Jagdish Swaminathan

Jagdish Swaminathan (June 21, 1928 - 1994) was an Indian artist and writer. He was a member of the Communist Party of India.

He wrote that: "cultural experiences and activity in India is a multi-level phenomenon – and these levels are often mutually independent and non-interacting – it is the urban and the so-called modern sense of contemporarity that appears to dominate the scene and thus to distort the real perspective".

Likewise, Swaminathan pondered over the tribal culture and throughout his life he kept on addressing the people and tried to give the tribal expression a proper place in the global art and cultural fora. As an artist and a man of institutions he kept on guiding people from all walks of life who value culture and human endeavour in wider perspective.

External links

* [http://www.ignca.gov.in/nl_00304.htm Life and Times of J. Swaminathan]
* [http://virtual-museum-india.blogspot.com/ India Virtual Museum]

Jagdish Swaminathan made his presence felt in the Capital's art world in the'50s and'60s mainly as an art critic and theoretician of art. Born in Simla on June 21st 1928, Swaminathan joined the Congress Socialist Party in 1943 in the last phase of the freedom movement and five years later shifted to the Communist Party of India. After being a party whole timer till 1958, he worked as a journalist and art critic for Left magazines for about a decade till the mid '60s. He had brief spells of art education at the Delhi Polytechnic and in Warsaw, Poland. In August 1962, Swaminathan and some other artist founded the Group 1890, the mystifying number being the house number of Jayant and Jyoti Pandya at Bhavnagar. The manifesto of the Group 1890, written by Swaminathan, was an attack on 'vulgar naturalism, 'pastoral idealism of the Bengal School, and against the imposition of 'hybrid mannerism' of European modernism. The manifesto urged the creative artists to see phenomena in their virginal state'. The Group had its first and last show in 1963 which was inaugurated by Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru and for which the Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote the catalogue. Later, the perception of this "virginal state" found form in his paintings, creating an alternative pictorial space in dividing purely conceptual landscapes in bright colour fields on which appeared mountains, stretches of water trees, diagonally levitating stones with an archetypal bird form painted with captivating simplicity. In his paintings of the '90's, Swaminathan broke away from his earlier well ordered colour-geometry and brush paintings, going back to retrieve the pristine freshness of symbols as used in the tribal art applying the pigments with his fingers.

In 1966, he published the monthly magazine, Contra in collaboration with the famous Mexican poet and ambassador m India Octavio Paz challenging the prevailing views of modernity through polemical articles on art and aesthetics. In 1968 he was awarded the Nehru Fellowship to work on a project titled The Significance of the Traditional Numen in Contemporary Art. He was a member of the International Jury of the Sao Paolo Biennale and served on the board of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. He was also a trustee of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, and in 198 1, the Government of Madhya Pradesh invited him to set up the art museum Roopanker at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal. As the Director of Roopankar, Swaminathan served till 1990. He held about thirty one- man shows and participated in many national and international exhibitions.

Swaminathan died in 1994.