Narayan Shridhar Bendre was born in 1910 in Indore, where he received his diploma in painting from the State Art School in 1929. He then received a Government Diploma in Art from Mumbai in 1933 and studied print making in New York from 1947 to 1950, under the sponsorship of The Federation of American Artists. On his return he also worked at Santiniketan and then later joined as Head of Department of Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the M S University, Baroda. It was here that he embarked upon the most important phase in his career, which involved experiments with cubist, expressionist and abstract tendencies.

He is known for his influential role in the formation of the Baroda Group of Artists in 1956 and the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi. He was elected to chair the International Jury at the Second Triennale in New Delhi in 1971 and as a fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1974. He was the member of the Government of India’s first cultural delegation to China and to Japan. He was awarded Padma Shri in 1969 and the Padma Bhushan in 1992. He continued to paint till he passed away in Mumbai in 1992.

Jagan Mehta (1909-2003)
Mehta residence, Ahmedabad, 1990

Jagan Mehta was born in 1909 into a family of Ayurveda physicians, in Sanand – Ahmedabad. However he was interested in painting from his school days, doing art work in both pencil and colour. Post failing his matriculation examination in 1929, he expressed his desire to his father to pursue art and go to the J. J. School of Art, Mumbai. Ravishankar Raval, hailed as Gujarat’s kala guru, happened to be a close friend of Mehta’s father. Thus, he went to apprentice with Raval for his magazine Kumar and started learning the ropes about painting and photography. Soon, photography became a passion and in 1933 he took his first photograph of Gandhi, which also set him on path of documenting life for posterity through the means of photography. He went on a scholarship to Vienna, Austria to study at the Institute of Graphic Arts. However, he became sick there and had to come back to India and post recovery went around pursuing photography as a profession. He joined the independence movement around 1942 and was able to capture Gandhi’s inner turmoil’s, which made him famous as well.

Post-independence, he opened his own studio in Ahmedabad but had to close down after 6 years and joined as an official photographer at the Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai for ten years. On returning home he worked for a year at the National Institute of Design for the Nehru exhibition project and in 1968, he joined the C N Fine Arts College to teach photography. He was also a founder member of Niharika, the club of Gujarati pictorialists. He died in 2003 at the age of 95 and is survived by two sons.

Ramkinkar Baij (1906-1980)
Baij residence, Santiniketan, 1978

Ramkinkar Baij, was born in 1906 in Bankura, West Bengal in a humble family. He was spotted by the journalist Ramananda Chatterjee who inducted him to Kala Bhavana. Baij soon mastered every medium – Sculptures, Oil paintings, Portraits & Miniatures. He worked under Nandalal Bose and Rabindranath Tagore and later became the Head of the Sculpture Department there.

The working style of Baij is reflective of his individual perspectives and traditions, which result in new challenges to the modern Indian art. He was known as a non- conformist who brought relevance and vision to his content and forms. His spirit and courage of experimentation and his motivation were to go against the accepted practices in modernity, making his art into a kind of material and intellectual engagement, fine-tuned to certain social and political ideas that emerged during his time.

Known for his expressionistic sculpture, he was also a talented painter whose paintings have not been recognized. His works have been included in several exhibitions such as the Asian Art Exhibition, Tokyo, Man and Nature: Reflections of Six Artists, Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage and National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

Baij was a bachelor and lived with Radharani Dashi for which he was criticized. He made Radharani and his nephew Dibakar Baij as his legal heirs. He passed away in 1980 in Kolkatta, making his last sculpture Durgamurti in the hospital.