The artist as printing machine

The history of printmaking is profoundly intertwined with shifting paradigms of art, the evolving figure of the artist, and the quest for autonomy of art in India. ‘Past in Perspective: Printmaking Practices from Bengal’, the latest exhibition at the Akar Prakar Gallery in Delhi, elegantly traces the journey of printmaking in Bengal. It showcases the works of 13 eminent artists and their engagement with the medium, rooted in emerging institutions and exchanges with international artists from Japan to Europe.

Printmaking, an underrated art form, involves creating visuals by transferring ink from a hard surface—whether metal, woodblock, or lithographic stone—onto another medium. During the era when Calcutta reigned as the capital of British India until 1911, the city flourished as an epicentre of printmaking, with entire streets bustling with the craft. Bengal has its history of print culture—the Battala prints—woodcut illustrations, which were generally used to mass produce illustrations for religious scriptures.

Bengal ink

These prints thrived in the pre-print era and were popular among the lower-middle classes. However, their demand declined and eventually faded away with the rise of lithographic prints in the late 19th century.

Reena Lath, director, Akar Prakar, states: “This exhibition is like a second part of the history of printmaking in Bengal. We held an exhibition on printmaking practices in 19th-century Bengal around 2017, where we showcased traditional Battala prints alongside prints from the Calcutta Art Studio used for propagation, advertising, and propaganda. Our new exhibition focuses on contemporary printmaking as it shifted from being a mass reproduction medium to fine art.”

The exhibition opens with Gaganendranath Tagore’s collection of early 20th-century lithographs—prints crafted by transferring images from flat stones or metal plates onto paper. Titles like Adhbut Lok, Birupa Bajra, and Nabba Hullor depict various caricatured scenes and figures. These lithographs signify early experiments with printmaking that transformed it from illustration to a liberated medium of graphic expression. They mark the search for a secular iconography of representation for a country on the cusp of tradition and modernity. The illustrations critique the homogeneous education system, the ‘babu-fication’ of the Bengali upper caste, and other societal ironies of colonial Bengal.

Institutions, artists

Bichitra Club, an intellectual and artistic club founded by the Tagores in 1915, elevated printmaking beyond mere reproduction to an art form in its own right. The Tagore brothers—Abanindranath, Gaganendranath, and Samarendranath—alongside their uncle Rabindranath Tagore, converted a section of their Jorasanko residence into a hub for artistic discourse and experimentation. Mukul Dey’s depiction of Tagore Lane, using the dry point etching technique acquired under printmakers such as James Blanding Sloan in London, evokes a vista from Jorasanko. During his time at the Bichitra Club, Dey persuaded Rabindranath Tagore to experiment with the medium, resulting in Tagore’s prints—both etchings and lithographs—displayed in the exhibition.

While printmaking remained a parallel medium for most of the artists displayed in the exhibition, Mukul Dey and Ramendranath Chakravorty, both trained in London, embraced it as their primary medium. Their works reflect the influence of Western academic representation, echoing also in Benode Behari Mukherjee’s woodcuts that transition from patterns to textures of landscapes. Mukherjee, under Nandalal Bose’s tutelage at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, explored a range of media from woodcut to tempera. The legacy of the Bichitra Club, Government College of Art, and Kala Bhavan fostered generations of artists in Bengal experimenting with intaglio and relief prints, resulting in a vogue of printmaking.

Artists such as Somnath Hore moved to Delhi, establishing the printmaking department at Delhi Polytechnic. Hore’s unique experiments included the invention of printing on paper pulp, yielding abstract formations that departed from traditional figures and landscapes. His works in the exhibition are displayed beside Krishna Reddy’s innovative use of the viscosity technique that also commenced colour-based printmaking experiments in India. With each of the 13 artists occupying a dedicated wall, the exhibition offers an interpretation of the history of printmaking and its formalistic evolution, through the artists’ lives and their relationships with influential figures and institutions in the 20th-century art world.

Medium, the message

Sanat Kar, whose coloured etching print hangs prominently in the exhibition, represents a reshaping of the medium from Mukul Dey’s earlier etching experiments using metal plates to Kar’s method of using ply as the base matrix. It seamlessly integrates the robustness of metal-plate etching with the organic character of wood. The two-fold engagement with artistic skill and technical proficiency, from designing to printing the image, defines the medium of printmaking, possibly explaining its popularity in contemporary times where there is a hunger to feed the ruptured connection between intellect and craftsmanship.

Siddhi Shailendra, head of curatorial projects at the gallery, says: “This exhibition not only traces the evolution of printmaking but also celebrates the diverse thematic explorations through this medium. For instance, Nandalal Bose’s iconic imagery of the Dandi March, originally published in the Viswabharati Journal, exemplifies this breadth. Artists such as Ramkinkar Baij and Chittaprosad utilised print techniques for both inspiration and propaganda, as seen in Ramkinkar’s prints reproduced for the annual Nandanmela at Santiniketan in 1974. Gaganendranath Tagore’s lithographs, satirical of British rule, alongside Rabindranath Tagore’s experiments with linocuts, further demonstrate the diversity of themes.”

Printmaking as a medium was linked with the effort to reproduce multiple drawings. In contemporary fine art practice where authenticity and originality dominate what defines the canon of art, printmaking raises questions about how parameters of measuring the value of artwork could be changed. This exhibition on printmaking seeks to ask the viewers and collectors where or should the value of an artwork reside—in its ‘originality’, history, social impact, the figure of the artist, flight of experimentation or somewhere at the intersection of all this?

(The exhibition is on till July 27 at Akar Prakar Gallery, Defence Colony)

This article is written by Prachi Satrawal