family visit to Sri Lanka in July 1948, using pictorial devices she saw in Sinhalese Buddhist art. Family records note that “Srimati spent quite some time studying and sketching [the murals at Sigiriya].”16 For her early subjects she turned to both rural life, and to the great literary and religious traditions of India. These were increasingly to inform her choice of subject manner,

Fig. 10 Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941), Preparation of the Bride. Simla, 1937. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

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and to shape her style. She drew her narrative content from the great corpus of Indian literature, religious and secular, and built on classical renderings of these subjects in new ways that set her vision apart. In this, Srimati positioned herself in a movement of neo-classicism that was running through pre- and post-Independence Indian art. Not all artists shared in this passion for historicism. Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941), the Hungarian-born Lahore-based painter who had trained in Europe, was an outspoken critic of the Bengal school. Sher-Gil wrote a polemic against the neo-classicism of the Bengal school in favour of Indian modern art in the national English daily The Hindu (November 1, 1936), and was widely championed in India by both R.C. Tandan and by the connoisseurcritic Karl Khandalavala.17 In 1937, she toured extensively in rural southern India, which greatly impressed her, and generated her acclaimed series of paintings of rural life, including Preparation of the Bride (fig. 10). These displayed a new empathy for rural subjects, a theme taken up by the younger Srimati a decade later. Sher-Gil wrote of rediscovering in the South the vitality in art that was missing in the North.18 Two artists who shared Srimati’s interest in the classical religious subjects so abhorred by Sher-Gil were Abdur Rahman Chughtai (1894–1975) (fig. 11) and Ram Gopal Vijayvargiya (1905–2003) (figs 12 a, b). Their neo-classicism reflects a shared vision of this generation, wedded to notions of historicism and romanticism. For the young Srimati, the explicit referencing of the past and the choice of religious subjects came together in an unparalleled way, driven by the conscious striving for an indigenous agenda. This gave form and meaning to her art, and largely defined her style.

Fig. 11 Abdur Rahman Chughtai (1897–1975), Radha and Krishna. Pakistan, undated. Formerly in the collection of the Nawab of Bahalpur, purchased from the artist. Collection of Bashir Mohamed, London.

Recognition came early in Srimati’s career with her inclusion in the first postindependence publication on Indian modern art: Manu Thacker and G. Venkatachalam’s Present-Day Painters in India, published in Mumbai in 1950 (fig. 13). Her work was shown along with such established and emerging artists as Syed Ahmed, K.K. Hebbar, S.H. Raza, N.S. Bendre, Jamini Roy, and Amrita Sher-Gil who had died in Lahore in 1941. Srimati’s traditionalist approach was

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ABOVE Figs 12A and 12B  Ram Gopal Vijayvargiya (1905–2003), The Exiled Yaksha and The Yaksha’s Wife: Scenes from Kalidasa’s Meghdoot (The Cloud Messenger). c. 1950. Watercolour on paper, 101 cm x 68 cm. Private Collection, Jaipur.

RIGHT Fig. 13 Jacket artwork for Manu Thacker and G. Venkatachalam, Presentday Painters in India, Bombay, 1950.

