M23 Group 1890

Group 1890 Manifesto (1963)

‘Something precious is being born with these artists,’ wrote the Mexican poet Octavio Paz in 1963. He was referring to the fledgling Indian art collective Group 1890, which had been founded a year earlier in Bhavnagar (in Gujarat). The twelve artists, led by the charismatic journalist, artist and communist sympathizer Jagdish Swaminathan (1928–94), had met in order to discuss the state of art in India, and the result was the formation of a group with a fervent desire to create an authentic modern Indian aesthetic independent of Western influences. Their name meant very little – 1890 was the number of the house where they met – yet for Paz the choice was significant. This was a movement affirming change, but at the same time refusing to be dogmatic about the direction of that change.

Group 1890’s manifesto was written in English by Swaminathan and printed together with Paz’s introduction in the catalogue for their inaugural exhibition in July 1963 at the prestigious Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi. It attacked ‘the vulgar naturalism’ of the celebrated nineteenth-century artist Raja Ravi Varma, who painted Indian subject matter in a classical European style, and ‘the pastoral idealism’ of the Bengal School, which had supported the Swadeshi movement in the early twentieth century (M1). Art, Swaminathan argued, was a state of freedom and should not prescribe any specific mode or manner. In this respect the manifesto reflected the spirit of independence that still enthused the nation a decade and a half after the end of its colonial era.

Sadly, despite Paz’s optimism, the group was short-lived. Although there were plans for further exhibitions, none of them ever came to fruition. Perhaps the lack of a distinctive unifying style in their work meant that their individual careers took precedence over the collective one.

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from its early beginnings in the vulgar naturalism of raja ravi varma and the pastoral idealism of the bengal school, down through the hybrid mannerisms resulting from the imposition of concepts evolved by successive movements in modern european art on classical, miniature and folk styles to the flight into ‘abstraction’ in the name of cosmopolitanism, tortured alternately by memories of a glorious past born out of a sense of futility in the face of a dynamic present and the urge to catch up with the times so as to merit recognition, modern Indian art by and large has been inhibited by the self-defeating purposiveness of its attempts at establishing an identity.

the self-conscious search for significance between tradition and contemporaneity, between representation and abstraction, between communication and expression lies at the root of all eclecticism in art. to us creative expression is not the search for, but the unfolding of personality.

a work of art is neither representational nor abstract, figurative or non-figurative. it is unique and sufficient unto itself, palpable in its reality and generating its own life.

the image proper in art describes itself inevitably through the creative act. it is neither the translation of an experience, feeling, idea or act nor the objective organisation of form in space.

the image proper defines its own space, delineation, colour and composition. any objective criterion of perspective, of harmony and dimension is unreal to it.

to us, the creative act is an experience in itself, appropriated by us and therefore bearing no relation to the work of art, which creates its own field of experience – as the experience of copulation is not the same as that of the offspring. a work of art has to be experienced, the experience not being subject to judgment or assessment.

the incapacity to see phenomena in their virginal state resulting from the conditioning of history creates the illusion that life can be ordained and made to flow from the image of one’s own ego, whereas the creative process has its own volition and genesis, which does not conform to anticipation by man.

the genesis of the form proper is genetically anticipated and not conceptually determined. its significance therefore lies neither in its capacity to evoke memory responses nor its relevance to any objective criterion of perspective, of harmony. whatever be the history of its becoming, its being emanates its own connotation. the form proper is the free form; its freedom is neither the denial of its history nor its recapitulation.

for us, there is no anticipation of the creative act. it is an act through which the personality of the artist evolves itself in its incessant becoming, moving towards its own arrival.

art for us is not born out of a preoccupation with the human condition. we do not sing of man, nor are we his messiahs. the function of art is not to interpret and annotate, comprehend and guide. such attitudinising may seem heroic in an age where man, caught up in the mesh of his own civilisation, hungers for vindication. essentially, this self-glorification to us is but the perpetuation of the death wish, of the state of unfreedom of man.

art is neither conformity to reality nor a flight from it. it is reality itself, a whole new world of experience, the threshold for the passage into the state of freedom.