Mumbai – Nexus of the Gods

The early 1900’s in Mumbai saw the convergence of several technologies for visual communication - the film industry, the printing press, the photo studio, the early advertising industry – together with an emerging cadre of trained ‘commercial’ artists. M. V. Dhurandhar, S. M. Pandit, and R. Mulgaonkar are recognized as successors of Raja Ravi Varma's realist style. They captured the glamour of early Bollywood and the allure of new consumer products in advertisements and calendar art, defining a contemporary popular 'kitsch' culture “ensuring the survival of the sacred in the space of the modern.” From Aug 26 to 31, artisans’ would bring for the first time to Mumbai, Pandit and his genre, which succeeded in humanizing gods and goddesses making them as real as men and women. At once glamorous in appeal, melodramatic in narrative, seductive in allure, these powerful offset-printed polychromes portray a bold vibrant visual presence of Bollywood’s Mumbai to this day. Mahadev Vishwanath Dhurandhar (1867 – 1944), born in Kolhapur, the first Indian headmaster of J. J School of Art produced over 50,000 paintings in his lifetime. Like Varma, M. V. Dhurandhar, used the illusionist techniques of watercolors and oil to depict literary, mythological and historical characters. S. M. Pandit (1919-1991), the most celebrated of all these artists was born in Gulbarga, Maharashtra, into an artisan family. He went through no less than three art schools (the Madras School of Art, the J.J. - where he was a student of M.V. Dhurandhar, and G.S. Dandavatimath's Nutan Kala Mandir in Bombay) before starting his commercial career in 1938. He became the first Indian to design MGM showcards for stars such as Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer and also designed covers for Filmindia magazine. Usually done in oil on cloth, Pandit’s film posters used the quick-dry goauche technique that innovatively retained the effect of oil making this his trademark.