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recognized by the authors, as was her acute awareness of the interdependence of art forms, reflected in the musical lyricism and the referencing of dance movements inherent in her work. It was as if Srimati was summoning up the authority of the Chitra Sutra which counselled that success in the visual arts flowed from a study of the performing arts, codified in the classic text, the Natya Shastra.19 Venkatachalam wrote that Srimati, being tutored in dance, music and painting, “in that order, as it should be”, enabled the young artist to grasp early the “rhythmic significance of forms, which alone gives to art, be it painting, sculpture or dance, its vital character”.20 In 1952, Srimati was selected for a solo exhibition to inaugurate the opening of Centenary Hall at the Government Museum, Chennai, officiated by the Chief Minister of Madras, C. Rajagopalachari, on August 24th. ‘Rajaji’, as he was popularly known, was a key player in the Indian National Congress, served as the first Chief Minister of Madras Presidency (1937–39), and was a close confidant of Gandhi. In 1952, he was elected to be Chief Minister again, this time of Madras State (renamed Tamil Nadu in 1953). Still in her early twenties, Srimati was able to assemble some sixty-three works for this exhibition, organized by the South Indian Society of Painters. The art critic G. Venkatachalam addressed the event, along with the Chief Minister and Principal of the Madras School of Art D.P. Roy Choudhury21 (fig. 14). The speeches were reported in The Hindu the next morning. This exhibition was a singular honor for a young artist, and the years immediately following were highly productive. The fruits of this intense period of painting were exhibited in New Delhi three years later, alongside key works from her early period. Srimati’s second solo exhibition was held at the All-India Fine Arts and Crafts Society in New Delhi in November 1955, at which the first Vice-President of India, S. Radhakrishnan, presided (fig. 15). This exhibition featured thirty-two works and was well received. Srimati chose to retain many of the paintings from these pioneering exhibitions in her personal collection; indeed, contemporary commentators referred to her somewhat stubborn reluctance to sell her works.22 These included the early portrait studies and rural scenes, together with many that were part of the mythology series. Many of these featured in later exhibitions mounted abroad, notably in London and New York, and a number of key works from this period remained with the artist, and have since entered the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. A studio photograph from around 1952 shows Srimati surrounded by many of these paintings, together with her prized vina and tambura (or tanpura) both of which are now in the Department of Musical Instruments of The Met (figs 1 and 2).

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Fig. 14 Opening of Srimati’s first solo exhibition at Centenary Hall, Government Museum, Chennai, 24 August, 1952, inaugurated by the Chief Minister of Madras, C. Rajagopalachari. The artist accompanies the Chief Minister and Principal of the Madras School of Art D.P. Roy Choudhury.

The other dynamic at play was Srimati’s life as a classically trained dancer, musician and vocalist. There can be little doubt that the aesthetics of music and movement found expression in her painting. This drew on the concept of rasa, in which picturing sound is a recognized device and metaphor deployed in both mediums. Srimati studied together with Ram Gopal in Bengaluru under the direction of Kathak dancer Sohan Lal from 1938 until the family moved to Chennai in 1942. There she took up Bharatanatyam under the famous teachers E. Krishna Iyer and Vidwan Guru Muthukumaran Pillai. Professor P.S. Srinivasan Rao trained her in bhajan-singing, and Sri Raja Gopal Iyer, the famed master of the vina, instructed her in Carnatic music, vocal and instrumental, in Chennai in 1946–47. Srimati’s lasting friendship with Ram Gopal—the leading Indian male dancer of the post-war generation (fig. 16)—led him to invite her to tour with him in the UK in the 1950s, but social norms of the day prevented this. She did however meet him in London in January 1960, and provided vocal and instrumental accompaniment to some of his performances that year. Srimati’s first visit to the UK in December 1959, had been prompted by an invitation from Beryl de Zoete, the English ballet dancer turned dance critic and scholarly observer of Asian dance. De Zoete wrote

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to Srimati on 13 September 1959 confirming arrangements she had made for her visit, signing off: “Meanwhile, continue to paint and prepare for your visit”.23 De Zoete had co-authored, with Walter Spies, the pioneering study Dance and Drama in Bali (1938), and then immersed herself in the study of dance-drama in South Asia, first writing a pioneering study of South Indian dance traditions, The Other Mind: A Study of Dance in South India (1953), followed by Dance and Magic Drama in Ceylon (1957). Srimati’s friendship with Beryl de Zoete probably began in Chennai around 1949 when de Zoete was researching her book on South Indian dance. When Srimati visited England a decade later, it was de Zoete who facilitated numerous introductions for her into the dance, music and art worlds.

Fig. 15 Opening of Srimati’s second solo exhibition, at the All-India Fine Arts Society, New Delhi in 1955, inaugurated by the Vice-President of India, S. Radhakrishnan.

