Chapter 1: Painting in India

Modern and contemporary Indian artists

Indian art from Amrita Sher-Gil and the Progressive Artists' Group of 1947 to today's sculptors and installation artists, with the clues that identify each one and the record prices their work has fetched.

16 min read16 topics3 PYQs See the pictures on the board

In one minute

6 facts to know

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913 to 1941) mixed Paris training with Indian subjects; her calm, heavy-eyed village women in earthy colours are the start of modern Indian painting.
The Progressive Artists' Group was formed in Bombay in 1947 by F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza, M.F. Husain, K.H. Ara, H.A. Gade and S.K. Bakre, to break away from the Bengal School and old academic styles.
Know each artist by one idea: Husain's horses, Raza's bindu (the dot), Souza's distorted heads, Gaitonde's glowing abstract layers, Tyeb Mehta's diagonal and flat colour.
Anjolie Ela Menon paints glowing, large-eyed figures on masonite; UCEED has asked students to pick her paintings out from Sher-Gil's.
Today's names: Subodh Gupta (steel kitchen pots), Bharti Kher (bindis), Jitish Kallat (Public Notice), Anish Kapoor (Cloud Gate in Chicago).
As of October 2026, the auction record for Indian art is Raja Ravi Varma's Yashoda and Krishna, sold for 167.2 crore rupees in April 2026; the modernist record is Husain's Gram Yatra.

Before Independence: Amrita Sher-Gil

Three young Indian women sit close together, two in red and one in a pale green shawl, with downcast eyes and still, serious faces against a plain brown background. — Picture: Amrita Sher-Gil. Public domain.

Amrita Sher-Gil

Where: Born in Budapest; worked in Paris, Shimla and Lahore; most of her paintings are in the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi
When: 1913 to 1941
Who: Hungarian mother and Sikh father
Style: Early Indian modernism
Made with: Oil on canvas
Key works: Group of Three Girls (1935, shown here); the South Indian trilogy of 1937 (Bride's Toilet, Brahmacharis, South Indian Villagers Going to Market); The Story Teller (1937)

Sher-Gil trained in Paris, where her painting Young Girls won her a gold medal in 1933. She came back to India in the mid-1930s and decided her subject would be ordinary Indian people, especially women, painted with quiet sadness. A trip south in 1937 led to her South Indian trilogy, which borrowed from the Ajanta murals. She died in Lahore in 1941, aged only 28, and her works are now protected in India as national art treasures.

Spot it by

Heavy-lidded, downcast eyes, still and silent figures, faces that look a little sad, warm earthy browns, reds and ochres, simple flat backgrounds.

Remember

Sher-Gil's girls never smile.

Don't confuse

Anjolie Ela Menon. Menon's figures have huge dark eyes and a glassy, glowing surface; Sher-Gil's are painted in thicker, matt oil and look downwards.

The Progressive Artists' Group

In 1947, just after Partition, a few young artists in Bombay decided Indian art had to change. They felt the Bengal School looked backwards to old Indian styles, and the art schools still taught British-style realism. They looked instead at modern European art (Expressionism and Cubism) and wanted to paint a new, independent India in their own way.

An old black and white photograph of six young men in white shirts sitting on a ledge in front of three modern paintings. — Picture: Unknown author. Public domain.

The Progressive Artists' Group

Also called PAG, the Bombay Progressives

Where: Bombay (now Mumbai)
When: Formed in December 1947; it faded in the 1950s as members moved abroad
Who: Founders F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza, M.F. Husain, K.H. Ara, H.A. Gade and S.K. Bakre (the only sculptor); later joined by V.S. Gaitonde, Krishen Khanna, Mohan Samant and others
Style: Modernism: bold colour, broken forms, influences from Expressionism and Cubism

The group was the first big push for modern art in independent India. Souza led it in the early years, but he left for London in 1949 and Raza for Paris in 1950. Husain, Ara and Gade carried on in India, and painters such as Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padamsee, Ram Kumar and Krishen Khanna became linked with it. Almost every big name of Indian modern art in the 1950s and 1960s came out of this circle.

Remember

Six founders, 1947, Bombay: "Souza, Raza, Husain, Ara, Gade, Bakre".

Don't confuse

The Bengal School (Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose), which came earlier and revived old Indian styles. The Progressives rejected that revival.

