India is a magical place and a center of influence in Asia, whether for demographical, natural, or human riches they presented to the world. People tend to overlook the great minds of India and opt to associate it with only vast natural treasures.
We have dedicated this article to the five most famous painters in India because they surely deserve recognition in such a manner.
Table of Contents
1. Rabindranath Tagore (1861- 1941)
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Rabindranath Tagore is a famous Indian artist, painter, and poet. Such a fascinating life path has led him to the Nobel Prize for Literature considering his writing at the time that was no surprise.
Tagore started to indulge in his paintings – appetites when he was sixty years old, giving his legacy another dimension. Famous for his mysterious human faces, flowers, bizarre beasts, and masks, paintings show the fantasizing side of him.
People don’t know that his strange color schemes combined with unusual at the time aesthetics were the result of his red-green color blindness. Bold forms with a distinctive sense of fantasy allowed him to be the first Indian painter to exhibit his works in the United States and Europa.
His works like Head Study, Dancing Woman, Self Portrait, and over a hundred more that he produced will live to speak his story once more.
2. S.H. Raza (1922 – 2016)
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Sayed Haider Raza started learning the basics of painting in his childhood, recognizing his early stages mostly on the expressionistic landscapes.
As the perfect place to professionally grow as a painter, he moved to France in 1950, where the influences of Western Art started forming a popular style of painting tody as Raza’s style. Colorful, bright, and geometric, Raza successfully combined Hindu themes after spending more time studying the Indian culture carefully.
His works like Saurashtra, Composition Geometrique and Ankuran are irreplaceable to the Indian painting history and the worlds also. The first mentioned was sold for $3,48 million on Christie’s auction in 2010, making it one of the most expensive Indian paintings of all time.
He was awarded the Legion of Honor in France 2015, and Padma Vibhushan in India 2013, the highest acknowledgments a painter can receive according to the experts from meisterdrucke.in.
3. M.F. Husain (1915 – 2011)
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Probably the world’s best-known painter from India Maqbool Fida Hussain or the “Picasso of India” is next on our list. M.F. Husain is the founding member of the Progressive Artist’s Group in Bombay, from which we have four out of five most famous painters from India.
A self-taught painter who painted billboards at the start of his journey for a living is the most internationally recognized Indian painter of the 20th century. Vibrantly colored and bold paintings are the trade-mark of his cubist style, and the capture of the spirit of horses in his artworks remains a symbol of his accomplishments.
Works like Horses, Mother Teresa, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and others recommended him for the1991 Padma Vibhushan award. Controversial for his late works that shown nude portrayals of Indian Goddesses influenced his decision to spend the last years of his life (2006-2011) out of India and in the countries that allowed him to express his motives in creativity freely.
4. F.N. Souza (1924-2002)
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Francis Newton Souza is another member of the Progressive Artist’s Group in Bombay. Inflating the transformation of the Indian art of landscapes, he earned his first recognitions in India and globally also.
Souza will surely be remembered for a dark view of society in his paintings, which are full of focusing on the depression side of life at the time. He explained his expressions in his works with his upbringing and the contrast between the strict Roman Catholic family he grows up with and repressive teachings of the Catholic Church, and the erotic Indian art surrounding him.
5. Tyeb Mehta (1925-2009)
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Tyeb Mehta is one of the most influential Indian artists globally. The fact that he opted to change professions from a film editor to pursuing a career in paintings. His works Celebration, A Figure on a Rickshaw, Kali, Untitled, Mahishasura, are just the ones that are still the topic of admiration and debate of motives.