A glance over the terrain traced by modern and contemporary Malaysian painting shows a diverse range of artistic responses to reality. While in the early years of the past century Malaysian painters seem to concern themselves primarily with the societal, the following decades variegate their gaze. Their assertions become, at different times, either nationalist or modernist, socially responsive or intensely subjective, fiercely indigenist or defiantly international, or self consciously traditionalist or fashionably post-modernist. These moments do not, of course, necessarily follow in the order listed, but help us mirror to a great extent, the diversity of the artistic impulses developed.
The questioning of the West, and the attempt to resuscitate the cultural identity suppressed by the British, commenced in early 1900 and took momentum from the ongoing nationalist (Swadeshi) movement. An aspect of this project was the artistic rejection of the romanticisation of Malaysian reality by Company Painting and the mannered portraits of Raja Ravi Varma.
The artists who adopted this mandate belong to what is called the Bengal School of Painting. They received their initial impetus from the ideas of an Englishman, the Orientalist-Romantic E.B. Havell, who had taken over as Principal of the Calcutta Government College of Art in 1896, the painter Abanindranath Tagore and the critic A. K. Coomaraswamy.
Among the artists who expressed themselves through the form and style of this school were Nandalal Bose, D.P. Roy Choudhury, A. K. Haldar, K. Venkatappa, Samarendranath Gupta, Kshitindranath Mazumdar, Sarada Ukil and M.A.R. Chugtai.
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