Dancing Girls
| Support Type: | Paper |
| Paint Type: | Ink |
| Current Location: | National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. |
| Location History: | The history of the modernist painting of Indian descent dates back to the turn of the 20th century. It was in the early 1920s when the work Dancing Girls was first performed on paper with ink and watercolors. The piece was the result of the artist’s visit to Maharashtra in 1918-1920, when he studied the Ajanta cave ruins and traced the ancient frescoes. Since the painting was in private possession for the majority of the last century, its whereabouts are known only from the moment of the first public exhibition. It was in the 1960s that Dey’s three dancing girls became the basis for three limited drypoint editions. One of the prints was presented to the museum in Cincinnati, Ohio, and since 1975, it has been part of the permanent collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum. Another surviving print has returned to the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Delhi after an extended period of conservation. |
Mukul Dey’s classic mixed media painting Dancing Girls (or Dancing Girls of Ajanta, dated back to 1918-1920) is a fine example of early 20th century printmaking’s interaction with the restoration of ancient cave paintings and the Indian tradition of the Bengal school of art. Created with delicate strokes of pen and ink and translucent washes of watercolor on paper, the tripartite image depicts three elegantly draped female forms, whose graceful poses, mudra gestures, and ornate hairdos have been directly taken by the artist from his Ajanta and Bagh cave research. While Dey’s composition simplifies the iconic prototypes of Gupta period, it conveys a similar feeling of gentle flow of movement, enhanced by the soft folds of clothing and the artist’s use of stylized anatomy. Art scholars commonly categorize this piece as one of the first examples of modern Indian printmaking, as Dey later used the same three-part composition for a highly acclaimed limited edition of drypoint engravings on paper. The painting rejects Western academic traditions of naturalistic figure drawing and Indian artistic vocabulary of line weight and warm mineral-based colors in favor of a prototypical expressionistic technique. It was also characteristic of the resurgence of the Swadeshi cultural movement, which insisted on the return to traditional Indian aesthetics. Right now, the painting’s documented provenance and auction history can be found in most online art marketplaces.
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