Srimati exhibited and performed widely during her year-long stay in the UK (1959–60). She was invited to Dartington Hall Arts Centre, Devon, for three months as an artist-in-residence, where she conducted classes in Indian classical dance.24 Srimati had travelled from India with a selection of paintings and these were exhibited at Dartington Hall, which, from its foundation in 1935 as a centre for progressive education, had strong links with Rabindranath Tagore and Santiniketan. In London, she exhibited at the India Arts Society, the event

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inaugurated on 24 October by Arnold Haskell, the eminent British dance critic. According to her London diaries, Srimati accompanied Ram Gopal in performance on a number of occasions, and was invited to record both vocal and instrumental works for broadcast by BBC radio and television.25 Srimati met the British film-maker Leslie Shepard (1917– 2004) at this time, likely during her instrumental and vocal lecture demonstrations arranged by de Zoete in London and Oxford. Shepard had recently returned from six months in Varanasi studying yoga and Indian music. Srimati was befriended by Shepard, who took sitar lessons with her, and encouraged her to develop her living as a performing artist and not to sell her paintings, advice she largely followed in her developing career.

Fig. 16 Ram Gopal performing at the Chennakeshava Temple, Belur, early 1950s.

Srimati returned to Chennai in December 1960, armed with a commission from the New York publisher, Limited Editions Club, to produce fifteen paintings to appear in a deluxe edition of Edwin Arnold’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, the famed 700 verses from the epic Mahabharata in which the narrative is presented as a conversation between the Pandava prince Arjuna and his guide and charioteer Lord Krishna. In preparation for these paintings (pl. 39–40), Srimati sought guidance from Brahmin acharyas in Chennai to penetrate further the psychological dramas that were embedded in these religious personas and narratives. This publication went quickly into reprint with The Heritage Club, further spreading awareness of her art. In 1963, Srimati sailed to New York and based herself there for the next forty years, returning to Chennai periodically to visit family and to reconnect with the sources that fuelled her art. Her public career was increasingly focused on performance. She became an established classical Indian musician and vocalist on the North American campus circuit, regularly touring, principally under the auspices of the Association of American Colleges. She was invited by Indian art historian and curator Stella Kramrisch to perform twice at the Philadelphia

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Museum of Art, the much prized Madurai mandapa in that museum providing an optimum setting (fig. 17). Following her performance there in the autumn of 1970, in which she played vina and was accompanied by her brother Y.G. Doraisami on tabla, Kramrisch wrote to Srimati on 23 November: “All these days since your concert in the temple mandapa in our museum I am haunted by the warmth and mellowness of your singing. Your voice carries your own religious experience and evokes it in those who listen. You led [our audience] into the heart of India”.26

Fig. 17 Srimati performing on vina in the ‘Madurai mandapa’, accompanied by her brother Y.G. Doraisami, and Michael Pellettieri, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1970.

Srimati continued to paint and exhibit. New York in the later 1960s was an increasingly difficult place for a conventional Indian artist to prosper. In a city under the growing sway of the influential Abstract Expressionist movement, Srimati’s

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paintings were looking increasingly out of step with the prevailing tastes. Nonetheless, recognition did come, in various guises. In 1964, Srimati received a scholarship to study printmaking at the Art Students League of New York, which was renewed for a further two years, and developed a close association with fellow artists, exhibiting there periodically until 1992.

Fig. 18 Srimati at work in her studio, on New York’s Upper West Side, 1970s.

Now a New York resident, her paintings attracted widespread interest. Between 1964 and 1969, her work was shown in nine solo exhibitions and a similar number of group shows. She presented forty recent paintings in her first solo exhibition in the USA, at the Mark of the Phoenix Gallery in Greenwich Village, in 1966. The gallery was resplendent with a Saraswati shrine and a rangoli by Srimati herself, and drew strong attendances. She was also invited to exhibit her paintings at the Indian Consulate in New York to mark the visit of the then newly elected Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, on 28 March.27 She accompanied Prime Minister Gandhi around the exhibition and established herself as a presence in the expatriate Indian community of New York. Around this time, pressed by the necessity to sell some paintings, Srimati began repainting works that she had sold in New York, revisiting such themes as Mara’s Temptation of the Buddha (pl. 52) and Bhairava Raga II (pl. 50), often in larger and more successful versions (fig. 18). In 1967, the Smithsonian Institution’s International Art Program commissioned Srimati to prepare a limited-edition, large-format etching for the Geneva Peace

