Rhythms of India: sixty years after India's independence, this exhibition highlights the ideals of the visionaries who succeeded in its achievement.

• Position: The World Yesterday

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BORN IN BIHAR, INDIA, Nandalal Bose (1882-1966) spent most of his life in Bengal as a pan-Asian artist and teacher. At the beginning of his career in 1905, he was one of many artists and visionaries who sought to revive the spirituality and cultural authenticity of Indian art after a half-century of colonial role and the influx of mass production and Westernization. Their work evokes the sublime spirituality of subjects drawn primarily from Indian religious literature.

In 1919, Bose became the first director of the art school at the new university founded by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore in rural Bengal, where British-style education was eschewed in favor of a return to traditional Indian pedagogical methods. For the next three decades, Bose embarked on a period of experimentation with a variety of indigenous Indian, Japanese, and Chinese techniques. His work mostly consisted of scenes of nature and tribal and village life, as well as devotional subjects. He saw the multiplicity of styles and subjects in his art as manifestations of one underlying unity, the life force of nature arisen through God's act of creative play. It was his portrayal of village India without dependence on Westrn materials or styles that captured the attention of Mahatma Gandhi and catapulted Bose to the status of national icon as the only artist Gandhi patronized. Although Bose's art was not inherently political, Gandhi used his images of a more traditional India to represent his nonviolent peace movement.

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