M.F. Husain

Also called Maqbool Fida Husain

Where: Born in Pandharpur, Maharashtra; worked in Bombay; died in London
When: 1915 to 2011
Style: Modernism, with broken, Cubist-style shapes
Key works: His horses; series on the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Mother Teresa and Gandhi; Untitled (Gram Yatra), 1954

Husain started out painting cinema posters in Bombay and became the best-known Indian painter of the 20th century. He painted in bold colours and broken, angular shapes, and returned again and again to galloping horses, epics and village life. Some of his later paintings of Hindu goddesses led to protests and court cases, and he lived outside India from 2006, taking Qatari citizenship in 2010. He received the Padma Vibhushan in 1991.

Spot it by

Muscular horses with twisting necks, thick black outlines, figures without detailed faces, bright reds, yellows and blues.

Remember

Husain's horses gallop through nearly every exam question about him.

S.H. Raza

Also called Sayed Haider Raza

Where: Born in Madhya Pradesh; lived in France from 1950 to 2010; died in Delhi
When: 1922 to 2016
Style: Geometric abstraction
Key works: The Bindu paintings; Saurashtra (1983); La Terre

Raza first painted expressive landscapes, then moved to France in 1950 and stayed for 60 years. From about 1980 his work centred on the bindu, a black dot or circle he saw as the seed of all creation, set among squares, triangles and bands of strong colour. He came back to India in 2010 and received the Padma Vibhushan in 2013. The Raza Foundation in Delhi looks after his legacy.

Spot it by

A black circle at the centre, rings or triangles around it, flat bands of earth red, yellow, blue and black, perfect symmetry.

Remember

Raza is the man of the dot: one bindu, the start of everything.

F.N. Souza

Also called Francis Newton Souza

Where: Born in Goa; worked in Bombay, London and New York
When: 1924 to 2002
Style: Expressionism
Key works: Birth (1955); Houses in Hampstead; Emperor

Souza was the founder and loudest voice of the Progressive Artists' Group. He moved to London in 1949 and later to New York. His paintings are deliberately rough and shocking: heads with eyes in the wrong place, crosses, angry saints and nudes drawn in thick black lines. He also painted dark, crowded city scenes. In September 2025 two of his paintings sold at Sotheby's London for about 7.5 and 6.9 million US dollars.

Spot it by

Faces pulled apart, with eyes and mouths moved out of place, heavy black cross-hatched lines, dark backgrounds, religious themes.

Remember

Souza scowls: angry heads and twisted faces.

Don't confuse

Husain also uses strong outlines, but his figures are smooth and flowing; Souza's faces are broken and fierce.

The modernists after 1950

V.S. Gaitonde

Also called Vasudeo S. Gaitonde

Where: Born in Nagpur to a Goan family; worked in Bombay and Delhi
When: 1924 to 2001
Style: Abstraction (he called it "non-objective" painting)
Made with: Oil on canvas, built up in thin layers with a roller and palette knife

Gaitonde was linked to the Progressive Artists' Group but went his own way into pure abstraction. His canvases are fields of glowing colour, often one main colour, with small shapes floating in them like signs or letters. He was a quiet, private man who painted slowly and showed rarely, and he received the Padma Shri in 1971. In 2014 the Guggenheim Museum in New York held a major show of his work, and in September 2025 one of his untitled paintings sold for 67.08 crore rupees.

Spot it by

One glowing colour across the whole canvas, layered and translucent like old paper, small floating marks like a secret script, no people or objects.

Remember

Gaitonde paints silence: one colour, a few floating signs.

Don't confuse

Ram Kumar is also abstract, but his paintings still hint at a landscape or city; Gaitonde's have no subject at all.

Tyeb Mehta

Where: Born in Kapadvanj, Gujarat; worked in Bombay
When: 1925 to 2009
Style: Modernism with flat colour
Key works: Trussed Bull (1956); the Diagonal series; Kali; Mahishasura (1996); Celebration (1995); Rickshaw Puller (2002)

The violence around Partition stayed with Tyeb Mehta all his life, and his pictures are full of falling figures, bound bulls and struggling bodies. From the late 1960s he split his canvases with a strong diagonal line, and later he painted in large flat areas of colour outlined in black, often showing the goddess Kali or the demon Mahishasura. In 2002 his triptych Celebration sold for about 1.5 crore rupees at Christie's, then a record that started a boom in Indian art prices. He received the Padma Bhushan in 2007.

Spot it by

A diagonal line cutting across the canvas, flat unshaded colour with black outlines, twisted or falling figures, bulls and the buffalo demon.

Remember

Tyeb's diagonal: one line that splits the picture in two.

