Vol. 7, Issue 6, Part C (2021)

Abstract
Modernism in India had to bear the burden of its historic past effectively mediating through the high art of its classical civilization and through the construct of ‘invented tradition’ in the nationalist agenda. These two factors were closely allied within the arena of ‘modernism’, which was a cultural and historical period in the late 19th and early 20th century. This period was to become a dominant force in influencing the character and configuration of the emerging modem Indian art the ‘modernism’ fundamentally was directed towards a process that required and involved experimentations of not only techniques and materials but also privileging new concepts and ideas in artistic expressions and centrality premised on the uniqueness of the creative individual. In metropolitan cities like Bombay and Calcutta the colonial established art schools had played a constructive role in the emergence of ‘artists’ in the modem sense of independent creative individuals from the period of nationalist straggle. Though Bombay and Calcutta had these art institutions it did not serve as a site or locus for the emergence of the modem movement. In Bombay the Progressive Artist Group established in 1947 was a loose confederation of artists with a common agenda of reducing nationalist character in the arts and seriously looked to Europe for appropriating then- stylistic formulae particularly of Post-impressionism and Expressionism.