Lalit Mohan Sen: An Enduring Legacy
A versatile artist, consummate teacher, and a well-known cultural figure throughout his career, Lalit Mohan Sen (1898-1954) was a leading Indian artist who lived and worked at the peak of the Gandhian era. An Enduring Legacyseeks to understand the artist as an ambitious practitioner in colonial South Asia while examining some of the central themes within the wide arc of his artistic practice. The exhibition features drawings, oil paintings, tempera, prints, photographs, designs, and sculptures, along with rare archival materials shown for the first time.
Born in Shantipur, West Bengal, into a family closely associated with the place鈥檚 famous handloom textile tradition, Lalit Mohan Sen moved to Lucknow when young and spent most of his life there. He studied art at the Government School of Arts and Crafts, Lucknow (1917) and later at the Royal College of Art, London (1925). Originally a pupil of Nathanial Heard and Sir William Rothenstein, he excelled in academic realism, portrait and landscape. Still, his works also show inspiration from Classical Indian art, the country鈥檚 rich craft and decorative traditions and the new nationalist paintings of Abanindranath and his disciples. The renowned art historian Laurence Binyon commissioned him to copy the Bagh Cave paintings, and his mastery of the Indian Style is visible in his two large-scale murals on the Mughal emperor, Akbar and Buddha鈥檚 life in India House, London in 1930. A fellow traveller of Indian nationalism, Lalit Mohan Sen was deeply sympathetic to India鈥檚 political struggle against the British Raj, evident in his series of Gandhi鈥檚 portraits in woodcut, done at different times. However, as an artist with a broad and open outlook, he avoided the oppositional spirit of anti-colonial nationalism. He did not view the new Indian art and Western realism 鈥� two dominant trends operative in the Indian art scene of the time 鈥� as antagonistic but as two distinctive paths of creative expression.
Lalit Mohan Sen worked in many styles and mediums, which gives his oeuvre extraordinary diversity. We witness him wrestling with what it means to be a modern artist while remaining sceptical about modernism鈥檚 desire for stylistic singularity and hierarchy of values. As an artist and pedagogue who taught at his alma mater Lucknow Art School for almost three decades and later became its Principal in 1945, he placed equal emphasis on the revered disciplines like painting and commercial/functional art, focusing as much on creative self-expression as on art鈥檚 communicative potentiality. The large body of his posters, graphic prints, book illustrations, and design works, which form a significant part of his oeuvre, is also crucial in understanding his unique place in the history of modern Indian art.
A versatile artist, consummate teacher, and a well-known cultural figure throughout his career, Lalit Mohan Sen (1898-1954) was a leading Indian artist who lived and worked at the peak of the Gandhian era. An Enduring Legacyseeks to understand the artist as an ambitious practitioner in colonial South Asia while examining some of the central themes within the wide arc of his artistic practice. The exhibition features drawings, oil paintings, tempera, prints, photographs, designs, and sculptures, along with rare archival materials shown for the first time.
Born in Shantipur, West Bengal, into a family closely associated with the place鈥檚 famous handloom textile tradition, Lalit Mohan Sen moved to Lucknow when young and spent most of his life there. He studied art at the Government School of Arts and Crafts, Lucknow (1917) and later at the Royal College of Art, London (1925). Originally a pupil of Nathanial Heard and Sir William Rothenstein, he excelled in academic realism, portrait and landscape. Still, his works also show inspiration from Classical Indian art, the country鈥檚 rich craft and decorative traditions and the new nationalist paintings of Abanindranath and his disciples. The renowned art historian Laurence Binyon commissioned him to copy the Bagh Cave paintings, and his mastery of the Indian Style is visible in his two large-scale murals on the Mughal emperor, Akbar and Buddha鈥檚 life in India House, London in 1930. A fellow traveller of Indian nationalism, Lalit Mohan Sen was deeply sympathetic to India鈥檚 political struggle against the British Raj, evident in his series of Gandhi鈥檚 portraits in woodcut, done at different times. However, as an artist with a broad and open outlook, he avoided the oppositional spirit of anti-colonial nationalism. He did not view the new Indian art and Western realism 鈥� two dominant trends operative in the Indian art scene of the time 鈥� as antagonistic but as two distinctive paths of creative expression.
Lalit Mohan Sen worked in many styles and mediums, which gives his oeuvre extraordinary diversity. We witness him wrestling with what it means to be a modern artist while remaining sceptical about modernism鈥檚 desire for stylistic singularity and hierarchy of values. As an artist and pedagogue who taught at his alma mater Lucknow Art School for almost three decades and later became its Principal in 1945, he placed equal emphasis on the revered disciplines like painting and commercial/functional art, focusing as much on creative self-expression as on art鈥檚 communicative potentiality. The large body of his posters, graphic prints, book illustrations, and design works, which form a significant part of his oeuvre, is also crucial in understanding his unique place in the history of modern Indian art.
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