Akbar Padamsee

Where: Bombay and Paris
When: 1928 to 2020
Style: Modernism, from figures to near-abstract landscapes
Key works: Heads; Metascapes (landscapes of pure colour); Reclining Nude; Greek Landscape

Padamsee worked in Paris in the 1950s alongside Raza and Souza and was close to the Progressive circle. He is known for calm, sculpted heads and nudes painted in greys, and for his Metascapes, landscapes reduced to bands of colour with a sun or moon. He also made films and photographs and ran a workshop in Bombay for young artists. He received the Padma Bhushan in 2010.

Spot it by

Grey, stone-like heads and bodies, or a simple landscape of colour bands with a round sun or moon in it.

Remember

Padamsee's Metascapes: landscapes beyond (meta) the real.

Krishen Khanna, an elderly man with white hair and glasses, wearing a brown jacket. — Picture: Ministry of Culture. GODL-India.

Ram Kumar and Krishen Khanna

Where: Both worked mainly in Delhi
When: Ram Kumar 1924 to 2018; Krishen Khanna born 1925
Style: Ram Kumar: abstract landscapes. Krishen Khanna: figurative painting
Key works: Ram Kumar: his Varanasi (Benares) paintings, The Vagabond. Krishen Khanna: the Bandwallahs and Truckwallahs series

Both were friends of the Progressive Artists' Group. Ram Kumar was one of the first Indian painters to give up figures for abstraction; his canvases suggest the ghats and houses of Varanasi or the hills, broken into blocks of muted colour. He was also a respected Hindi short-story writer. Krishen Khanna (shown here) worked at Grindlays Bank in Bombay before he gave it up for painting in 1961. He paints people of the street, such as wedding-band musicians (Bandwallahs) and truck drivers, and scenes of Partition. He turned 100 in July 2025.

Spot it by

Ram Kumar: grey, blue and ochre blocks that suggest a city by a river. Krishen Khanna: crowds of musicians in red band uniforms, heavy brushwork.

Remember

Ram Kumar paints the city of Benares; Krishen Khanna paints the band that plays at the wedding.

Baroda and the storytellers

K.G. Subramanyan

Also called Kalpathi Ganpathi Subramanyan, "Mani"

Where: Born in Keralam (Kerala until 2026); studied at Santiniketan; taught at Baroda and Santiniketan
When: 1924 to 2016
Style: Modernism rooted in Indian crafts and storytelling
Made with: Painting, terracotta and murals, toys, and reverse painting on acrylic sheets
Key works: Fairytales of Purvapalli (1986, water and oil colours on acrylic sheet, NGMA New Delhi); large terracotta and black-and-white murals

Subramanyan studied at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, under Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij, and then taught for decades at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda. He believed artists should learn from craftspeople, and he worked in clay, wood, toys, textiles and murals as well as paint. In Fairytales of Purvapalli he paints on the back of a clear acrylic sheet, an idea taken from old reverse glass painting, with several stories happening across one picture. He received the Padma Vibhushan in 2012.

Spot it by

Playful figures, animals and fairy-tale characters scattered over the picture, bright flat colour, several small stories at once.

Remember

K.G. Subramanyan, the teacher of Baroda, painted fairy tales backwards on clear sheets.

Bhupen Khakhar

Where: Born in Bombay; lived and worked in Baroda
When: 1934 to 2003
Style: Indian Pop art and narrative painting
Key works: Two Men in Benares (1982, shown here); You Can't Please All (1981)

Khakhar worked as an accountant for years and taught himself to paint. He is often called India's first Pop artist, because he painted ordinary people such as barbers, watch repairers and clerks, in the flat, bright style of calendar art and shop signs. From the 1980s he painted openly about love between men, which was brave in India at the time. Tate Modern in London held a big show of his work in 2016. He received the Padma Shri in 1984.

Spot it by

Everyday people in a small town, flat pastel colours, many little scenes in one picture, a mix of the funny and the tender.

Remember

The accountant who painted the barber.

Women artists after 1960

Arpita Singh, an elderly woman with grey hair and glasses, smiling, wearing a cream and purple sari. — Picture: Ministry of Culture. GODL-India.

