The International Herald Tribune is running a special section on art. The story on the Indian Progressive movement that is so essential to Indian Modernism contains this interesting European connection:
In the late 1940s, the Progressives were encouraged and received support from an assortment of European Jewish émigrés who had fled Europe with the rise of the Nazis to settle in Bombay. The businessman Emanuel Schlesinger and Walter Langhammer, an art teacher who later became art director at the Times of India, as well as Rudolf von Leyden, who was an art critic for The Times of India, were patrons. They helped not only financially, but also by providing access to books and color reproductions of classical and modern European paintings. Sunday morning salons hosted by Langhammer opened up a world hitherto unknown to these artists, who hailed from small towns. As Professor Homi K. Bhabha, director of Harvard University’s Humanities Center, said in a phone interview, “the Progressives were very open to international movements and to the history of art in a global context.”
Not Just Modern But Indian (New York Times)
