New Popular Indian Art


 
 
Concept Explanation
 

New Popular Indian Art

The New Popular Indian Art: There are some reason why scroll painters and potters come to Kalighat they begin to paint new themes. In the nineteenth century a new world of popular art developed in many of the cities of India.In Bengal, around the pilgrimage centre of the temple of Kaighat, local village scroll painters (called patuas) and potters (called Kumors in eastern India and Kumhars in North India) began developing villages into Calcutta in the early nineteenth century.

This was a time when the city was expanding as a commercial and administrative centre. Colonial offices were coming up, new buildings and roads were being built, markets were being established. The city appeared as a place of opportunity where people could come to make a new living. Village artists too came and settled in the city in the hope of new patrons and new buyers of their art.

Mythological themes were the main art forms of the scroll painters producing images of gods and goddesses. Kalighat painters began to use shading to give them a rounded form,to make images look three dimensional but were not realistic and lifelike.Early kalighat paintings use a bold deliberately non-realistic style depicting large and powerful figures with a minimum of lines, detail and colours.

Many of these kalighat pictures were printed in large numbers and sold in the market. Initially, the images were engraved in wooden blocks. The carved block was inked, pressed against paper, and then the woodcut prints that were produced were coloured by hand. By the late- nineteenth century, mechanical printing presses were set up in different parts of India, which allowed prints to be produced in even larger numbers. These prints could therefore be sold cheap in the market. Even the poor could buy them.

 
 


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