Painted Postcards from a Bygone Era

If you have missed the unique online exhibition titled &lsquoThe Art of the Painted Postcard Nandalal Bose and His Contemporaries,&rsquo here is your chance to see it. Hosts Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre (JBMRC) has not only extended the last date of the exhibition to January 31 but also expanded it with another titled &lsquoLetters to Nandalal&rsquo.

Nandalal Bose (1882-1966), one of the pioneers of modern Indian art, was not only a master artist but also known known to have illustrated the Indian Constitution (along with Beohar Rammanohar Sinha) and sketched the Bharat Ratna and the Padmashri awards. In 1930, during the Dandi March movement, he made a linocut print of Mahatma Gandhi with his staff, which later became one of the most popular icons of the great man. Bose is one of the nine artists whose works were declared "not being antiquities, to be art treasures, having regard to their artistic and aesthetic value," by the Department of Culture of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1976 and 1979.

Kolkata-based JBMRC is holding an online exhibition of Bose&rsquos hand painted postcards in collaboration with Victoria Memorial Hall (VMH) and DAG Museums. The postcards, mostly written to close friend, Ramesh Charan Basu Majumdar between 1918 and 1946, were gifted to JBMRC by Basu Majumdar&rsquos granddaughter. Along with this, there is also a small selection of painted postcards written to or by Bose&rsquos contemporaries, Abanindranath Tagore, Asit Haldar and Jamini Roy, from the collections of DAG and VMH.

According to lead curator Tapati Guha-Thakurta, the postcards take viewers through the most important years of Nandalal Bose&rsquos artistic career and travels across India and abroad. In her introduction to the exhibition, she writes, &ldquoBy bringing together this genre of postcards from these institutional collections, this exhibition is an invitation to reflect, both, on the kind of art form that these postcards constitute, and on the snippets of art historical and professional exchanges that emerge from these letters and the locations from which they were sent.&rdquo

Recently, the organisers added a new section &lsquoLetters to Nandalal&rsquo. According to the organisers, this section &lsquowas conceived as a conversation between the students of Kala Bhavana (Viswa Bharati, Shantiniketan) and Nandalal's postcards in the exhibition&rsquo. Bose, who was a student of legendary artist Abanindranath Tagore, was the principal of Kala Bhavana in 1922. 

Curated by Sanchayan Ghosh and Arpan Mukherjee, 'Letters to Nandalal' exhibition is the students&rsquo response to the individual postcards in the form of hand-drawn images or writing.

The online exhibition&nbsphas been extended to January 31, 2021.