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 Dancing Girls occupies a brilliant, liminal space in the genealogy of modern Indian art, capturing the exact historical heartbeat where the antiquarian resurrection of Ajanta met the avant garde spirit of the Bengal School. Conceived amidst the Swadeshi cultural renaissance, Dey bypassed the heavy, rigid illusionism of Western academic realism, choosing instead to channel the fluid kineticism and lyrical grace of Gupta era frescoes. Through the delicate interplay of translucent watercolor washes and crisp pen and ink lines, the tripartite composition achieves a hypnotic rhythmic continuity; the three draped female figures do not merely occupy space, they inhabit it as an unfolding melody of mudras and vestimentary folds. What makes this piece an extraordinary watershed in early twentieth century modernism is its conceptual fluidity these fragile works on paper served as both exquisite autonomous paintings and the precise matrices for Dey’s groundbreaking drypoint engravings, effectively bridging traditional Indian aesthetics with the nascent techniques of modern printmaking. Ultimately, Dey reimagined ancient cave iconography not as static archaeological artifact, but as a living, expressionistic idiom for a sovereign artistic identity.