(b Babaria, Madhya Pradesh, 22 Feb 1922). Indian painter, active in France. The son of a forest warden, he was educated at the Government High School in Damoh and in 1939 entered the School of Art in Nagpur, after which he studied at the Sir Jamshetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art, Bombay, receiving a diploma in 1947. While in Bombay his work came to the notice of the critic Rudolf von Leyden, who became his champion. In 1947 he was a founder-member of the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay and in 1948 won the Gold Medal of the Bombay Art Society. In 1950, with a study grant from the French government, he left India for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, where he studied from 1950 to 1953. He travelled widely in Europe at this time and after his studies continued to live in France, where he exhibited his work. From 1955 he had a permanent show at the Galerie Lara Vincy in Paris and in 1956 was the first non-French artist to be awarded the Prix de la Critique. In 1962 he was a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, CA, and had his first solo exhibition in the USA in Palo Alto, CA. He visited India in 1959 and 1968 but otherwise continued to work in France in the milieu of the Ecole de Paris. He held solo exhibitions in India, Europe and the United States and participated in group exhibitions such as those at the Salon de Mai, Paris (1951), Venice Biennale (1956, 1958), Paris Biennale (1957), Bruges Biennale (1958), Sao Paulo Biennale (1959), Rabat Biennale (1963), Menton Biennale (1964, 1966, and 1972 where he received the Prix de la Biennale), the India triennales from 1968, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1982), Royal Academy of Arts, London (1982), and the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris (1985).
See the Abbreviations for further details.
