Contemporary Indian art has travelled a long way since the days of Ravi
Verma, Abanindranath Tagore and his followers and even Amrita Sher-Gil.
Broadly, the pattern followed is this. Almost every artist of note began
with one kind of representational or figurative art or the other tinged
with impressionism, expressionism or post-expressionism. The irksome
relationship of form and content was generally kept at a complementary
level. Then through various stages of elimination and simplifications,
through cubism, abstraction and a variety of expressionistic trends, the
artists reached near non-figurative and totally non-figurative levels.
The 'pop' and the 'op', the minimal and anti-art have really not caught
the fancy of our artists, except for very minor aberrations. And, having
reached the dead and cold abstraction, the only way open is to sit back
and reflect. This copy-book pattern has been followed by a great number
of artists, including senior and established ones. As a reaction to
this journey into nothing, there are three new major trends: projection
of the disturbed social unrest and instability with the predicament of
man as the main theme; an interest in Indian thought and metaphysics,
manifested in the so called 'tantric' paintings and in paintings with
symbolical import: and more than these two trends is the new interest in
vague surrealist approaches and in fantasy. More important than all
this, is the fact that nobody now talks of the conflict between form and
content or technique and expression. In fact, and in contradiction to
the earlier avowal, almost everybody is certain that technique and form
are only important prerequisites to that mysterious something of an
idea, message or spirit, that spark of the unfathomable entity that
makes such man a little different from the other.
