Chennai-based Ashvita Gallery’s newest show traces the genesis and progress of business artwork from Madras — from calendars to commercials and, in fact, cinema posters
Chennai-based Ashvita Gallery’s newest show traces the genesis and progress of business artwork from Madras — from calendars to commercials and, in fact, cinema posters
These tints, landscapes, faces and motifs are all too acquainted; we grew up seeing them on calendars, periodicals and commercials. Now, save for the occasional resurrection that cashes in on their ‘retro’ worth, industrial artwork is inching in the direction of obscurity. At Ashvita’s quaint gallery house, a story is being created on how industrial artwork, which dominated many a house over the previous hundred years, noticed a motion in Madras, parallel to the remainder of India.<SU> The exhibit is titled The Popular Picture: One Hundred Years of Commercial Art from Madras.
Look round and you discover, for example, a calendar that dates again to 1966: A scene that depicts the Hindu god Shiva surrounded by pious devotees is juxtaposed by columns of dates and a masthead that reads Murali Traders. A 1970 poster carries maybe essentially the most widely-shared and replicated portray of one other Hindu god, Balamurugan, that reads With greatest compliments from: Sri Mangalambiga Stores — Dealers in stainless-steel and normal retailers.
These widely-circulated artworks are most frequently not attributed, but are very important to the visible language of the nation. “This show exists because we wanted to ask people questions like: ‘What is fine art? Who classifies it as fine art? Why does Hussain get a museum exhibition and not say, Konderaju and Aykan,’” says Ashvin E Rajagopalan, curator of the show. Most of those artworks had been discarded. “They became objects of no value because they were free. Today we are able to give them a context.”
A calendar that dates again to 1966
The focus of the show that brings seven artists to the fore doesn’t stray away from Madras. Initially, it was not a 100-year historical past, says the curator.
It all began with a Tanjore portray of lord Rama that got here into their assortment by probability. “Right at the bottom, in older Tamil, it said that anyone who wanted to buy prints of such artworks, were required to go to shop number so and so, in Broadway, dated 1888. A lot of such paintings are classified as Tanjore paintings on paper, even in museums today. But we figured out that college students would come to lithography presses in Broadway, which has been a hub of calendars, greeting cards and posters for the past 100 years, to print them on lithographs in black-and-white which were later hand coloured. It therefore became inexpensive and could be easily replicated. This happened around the same time when works of artists like Raja Ravi Varma came to the printing presses.” And so, the influences are onerous to overlook. When an artist’s visuals get commercialised on this scale, reputation follows. And when these visuals keep in houses for lengthy durations of time, it turns into the concept itself; of gods and goddesses, landscapes and sceneries.
From there, the narrative exhibits how this motion branched out to totally different points: On show are additionally journal covers and calendars that maintain “state-of-the-art photoshop work of that time”. In that sense, they’d paint, lower the font (for textual content) and stick it, and ship the unfavourable of the entire panel to the press. Only a number of of the magazines had offset expertise then. Ananda Vikatan was one of many first publications to go offset within the Nineteen Thirties. Their magazines that carried artworks on the quilt had been extremely anticipated by the Tamil-speaking inhabitants. Similarly, a set of draft designs for the Rajinikanth film Pandian (2000) exhibits hand-sketched, highly-skilled work that mixes cut-and-paste parts.
A draft poster of the Rajinikanth-starrer ‘Pandian’ (2000)
The late 1800s additionally noticed a crop of images college students establishing studios throughout Tamil Nadu. “The studio’s job was commercial work: apart from photos and portraits, they would also work on greeting cards and calendars. And when you enlarge a photo, it starts becoming blurred, and to sharpen it the studio would have people doing finishing touches with colours. Photo studios thus were hubs of commercial artists,” says Ashvin. A piece of the show pays homage to this a part of historical past.
A walkabout throughout 90 such frames lends fascinating views to a class of artwork that has hardly ever been studied or documented. “Commercial art is not commercial in that sense. It is still built on art that is as ‘fine’ as any other form,” concludes Ashvin.
The exhibit is on view until July 17 at Ashvita’s, Dr Radhakrishnan Salai.
Source: www.thehindu.com