Arpita Singh and Nalini Malani

Where: Arpita Singh: born in West Bengal, works in Delhi. Nalini Malani: born in Karachi, works in Mumbai
When: Arpita Singh born 1937; Nalini Malani born 1946
Style: Arpita Singh: figurative painting. Nalini Malani: video, installation and shadow play
Key works: Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood (2012)

Arpita Singh (shown here) paints crowded, dreamlike pictures of women, surrounded by things from daily life and from the news: cars, aeroplanes, guns, flowers, numbers and maps. She borrows from miniature painting and folk art, and received the Padma Bhushan in 2011. Nalini Malani was one of India's first video artists. In In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), painted plastic cylinders turn in front of lights and throw moving shadows on the walls, telling stories of violence since Partition. In 2019 she won the Joan Miró Prize in Barcelona. In the late 1980s the two, with Madhvi Parekh and Nilima Sheikh, took part in a touring show of women artists.

Spot it by

Arpita Singh: small, floating women and objects, words and numbers scattered on a soft pink, blue or green ground. Nalini Malani: a dark room of moving coloured shadows.

Remember

Arpita fills a canvas with a woman's world; Malani makes shadows tell history.

Anjolie Ela Menon

Where: Born in Burnpur, West Bengal; lives and works in New Delhi
When: Born 1940
Style: Figurative painting
Made with: Oil on masonite (a hard board), in thin see-through layers; also murals and Murano glass

Menon is one of India's best-known living painters. She builds her pictures from thin, glowing glazes of oil, so the surface looks old and polished, almost like a church icon. Her figures, often women, mothers and children, or young men, have large dark eyes and are framed by windows, doors or crows. She received the Padma Shri in 2000. UCEED 2015 asked students to tell her paintings apart from Sher-Gil's.

Spot it by

Large almond-shaped dark eyes, a smooth glowing surface, figures in windows or niches, deep blues, greens and reds, a still, dreamy mood.

Remember

Menon's eyes are big and her surface shines.

Don't confuse

Amrita Sher-Gil. Sher-Gil's women look down and are painted in thicker, matt, earthy colour; Menon's look out with big eyes from a glowing surface.

Contemporary artists

A large outdoor sculpture on grass beside a road, made of blue motorway signs curled into loops, with place names and distances such as Warsaw and Mumbai. — Picture: C.Stadler/Bwag. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Atul Dodiya and Jitish Kallat

Where: Both are from Mumbai
When: Atul Dodiya born 1959; Jitish Kallat born 1974
Style: Contemporary painting and installation
Key works: Atul Dodiya: paintings on shop shutters, works on Gandhi. Jitish Kallat: the Public Notice series; Here After Here After Here (2012 to 2015, Stockerau, Austria, shown here)

Atul Dodiya is a Mumbai painter who borrows from photographs, films, comics and art history. He is famous for paintings on metal roller shutters, where one picture is painted on the shutter and another is revealed behind it when it rolls up, and for works on Mahatma Gandhi. Jitish Kallat works with history and the city. His Public Notice works turn famous speeches into art, such as Swami Vivekananda's 1893 Chicago speech. His sculpture of curled-up road signs in Austria, unveiled in 2015, is a permanent public artwork. He was artistic director of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014.

Spot it by

Dodiya: shop shutters, Gandhi, borrowed images. Kallat: big words and old speeches, road signs, crowds of Mumbai life.

Remember

Dodiya rolls up the shutter; Kallat posts the public notice.

A life-size grey elephant lying down with its head on the floor, covered all over in small bindis, displayed in a hotel lobby. — Picture: Wpcpey. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher

Where: Both live and work in Delhi; they are married
When: Subodh Gupta born 1964
Style: Contemporary sculpture and installation
Key works: Subodh Gupta: Very Hungry God (2006), Line of Control (2008). Bharti Kher: The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own (2006, shown here)

Subodh Gupta, who grew up in Bihar, makes huge sculptures out of shiny steel kitchen pots, plates, tiffin boxes and buckets, the things every Indian home uses. Very Hungry God is a giant skull made of cooking pots, and Line of Control is a mushroom cloud built from them. Bharti Kher uses the bindi as her material, covering paintings and sculptures with thousands of them. Her most famous work is a life-size fibreglass elephant, lying down as if dying, covered in bindis.

Spot it by

Gupta: gleaming steel utensils piled into a giant shape. Kher: surfaces covered in hundreds of small dots, which turn out to be bindis.

Remember

He cooks with steel, she dresses up in bindis.

