The Calcutta Group was the first group of modern artists

Modern art

Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...

 in India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

, formed in 1943 in Kolkata

Kolkata

Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...

. Its leading members included the sculptor Pradosh Das Gupta and the painters Paritosh Sen

Paritosh Sen

Paritosh Sen was a leading Indian artist. He was born in Dhaka , the present-day capital of Bangladesh...

, Gopal Ghose, Nirode Mazumdar and Zainul Abedin

Zainul Abedin

Zainul Abedin was nitially a painter of India and became famous in 1944 with his Famine Series paintings of 1943; and after partition he moved to Pakistan; and finally when Bangladesh was created in 1971, he was rightly considered the founding father of Bangladeshi Art...

. The group held exhibitions from 1945, and held a joint exhibition in 1950 with the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay (which became more influential).

Sen outlived his co-founders.

Sources

• Partha Mitter, Indian Art (Oxford History of Art), Oxford University Press (2001), ISBN 0192842218 - page 193
• Krishna Dutta, Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination), Interlink (2003), ISBN 1566564883 - page 233

External links

• Hilarious treatment of protagonists (exhibition by Paritosh Sen), The Telegraph, May 5, 2006