Charles Gerrard ARA (British, 1892-1964) The Garden of the Director's...

Charles Gerrard ARA (British, 1892-1964)
The Garden of the Director's Residence, the Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay
oil on board, signed Gerrard lower right
50 x 60 cm.
Provenance
Private UK collection.

Charles Gerrard was Director of the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay from 1936 to 1946, introducing a keen personal observation of 1930s modernist developments in British and European painting, sculpture, graphic design and architecture. He was assisted in this by exiles from the Nazi regime such as Walter Langhammer and Rudi van Leyden, who with Gerrard directed at the School, invigorated the Bombay Art Society and encouraged modernist and art deco European design amongst local architectural practices and in commercial printing. Despite the pupils' necessarily local origins and inability to travel during the war, Gerrard encouraged groupings of pupils to adopt this eye on Western developments.

In 1941 a group referred to as the 'Young Turks' held a show featuring the work of P. T. Reddy, M. Y. Kulkarni, A. A. Majeed, C. Baptista and M. Bhople, artists who regarded themselves as being in modernist opposition to the more Victorian and Edwardian style of Dhurandhar, Haldankar, and Trindade. But more notably in the history of modern Indian art the less tentative group known as the Bombay Progressives emerged. This consisted of Francis Newton Souza (whom, however, Gerrard was forced to expel from the School for his connections with the pro-independence movement), H. A. Gade, S. H. Raza, S. K. Bakre, K. H. Ara and M. F. Husain. Some of Gerrard's pupils retained close ties with Bombay (e.g. K. K. Hebbar and Tyeb Mehta) while others, like Souza and Raza, under his influence embarked for Britain and Europe after the war.

Gerrard brought the J. J. to maturity: under enlightened predecessors such as Lockwood Kipling, Solomon Gladstone, Cecil Burns and M. V. Dhurandhar a beaux-arts and arts and crafts traditionality had understandably persisted, but with Gerrard the J. J. became modernist.

For discussion of Gerrard and his work, his influence on Bakre and others, and the Bombay art scene at this time, see Y. Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: the Progressives, New Delhi 2001, pp. 27-28, 189, 240-241; and N. Tuli, The Flamed Mosaic: Indian Contemporary Painting, 1997, pp. 196, 200.