The ArcelorMittal Orbit in London, a tall red steel tower made of looping, twisting tubes with a round viewing deck near the top. — Picture: Cmglee. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Anish Kapoor

Where: Born in Mumbai; lives and works in London
When: Born 1954
Style: Sculpture and installation
Key works: Cloud Gate, nicknamed "The Bean" (Chicago, 2006); ArcelorMittal Orbit (London, 2012, shown here); Sky Mirror

Kapoor went to school in India and then moved to Britain to study art, and he is now a British Indian sculptor. He won the Turner Prize, Britain's best-known art prize, in 1991 and was knighted in 2013. His best-known work is Cloud Gate in Chicago's Millennium Park, a huge bean-shaped mirror of polished stainless steel that reflects the city and the sky. The ArcelorMittal Orbit is a red steel tower he designed for the 2012 London Olympic Park.

Spot it by

Mirror-polished steel curves that reflect and bend the world, deep red pigment, simple giant shapes, holes and voids that seem to have no bottom.

Remember

Kapoor's Bean is a mirror for a whole city.

Spot the artist

Artist	Look for
Amrita Sher-Gil	Quiet village women with downcast eyes, earthy browns and reds
M.F. Husain	Galloping horses, thick outlines, bright angular shapes
S.H. Raza	A black dot (bindu) inside circles, triangles and colour bands
F.N. Souza	Faces with eyes and mouths out of place, black cross-hatching
V.S. Gaitonde	One glowing colour with tiny floating signs, no subject
Tyeb Mehta	A diagonal split, flat colour, bulls, Kali, falling figures
Bhupen Khakhar	Ordinary small-town people in flat pastel colour
Anjolie Ela Menon	Huge dark eyes, glowing glazed surface, figures in windows
Subodh Gupta	Steel kitchen pots and pans piled into big shapes
Bharti Kher	Bindis covering a painting or sculpture
Anish Kapoor	Mirror-polished steel or deep red, as in Cloud Gate

Record prices at auction

These are the highest prices paid for Indian paintings at auction, as of October 2026. Prices include the buyer's fees. Records change often, so check the date.

Artist	Work	Price	Sale
Raja Ravi Varma	Yashoda and Krishna (1890s)	167.2 crore rupees (about 17.9 million US dollars)	Saffronart, Mumbai, April 2026
M.F. Husain	Untitled (Gram Yatra), 1954	About 118 crore rupees (13.8 million US dollars)	Christie's, New York, March 2025
Tyeb Mehta	Rickshaw Puller, 2002	69.1 crore rupees	Volte Una (a new single-lot auction), October 2026
F.N. Souza	Houses in Hampstead	About 7.5 million US dollars	Sotheby's, London, September 2025
V.S. Gaitonde	Untitled, 1970	67.08 crore rupees	Saffronart, New Delhi, September 2025
M.F. Husain	The Red Girl, 1952	65 crore rupees	Pundole's, Mumbai, 2026
Amrita Sher-Gil	The Story Teller, 1937	61.8 crore rupees	Saffronart, New Delhi, September 2023

Ravi Varma died in 1906, so he belongs to the age before modern Indian art. The record for a modern Indian painting is still Husain's Gram Yatra.

1913
Amrita Sher-Gil is born in Budapest
1937
Sher-Gil paints her South Indian trilogy
1941
Sher-Gil dies in Lahore, aged 28
1947
The Progressive Artists' Group is formed in Bombay
1950
S.H. Raza moves to France
1991
Anish Kapoor wins the Turner Prize
2002
Tyeb Mehta's Celebration sells for about 1.5 crore rupees, starting a boom in Indian art prices
2006
Cloud Gate is completed in Chicago
2025
Husain's Gram Yatra sets the record for a modern Indian painting
2026
Ravi Varma's Yashoda and Krishna sets the record for any Indian painting

Test yourself

Question 1 of 8

Who painted this picture of three young women?

Question 2 of 8

Which of these works is by Anish Kapoor?

Question 3 of 8

The elephant in this sculpture by Bharti Kher is covered in what?

Question 4 of 8

The painter in this photo is sitting in front of a painting with a dark circle at its centre. What did he call this central dot, the idea his later work is built on?

Question 5 of 8

Flat colour, black outlines, a buffalo demon and a strong diagonal: who painted this?

Question 6 of 8

Which of these artists was NOT a founder of the Progressive Artists' Group of 1947?

Question 7 of 8

This painting shows ordinary people and several small scenes spread across one canvas. Who painted it?

Question 8 of 8

Which artist taught at Baroda and painted Fairytales of Purvapalli on the back of a clear acrylic sheet?

From past papers

Real exam questions on this topic, each with a full solution.

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