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Conference scheduled for June of that year. Srimati worked directly on the etching plate, assisted by her artist-friend Michael Pellettieri, and together they supervised the printing of the numbered edition at the famed Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, in New York (fig. 19). This work entered the Smithsonian Institution’s collection and that of the Library of Congress (pl. 37). The Landmark Gallery, Kingston, New York, presented her last solo exhibition in July that year. Through the 1970s into the 1990s, Srimati continued to paint scaled-up works that honed her skills in the control of watercolour wash over larger areas. Srimati continued to paint with her characteristic intensity and, in 1993, produced the startlingly modern Buddha (pl. 53). However, by this time, she had largely lost interest in exhibiting her work, and painted for her own purposes alone.

Fig. 19 Srimati preparing the zinc etching plate for printing of the Smithsonian Institution commission for a Geneva Peace Conference, at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York, May 1967.

Srimati made regular visits to Chennai throughout her years living abroad, finally returning there to spend her last few months in 2007. Her journeying mirrors that of many of those creative Indian citizens who have come to form one of the largest voluntary diasporas of the modern age. Yet she remained deeply rooted to her South Indian past, visiting frequently throughout her lifetime, as if her art was constantly in need of the spiritual recharging that only India could provide. Her life in New York, from 1963 to 2007 (fig. 20), during which she built a career as a performing artist, classical musician, vocalist and dancer, as well as painter, had an unexpected consequence. Having been widely recognized and admired in Indian art circles early in her career, her later lack of visibility in India resulted in her being all but forgotten by mainstream commentators of the post-Independence art scene. Yet, her early career speaks of a gifted young artist committed to the traditionalist perspective pioneered by the Bengal school, who remained in tune with a Gandhian perspective for postIndependence India. Together with Srimati’s

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Fig. 20 Exhibition opening at the Art Student League of New York, 2002; left to right, Marianne Scarpa, Michael Pellettieri, Srimati, Lee (Lionel) Zimmer and Betty Zimmer.

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singular disinterest in self-promotion and her reluctance to sell her most highly prized works, her art largely dropped out of view of critics and admirers alike. The career of Srimati—as classical singer, musician, dancer and painter—represented a continuum in which each of her talents nurtured the other. As a painter of the mid and late twentieth century, Y.G. Srimati occupied a traditionalist position, largely impervious to the forces of progressive modernism that swirled around her. She stayed steadfast in her vision of an Indian style, affirming the continuing vitality, and place, of traditional imagery in modern Indian art.

Early Years 1946–1952 Srimati probably began painting in earnest around 1942, in her mid-teens when, following the unexpected death of her father, the family moved from Bengaluru to Chennai. She developed an early mastery of watercolour and pursued this as her preferred medium through her fifty-year career as a painter. With the support of her elder brother and mentor Y.G. Doraisami, she secured the finest materials available to her in Chennai, working in Winsor and Newton paints on J.B. Green and J. Whatman art papers. Again, when she moved to New York, she sourced high quality art materials and papers. These have served her art well, resisting better than most the ruinous effects of a monsoonal climate on works on paper. The early portrait studies of women from this period display an early aptitude and ease with the watercolour medium (pl. 1, 2 and 4). The technique she developed was personal and idiosyncratic. First, she prepared a careful under-drawing directly onto the sheet, correcting and refining as she resolved the composition. Colour was then first applied as large-area washes, which were then manually scrubbed back and reapplied, building a complex tonality and depth that a simple direct watercolour technique could not achieve. Her control of these large colour washes is remarkable. These technical innovations evolved through rigorous practise and application, rather than as the result of formal tuition. Srimati routinely didn’t sign or date her works, and so placing much of her early collection is problematic and dating often circumstantial. In later years, encouraged by dealers and collectors, she would on occasions sign and date a work retrospectively. The earliest works are a series of studies of women, in which her growing command of her medium is already evident. Woman with Medallion (c. 1943–44), a work from this period, hung at the family house at Sait Colony, for decades (pl. 1). Srimati’s engagement with themes that explored everyday life in rural India was shared by a number of other painters of her day, most notably Yagnesh Shukla, N.S. Bendre and Amrita Sher-Gil. Together, they sought to identify themes that belonged to India and so distance themselves from dependency on British art models in the pursuit of an Indian modernism.

