Jagdish Swaminathan

Achievements of Jagdish Swaminathan

Jagdish Swaminathan is one of the most significant modern artists of India. He has the skill to express himself easily in words. He was among the co-founders of the Group 1890. Indian art received an all new direction by him and he started working towards a new set of values based on an indigenous identity. His mystical bent of mind is mirrored in his paintings. The account below throws more light on the achievements of Jagdish Swaminathan.

Early Life

Jagdish Swaminathan was born in Simla on 21st June, 1928.

Education and Career

Education in art of Jagdish Swaminathan involved short time spans at the Delhi Polytechnic and then in Poland. He worked in Delhi for the Congress Socialist Party. He became a member of the Communist Party in the year 1947 but left it in 1953. He carried on his work of writing and translation and painting as well. In order to study graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, he won a scholarship in 1958. After six months he came back to Delhi and started working with the artist Sailoz Mookherjea. He also provided his talent for the weekly magazine Link From 1958 to 1962. He wrote a regular political column and acted as its art critic. He launched the exhibition of Group 1890 in the year 1963 at the Rabindra Bhavan Art Gallery, New Delhi. This step worked well for the repute of the group. He also founded and edited the art bulletin Contra in 1966. As an art critic, he hit the supremacy of the Western art world and emphasized the requirement to revive the nature of Indian art.

Style

Jagdish Swaminathan is more apprehensive about having an arousing viewpoint in relation to the understanding. The graphic potential of his imagery is discovered in his paintings. His paintings have copious variations and blend of imagery with brilliant colors. All this recommended the incline of inner being of an individual parting the gross and the sullied. Jagdish Swaminathan left back his previous well ordered color-geometry and brush paintings during 1990s. He moved back to repossess the immaculate freshness of symbols as utilized in the tribal air putting in the pigments with his fingers. He introduced the tribal art of Central India into contemporary focal point through Bharat Bhavan. Reminiscent of the Indian miniature is echoed in his use of flat colors and spaces in his early works.

Awards and Accolades

Jagdish Swaminathan was among the first artists who have the honor to have received Nehru Fellowship in 1968–70. He achieved this fellowship through his thesis titled ‘Relevance of the Traditional Neumen to Contemporary Art’. Despite the fact that it is incomplete, it was the commencement of appreciating the tribal psyche. He had a number of solo exhibitions in India and he participated in group exhibitions as well. These group exhibitions include the Tokyo Biennale in1965 and the first International Triennale India in 1968. He also has the credit to be a member of the intercontinental jury at the Sao Paulo Biennale in the year1969.
Jagdish Swaminathan was considered about the tribal traditions. He continued addressing the people in order to make efforts to take the tribal expression to a good position in the international art and cultural fore. He made sincere attempts to guide people who have a taste for culture to value it and also the human endeavor in broader point of view. He breathed his last in 1994 in New Delhi but achievements of Jagdish Swaminathan will always make us feel his presence amongst us.