“The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture”- Martin Heidegger

The art scene in Bengal in the mid-19^th century primarily evolved from the ‘bazaar art’ that flourished around the Kali temple at Kalighat in Calcutta along side a vibrant community of traders who made their livelihood from wood-engraved prints that grew around the region known as Bat-tala, considered historically as the prime center of early Bengali printing and publishing.

As new printing techniques like lithography, chromolithography and oleography were developed in Calcutta, the Kalighat painting and the Bat-tala art went into rapid extinction. So much so, that the Principal of Calcutta Art College, Mukul Dey was taken aback by the gradual disappearance of the old art as they were replaced by oleographs. On a morning in 1910, as he strolled through the lanes and bylanes of Kalighat , like a Baudelarian flaneur, he quietly resigned to the advent of industrial printing press as he observed: “the artist craftsmen are nearly all dead, and their children have taken up other business…The old art is gone forever- the pictures are now finding their last asylum in museums and art collections as things of beauty which we cannot let die”. (Kalighat Paintings/Aditi Nath Sarkar, Christine Mackay, Roli Books, Published in association with National Museums And Galleries of Wales)

By 1870s and 1880s, new training methods in the practice of art like shading, use of perspective, landscape and anatomy drawing set the new trend along with emergence of new printing techniques. The Kalighat paintings were rendered into a new space by the use of illusionist oil paintings or chromolithograph prints.

The new visual cultural iconography was a variation upon older ones and women were significantly portrayed in a domestic middle-class setting evidently reminiscent of shots from Charulata by the film maker Satyajit Ray.

Above: Agamani/ Chromolithograph, Calcutta Art Studio, Calcutta, 19^th Century

The practice of academic oil painting to produce superior varieties of art prints became a serious discipline among new artists like Bamapada Banerjee (1851-1932). Influenced by the genre of European history paintings, he apprenticed with German painter Karl Becker in Calcutta and later developed a unique individual style for his mythological paintings, the oleographs of which were printed in Germany.

The new cultural hub included the studios and printing presses around Chitpur replacing the old Bat-tala printers. Kansarari Para Art Studio, Hindu Art Academy (Chorebagan), and the Imperial Art College (Pathuriaghata) emerged as the ‘native’ centers of publishing and print production.

The setting up of the Government School of Art in Calcutta in 1854 (the first art school of British India) is considered by art historians as the major landmark in the art scene of India.

The knowledge of academic training in art was formally in place and learners were formally inducted into courses where skills of drawing, painting, shading, modeling, engraving, lithography were taught with utmost discipline and care.

The first batch of professional academy trained artists in Calcutta in the 19^th century included Ananda Prasad Bagchi (1849-1905), Jamini Prakash Gangoly (1876-1953), Satish Chandra Sinha (1893-1965), Basanta Kumar Ganguli (1893-1965) and, Kishori Roy (1911-1965) to name a few.

Lack of restoration and identification of artists have crippled the art historians engaged in the process of cataloguing academic art of the late 19^th century and early 20^th century in Calcutta.

Significant developments in printing from 1900 to the 1950s were much attributed to resources made available by indigenous institutions like Albert Temple of Science and School of Technical Arts and Indian Art School.

Individual persons like Girindrakumar Dutta, who founded the School of Technical Arts in 1876, and Manmathanath Chakravarty, founder of Indian Art School (1896)were pioneers behind the new middle-class market for journals, illustrations and commercial advertisements of products ranging from cosmetics to gramophone records. So the shifting in printing from earlier Bat-tala wood-engravings and Chitpur chromolithographs to new electroplate engravings, photographically produced line and half-tone colour blocks and finally the four-colour offset press were instrumental in spurring the careers of many middle-class artists, illustrators and cartoonists.

The new journals like Basantak (1874-75), Shilpa Pushpanjali (1885-86), Bharati, Prabasi, or Basumati incorporated the new illustrative style and printing techniques.

Above: Illustration showing new four-colour offset printing style/Basumati- A Bengali Journal; B.S. 33/Source: National Library of India, Kolkata

A major string of artists in Calcutta were caught between the Academic (Western) and Oriential divides of modern art as sources for inspiration and artistic practice.

Few artists like Charuchandra Ray, Bireshwar Sen were motivated to join the printing industry as commercial artists. This was an important period in the history of modern art in India as people from the Bengali middle-class first opened the doors of Indian Advertising Industry.

Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri at 100 Garpar Road in Calcutta mastered the three-colour half-tone block process. The Ray family contributed to periodicals like Sandesh (1913) – the illustrations and texts clearly demarcate a consumptive pattern of upper strata Bengalis who were liberal to recognize the acceptance of values both Nationalistic and British.

A lot of promotional materials like pamphlets, catalogues, booklets for various organizations like the Eastern Bengal Railways, HMV or Columbia , AIR and the Bengali Cinema industry in general were printed by the new printing houses and notably by Indian Photo Engraving Company (1924). These advertising prints show the range of creativity of the trained skilled artists who were all set to pursue alternative careers in the commercial art market. A catalogue of advertising logos, illustrations, designs from the early 20^th century tell us a lot about the historicity of the visual culture and popular iconography of Bengal as it strived to attain a common language accentuating development of academic excellence and representative ethos of a national identity in art.

In the post-Independence era, as the advertising industry flourished with an increasing strength of the new economy, illustrative art also changed with varying complexity of visual-text assimilation to sell consumer products. Also the advent of photography and film, made illustrations more naturalistic following Western tradition of product displays and promos. Raghunath Goswami (1931-95), was a key exponent of the new visual idiom and is widely respected in the commercial art circuit.

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