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Early Years 1946–1952

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2 

Profile of a Young Woman

Chennai, early 1940s Watercolour on paper, 15.5 cm x 17 cm Collection of Michael Pellettieri

This early study exploits the power of the profile silhouette, a device celebrated in early Mughal portraiture that also pervaded the later Hindu court traditions of portrait painting. The strength of line that would become a hallmark of Srimati’s corpus of work is already present. This painting was exhibited, along with the Woman with Medallion, in her solo exhibitions in Chennai in 1952 and New Delhi in 1955.

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3

Bullock Cart

Chennai, c. 1950 Watercolour on paper, 33 cm x 42 cm Collection of Michael Pellettieri

Srimati’s scenes of rural life are both tender and immediate, revealing an empathy born of her experiences with the culture of self-reliance nurtured by Mahatma Gandhi’s anti-British swadeshi movement. This political agenda finds expression in subjects that celebrate the nobility of labour, a theme beloved of Edwardian artists and given a nationalist edge by Indian artists of the Bengal school such as D.P. Roy Choudhury, Nandalal Bose and Ramkinkar Baij. The Bullock Cart epitomizes this celebration of rural Indian life. The high perspective affords the viewer an unexpected vantage into the covered cart and the driver’s family. It enhances the dignity of the scene, giving the man driving the cart while cradling a child seated on his knee majesty worthy of a mythical charioteer. The theme was taken up by other painters, including Ram Gopal Vijayvargiya in his Bridal Cart (fig. 21).

Fig. 21 Ram Gopal Vijayvargiya (1905– 2003), Bridal Cart. Probably Jaipur, signed and dated 1969. Watercolour on paper. Private collection.

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“Dr. John Guy... makes an important

contribution for the recognition of Srimati’s contribution to Modern Indian Art. The catalogue... is exemplary...” —New Indian Express

“If artists like [Amrita] Sher-Gil boldly

defied norms by looking west for inspiration, Srimati remained affixed to her eastern roots—absorbed in the profusion of mythologies, histories, and folk tales from the subcontinent—with as much steadfastness and courage of conviction.” —Somak Ghoshal, Open Magazine

John Guy is the Florence and Herbert Irving Curator of the Arts of South and Southeast Asia at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He formerly served as Senior Curator of Indian art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He has curated numerous international exhibitions and is widely published in journals and collected volumes. His major books include Indian Art and Connoisseurship (ed. 1995), Vietnamese Ceramics: A Separate Tradition (1997), Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East (1998, repr. 2009), Indian Temple Sculpture (2007, repr. 2017), Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India (2011), Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800 (co-author 2013), and Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia (2014).

OTHER TITLES OF INTEREST Indian Temple Sculpture

ART

Art and Independence Y. G. Srimati and the Indian Style John Guy

In the Service of Krishna

Illustrating the Lives of Eighty-four Vaishnavas Emilia Bachrach

Paper Jewels

Postcards from the Raj Omar Khan

Jitish Kallat Edited by Natasha Ginwala

www.mapinpub.com

Printed in India

144 pages, 66 illustrations & 63 photographs 8.26 x 11.69” (210 x 297 mm), hc ISBN: 978-93-85360-40-4 ₹1750 | $40 | £32 Spring 2019 • World rights

John Guy

“This beautiful and important small show [reveals that] in the end Srimati is a devotional artist, in the religious and spiritual sense.” Holland Cotter, The New York Times

“The most compelling aspect of Srimati’s work is her treatment of the physical form. She was a trained classical dancer, having studied alongside Ram Gopal, under the tutelage of renowned Kathak dancer Sohan Lal, and this gave her an almost intuitive, sculptural understanding of the human figure.” Avantika Shankar, Architectural Digest

“An unexpected gem... seek out these thought-provoking pictures by Y.G. Srimati.”

Louise Nicolson, Apollo Magazine

₹1750 | $40 | £32 ISBN 978-93-85360-40-4

www.mapinpub.com