Indian Art and Letters

Author(s): India Society
Publisher: India Society

Page 34

Modern Art in Western India
I also happen to know not only Mr. Gladstone Solomon's work, but also several of his disciples and pupils.
The Indian School of Art is masculine and not emasculated, and never feminine. It is 100 per cent. virile and full of flesh and blood.
The Bombay School proves that the people are still as virile as in the old days. The Bombay School of Art can do as admirable work, as beautiful, if not better, than the Bengal School itself; but still their venue lies in another way.
So far as the Bombay School is concerned, I give them prizes every year. I have no partiality, because I happen to be the friend of all the artists, and for the last six or seven years I have been giving prizes.
This much I might say, that to Captain Gladstone Solomon and other people we Indians owe a debt of gratitude. We all love him not as an Englishman, but as an Indian who appreciates India at its best, who takes the perfume from the lotus and spreads it outside.
CHAIRMAN: I think you will all have been interested in the enthusiastic statement made by Dr. Sitaram of the Museum in Lahore.
Prior to that we heard Lord Lloyd, Mr. Yusuf Ali, and Mr. Fyzee Rahamin. From what I can gather, their view seems to be that there is a separate art movement in Bengal, another in Bombay, and a third in Lahore, and that, in fact, the art movement is very much alive all over India. That is the thing that matters. What particular methods of expression are chosen depends on the artists What training they get is more or less a matter of predilection, and I do not see why anyone should wish to lay down that they are only to be trained according to one system and no other.
There are some important points that arise out of Mr. Solomon's address.
Mr. Solomon has shown us to-night very convincing examples that life schools need not spoil a good artist when you have got one.
The technical methods of training a budding artist to become a qualified artist are very much bound up with tradition, and it is on that account that people who do not understand exactly what the methods of the Bombay School of Art are have been declaiming against it.
The real difficulty about the teaching at the Bombay School of Art, it would seem to me, is not so much that they follow certain European methods, but how they are going to keep in touch with the European art movements which underlie their methods. This difficulty is bound to be experienced wherever one country works on ideas derived from another. At Bombay, if I may judge from the few things I have seen of the work of the Bombay School of Art, they appear to have struck a happy medium.
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