Abstraction of a lost master rediscovered
Bringing back forgotten masters of Indian art to public view is a mission art experts and galleries have embarked on. One such unsung master is Avinash Chandra whose legacy is now being celebrated through Contours of Identity, a landmark exhibition in Mumbai that pairs him alongside the Goa-born FN Souza—an older contemporary with whom, it turns out, he had a lot in common.
Giles Tillotson, the curator of the show admits that the idea for the exhibition started with Souza’s birth centenary earlier this year. “As an art historian, I am fascinated by how people connect and our job is to uncover those connections to arrive at a broader picture,” says Tillotson, explaining that Avinash Chandra and Souza make for intriguing companions in this context because “they were regarded as the most famous non-white artists working in London in the 1960s”.
As the exhibition reveals, Chandra and Souza were kindred spirits for two significant reasons. First, both were quintessential postcolonial émigrés living in London at a time when Britain was in the whirlpool of cultural revolution in the 1950s and ‘60s. Secondly and more crucially, they shared an audacious approach towards sexuality and erotica in their work. Unlike Souza whose depiction of sexual imagery is often be frank and visceral, Chandra’s whirling and swirling human bodies were fluid and lyrical.
While in London, Chandra developed his own transgressive visual language, drawing inspiration from the sexual symbolisms of Indian Tantric ethos, ideas from European modernism and the free love culture of the swinging Sixties. Chandra’s oeuvre from this period erupts in an unrestrained fantasy of colour, their groovy visuals evoking the hallucinatory effects of psychedelic art. Chandra’s nude figures reminded one of the friezes and sculptures of Khajuraho, while his cityscapes were marked by recurring arches and circles.
Tillotson notes that these paintings defy easy categorisation—neither fully landscape nor representational, they occupy a dream space between the two. On closer scrutiny, though, viewers can discern echoes of Chandra’s early realism in the form of tangled bodies and shape-shifting objects. There is psychological ambiguity in Chandra’s imagery, suggests Tillotson. “The boundaries of reality and fantasy are deliberately blurred in his work. Consider, for a moment, Ram Kumar.
Would you describe Ram Kumar as a landscape or a purely abstract painter? Similarly, Avinash Chandra walks a thin line between figuration and abstraction,” he observes. Ram Kumar was part of first generation of post-colonial Indian artists and an associated of the Progressive Artist’s Group, alongside Souza, SH Raza and MF Husain. His progression from specific landscapes like that of Varanasi to abstract imagery pooling slashes of countours makes him an ‘inquisitor of structures’ as the modernist American poet Wallace Stevens put it.
The morphing metaphor is present in Chandra’s work as is evident in an untitled watercolour study that begins as a sensuous nude but quickly metamorphoses into a winding path leading to a forest. Hills of Gold is another riveting example of this experimental duality. It is both a humanscape and a landscape that assumes the form of a reclining nude, with various distorted body parts hinting at a curious imaginative mind at play.
Born in Shimla in 1931, Chandra graduated from the Delhi Polytechnic (now known as College of Art) and was a rising star in Delhi art circles, having won the Lalit Kala Akademi prize in 1954. At Delhi Polytechnic he met his future wife Prem Lata. Later, Chandra decided to join her when she received a scholarship in London in 1956. His reputation as a seasoned artist and a renowned teacher in Delhi had preceded him. He is the first Indian artist to participate in the prestigious Documenta in Kassel, Germany, in 1964.
Britain’s capital gave him a sense of freedom, offering him a global gaze from where he could look back at Indian concepts with objectivity and absorb the international cosmopolitanism of England at the same time. The British press was captivated by his work; The Guardian once equated him to Paul Klee. Chandra’s mystical abstractions also invited comparisons with British artists of the time, like Gillian Ayres, Bernard Cohen and Howard Hodgkin. Some critics and observers couldn’t resist focussing on his Indian identity and roots, in order to explain the erotic undertones in his paintings. The influential curator WG Archer was one of the scholars who championed Chandra’s work.
In the mid-60s, Chandra travelled to New York after receiving fellowships from John D Rockefeller III Fund in 1965 and the Fairfield Foundation in 1967. Incidentally, Souza had also moved to New York. New York City’s atmosphere of sexual liberation greatly influenced Chandra’s work but overall, America was less receptive to both the artists. When Chandra returned to London around the 1970s, London had changed drastically, with pop art becoming a dominant force.
In 1975, Prem Lata died. This period marked a challenging phase for Chandra, both personally and professionally. His work became darker, the visual energy and intellectual vigour of his earlier life giving way to bitterness. Chandra died in 1991 aged 60, leaving behind his second wife, Valerie Murray-Chandra—a British actor of Jamaican heritage—who has since dedicated herself to rehabilitating her late husband’s legacy.
The exhibition argues that Chandra’s bold outlook towards sexuality, and his distinctive visual style helped him redefine the possibilities of abstract painting, standing at the cusp of Indian and European modernism. A question worth asking, then—why is he not as well-known as Souza or Husain? Tillotson attributes it to his relatively slim portfolio and the scarcity of written records about him. Blame it on his eccentric personality and the fact that he did not hobnob enough with the art world in India. Compared to the eloquent Souza, “Chandra was more reticent, more willing to let his paintings speak for themselves.” And now they are.