Ramkinkar Baij

IN NEWS:

• The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) organized a virtual tour on the life and work of Ramkinkar Baij on his 115^th birth anniversary on May 26.

RAMKINKAR BAIJ:

• Ramkinkar Baij (1906-1980) was a pioneer modern sculptor and painter.
• He was born in modest family in Bankura in West Bengal.
• He studied at the Kala Bhavan, the art school at Santiniketan in 1925 and was under the guidance of Nandalal Bose.
• One of the earliest modernists in Indian art, he assimilated the idioms of the European modern visual language and yet was rooted in his own Indian ethos.
• He was among the first Indian sculptors to use cement, laterite and mortar to model the figures.
• In 1970, the Government honoured him with the Padma Bhushan for his irrefutable contribution to Indian art.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART (NGMA):

• The NGMA is the premier art gallery under Ministry of Culture.
• Its collection of more than 1700 works by 2000+ artists includes artists such as Raja Ravi Verma, Abanindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy, Amrita Sher-Gil as well as foreign artists.
• The main museum at Jaipur House in New Delhi was established in 1954, with subsequent branches at Mumbai and Bangalore.
• The gallery is a repository of the cultural ethos of the country and showcases the changing art forms starting from about 1857 in the field of visual and plastic arts.

PRELIMS QUESTION:

Q. “He was one of the pioneers of modern Indian sculpture. Born in 1906 in West Bengal, he studies at Kala Bhavan under the guidance of Nandalal Bose. he assimilated the idioms of the European modern visual language and yet was rooted in his own Indian ethos”. Identify this person:

1. Jamini Roy
2. Adi Davierwala
3. Ramkinkar Baij
4. Piloo Pochkhanwala

Answer to Prelims question

Source: Times of India