From 31 January to 31 Could 2026, the Museum of High quality Arts, Boston, presents the exhibition “Divine Colour: Hindu Prints from Fashionable Bengal”
Supply: Museum of High quality Arts, Boston. Picture: Madana-Bhasma, printed by Calcutta Artwork Studio, about 1885-95
Vivid prints of divinities are a part of day by day life for Hindus in India and world wide, used for worship in properties, factories, and workplaces, in addition to for adornment on automobiles, calendars, computer systems, and store counters. The artwork world has traditionally missed these pictures, usually known as “calendar artwork,” as a result of they’re cheap and mass produced. However they’ve a wealthy and interesting historical past in and affect on Indian artwork, faith, and society.
Divine Colour: Hindu Prints from Fashionable Bengal explores these in style prints’ origins and highly effective impacts. When Indian artists encountered the brand new printmaking know-how of lithography in Nineteenth-century Calcutta (at the moment Kolkata), then the capital of British India, they used it to reinvent devotional artwork. Depictions of Hindu gods grew to become extra lifelike, colourful, and accessible than ever earlier than. Shrines in properties throughout the financial spectrum got here to host these pictures, combined and matched in accordance with a household’s style. Although the lithographs of Hindu gods created by Bengali artists weren’t costly, they had been beneficial in different senses. Bought within the bustling bazaars of Calcutta the place presses competed to draw clients, the prints served an necessary position in house worship, glad the inventive sensibilities of a Bengali society that had absorbed European tremendous artwork values, and helped to unfold new political concepts. The exhibition considers how lithography gave these artists—who produced 1000’s of prints that traveled rapidly throughout the nation—a method to vary not simply devotional but in addition inventive, political, and social life.
A spotlight of the exhibition is the MFA’s assortment of 38 vibrant lithographs from Nineteenth-century Calcutta. The MFA is one among solely two American museums that collects this materials. This exhibition, the primary of its sort in america, options greater than 100 objects, together with different prints, work, sculpture, and textiles from the Museum’s South Asian assortment and choose loans.
