Lunar Landscape
Avinash Chandra (Shimla 1931 - London 1991)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
1961
Materials
Oil on board
Measurements
917 x 1524 mm
Place of origin
London
Order this imageCollection
2 Willow Road, London
NT 112305
Summary
Oil painting on board, Lunar Landscape by Avinash Chandra (Simla 1931 - 1991), 1961. In a slim stained pine frame, unglazed.
Full description
Born in Shimla in northern India in 1931, Avinash Chandra trained at the Delhi Polytechnic (now College of Art) from 1947 to 1951, graduating to considerable acclaim. He became the first painter to sell a work of art to the then newly opened Museum of Modern Art in New Delhi, and the youngest artist to be given a solo show by the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group. Townscapes and landscapes characterised his early output. ‘In those days’, Chandra noted, ‘it was never fashionable to indulge in or appreciate Indian Art and perhaps as a result some Indian painters still bear a grudge because of it.’ (Avinash Chandra, exh.cat., Rose Fried Galleries, New York, October -November 1968, unpaginated). In 1956 Chandra moved to London with his first wife, the artist Prem Lata who had been offered a scholarship to study at the Central School of Art (Khakoo 2023). His first exhibitions in England were held at the Imperial (now Commonwealth) Institute and Gallery One, London (‘Seven Indian Artists in Europe’, 1958). In 1959 he toured a debut solo show to Belfast, Northern Ireland. The late 1950s saw a turning point in Chandra’s artistic style. He broke away from early techniques and subject matter, moving towards looser displays of colour, line and figuration that took the female body as principal subject. His compositions became more energetic and curvilinear: ‘Mine was an upbringing that taught me to think in straight lines but, perversely, I had to think in circles.’ Reflecting further on his artistic development, he said: ‘As I painted, I found shapes thrusting upwards like plants or mushrooms, shapes that virtually exploded into life. This convulsive moment stimulated and excited me, and more drawings and paintings magically materialized. My painting became a discovery of my Indian nature and temperament, and without knowing it I drew more and more on Indian images.’ (ibid). Lunar Landscape was conceived during this period of creative transition and emancipation. It was exhibited at The Arts Council of Great Britain's 1965 exhibition, Indian Painting Now. In his introduction to the catalogue for that exhibition, the British colonial civil servant and art historian W.G. Archer, a supporter of Chandra’s work, wrote: ‘It is the complexity of his meanings, the ambiguity of his forms that is perhaps this painter’s special quality. In some of his pictures, the experience of liberation accounts for strange exploding forms, images of outer space, whirling moons and stars. In others it is as if the whole enigma and wonder of life engross him—the mystery of human relationships, questions of morale, strangeness of physical encounters, the body as full of astonishing mechanisms and surprises, the head as a vast container of thoughts, wishes and reveries. His pictures with their ardent colours, taut rhythms and poetic images are perhaps the strongest proof we have that Indian painting can be vitally modern yet, through these very qualities, remain deeply and traditionally Indian.’ (Archer 1965) The 1960s brought Chandra further critical acclaim. His work was exhibited across Britain, Europe and the United States, and in 1962 the BBC series Monitor produced a television documentary entitled the ‘Art of Avinash Chandra’. He became the first Indian artist to exhibit at both the Documenta art festival in Kassel, Germany (1964), and the Tate, which acquired 'Hills of Gold' for its national collection in 1965 (Tate T00724). Chandra received several prestigious awards, allowing him to live and work in the United States for a time. He returned to London in the early 1970s, married Jamaican actor Valerie Murray, and joined Indian Artists UK (originally the Indian Painters Collective). He went on to hold solo exhibitions at the October Gallery (1981) and Horizon Gallery (1987). In 1989, his work was featured in the landmark exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, curated by Rasheed Araeen at London’s Hayward Gallery – the final exhibition of his lifetime. Avinash Chandra died in London in 1991. Renewed interest in his work from the mid-2000s saw retrospective exhibitions at Osborne Samuel LLP/Berkeley Square Gallery in London in 2006 and at the India- and US-based DAG Modern in 2015-16. Chandra's work was also included in the exhibitions Migrations: Journeys into British Art at Tate Britain in 2012 and Midnight's Family: 70 Years of Indian Artists in Britain presented online by Ben Uri in 2020. Chandra also featured in the BBC documentary Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? in 2018. His work is held in UK public collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, Durham University, Tate, County Hall Leicestershire, Arts Council of Great Britain, and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.
Provenance
Owned by Ernö Goldfinger and Ursula Ruth Blackwell, also known as Mrs Ernö Goldfinger. Purchased by the National Trust in 1994.
Credit line
2 Willow Road, The Ernö Goldfinger Collection (National Trust)
Marks and inscriptions
Bottom left: Avinash 61 Reverse: Exhibition label: The Arts Council of Great Britain / 4 St. James Square, London S.W.1. / Telephone: Whitehall 9737 / Exhibition: B.296 Indian Painting Now / Cat. no. 10 / Artist: Avinash Chandra / Title: Lunar Landscape 1961 / Owner: Mr. & Mrs. Erno Goldfinger
Makers and roles
Avinash Chandra (Shimla 1931 - London 1991), artist
References
Archer 1961: Avinash Chandra: painter from India, The Studio, vol. 161, no. 813, January 1961, pp. 4-7. Archer 1965: W.G. Archer, Introduction to Indian Painting Now (London: Arts Council, exhibition catalogue, 1965), unpaginated Singh 2015: Kishore Singh, Humanscapes, Avinash Chandra: A Retrospective, exh.cat, DAG Modern, New York 2015, Mumbai and New Delhi 2016 The Roots of the Indian Artists’ Collectives, exh.cat., Grosvenor Gallery, London, 2019 Correia 2021: Alice Correia, ‘Absence in Post-War British Painting: South Asian Modernists in Regional Collections’, Midland Art Papers 4 (2021) Khakoo 2023: Alina Khakoo, ‘Who is Prem Chandra?’, Animating Archives, March 2023 Tillotson 2024: Giles Tillotson, ‘“Vitally Indian”: F.N. Souza and Avinash Candra with W.G. Archer in London in the sixties’, in Contours of Identity: F.N. Souza, Avinash Chandra, exh.cat. DAG, Mumbai 2024.