Echoes of a Master: As Krishen Khanna turns 100, artists describe his impact, legacy
Signs of his work, mentorship and influence are visible across the canvases of generations of Indian artists. Shaleen Wadhwana traces the ripple effect.
In 2019, while taking a group of Delhi University students around the National Gallery of Modern Art in that city, I stopped in front of The Black Truck. This 1974 oil-on-canvas by Krishen Khanna depicts two shrouded figures sitting in the back of a truck hurtling into the night, swallowed up by black, white and grey strokes.
“How does this painting make you feel?” I asked the 20-something-year-olds. “Sad.” “Empty.” “Morose.” “Emotionally dark,” they replied.
The figures on this truck are witnesses to the times; they are the most invisibilised, the migrants who helped build India after Partition, but never benefitted from its progress. Khanna, a member of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, consistently documented the overlooked, using scenes both mundane and mythical, I explained.
Last week, Khanna turned 100, and I want to pose another question: What does it mean for him to be the last living Modernist of our times?
In his over-80-year practice, Khanna has played many roles: artist, curator, writer, public arts administrator, photographer, documentarian, poet, collector.
I spoke with over 75 artists, curators, gallerists, collectors and auctioneers across India to understand his impact and influence on them. Each of them had connected with the arts polymath in unique ways.
Among the contemporary artists I spoke to (at least 60 to 80 years his junior), most connected with the riot of colour on his canvases, recurrent motifs such as that of the bandwallas, and his style which was largely figurative but tinged with abstraction.
For some, Khanna’s lived experience of Partition, his compositional framing, treatment of colour, and his inner calling as an artist found their way into their practices.
Riya Chandwani, 29, said she felt “ek sannata aur bhaari cheekh (an eerie silence and a loud scream)” when she viewed Partition-era artworks such as News of Gandhiji’s Death (1948). Like Khanna, who fled with his family from Lahore to Shimla a few days before August 15, 1947, her grandparents fled Sindh overnight. They were among millions in India and Pakistan who crossed borders and witnessed communal violence, loss and death.
Chandwani’s painting, Carrying Across–2 (2022) centres the radio, bringing life-altering news of Partition, just as the newspaper does in Khanna’s canvas, announcing the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi shortly after Partition.
Sameer Kulavoor, 41, remembers being struck by the multiple vantage points of the anxious-shocked readers of newspapers in Khanna’s work. Inspired by it, he painted Morning News (2018), which depicts our modern-day addictive need to “reach out to our devices first thing in the morning, for news”.
Khanna’s shift towards terracotta hues and warm earthen tones, specifically in Dead and Dying (1971) and Untitled (1963), influenced 28-year-old Anoushka Bhalla’s depictions of grief and pathos. Referring to Khanna as the “historical ancestor” to her practice, she offers the example of her 2023 work, Foreteller, that follows a similar colour tone and emotional register.
The 44-year-old artist Chetnaa’s decision to “follow a calling regardless of age and circumstance”, quitting a four-year career in market research to study and practise art, mirrored Khanna’s trajectory. The latter was a banker for 14 years before he turned to art full-time, though he continued to paint while working at Grindlays Bank.
Asked how he would want to be remembered by younger artists, Khanna says: “People will say many things: He was an important painter; we like him. More than that I would like them to see and to understand how a painting is made… The person looking at my paintings should think: This man had a calling.”
***
Our understanding of who a Modernist is relies heavily on a timeline built around the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, of which Khanna was a part.
This timeline needs to be revisited with a more comprehensive lens that includes caste, class, region, language and gender. To understand Khanna, we must consider the doors that were open for him as a result of his inherited privilege, and those that he, in turn, held open for others.
Born in 1925 in what is now Pakistan, Khanna studied in Lahore, received the Rudyard Kipling Scholarship to study in England. He was fluent in Urdu, Persian and English. In 1962, when he quit his job as a banker, he received the John D Rockefeller III Fund Fellowship and travelled to Japan. He was also artist-in-residency at American University, Washington.
Well-travelled and globally known, Khanna forged vital friendships with contemporaries from PAG. He advocated with Kumar Gallery for a higher monthly stipend for Tyeb Mehta. Collecting was an integral part of his relationships with art and artists. His collection includes works by MF Husain, Mehta, Akbar Padamsee, SH Raza, Ram Kumar and Bal Chhabda.
“That’s how all of us survived, by helping each other. There was love and friendship,” Khanna said, in an interview published in the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) Art Journal in 2022.
Any visitor to NGMA, Lalit Kala Akademi or Bharat Bhavan today stands in an institution Khanna helped shape. He sat on their art acquisition committees, championed for artworks to be collected, and curated voices beyond his own. This wasn’t without friction. Gallerist Geetha Mehra recalls how, in the 1980s, disgruntled artists locked Khanna in a room at Lalit Kala Akademi in Chennai because they felt sidelined!
Khanna also mentored artists and writers across generations. Jitish Kallat still recalls Khanna’s encouraging words at his first solo show in Delhi, in 1998. At the time Kallat was 24 and Khanna, 73.
Nine years ago, Khanna encouraged Reema Desai Gehi, editor of Art India magazine, to uncover the under-acknowledged role of the German art critic Rudolf von Leyden in India, and this resulted in her authoring a book on him.
***
Khanna has lived through World War 2, Independence, Partition and a state-driven effort of institution-building around Indian arts and culture.
The India we live in today is vastly different. When I ask contemporary artists where they view Khanna’s works, they say “online”. Virtual exhibitions, online journals and archives, digital catalogues and newer media interventions that pair artworks with AI-generated poetry postcards or ‘remix’ subjects in his painterly style have made Khanna infinitely accessible.
Yet, for the art-viewing public, private and state-run institutional collections are crucial. Khanna’s dual market presence — in primary and secondary markets — makes it possible for collectors even today to acquire his works, says entrepreneur and young art collector Jaiveer Johal, an opinion echoed by auctioneer and gallerist Dadiba Pundole.
When his early artworks are up for sale they provide an art-historical roadmap for collectors because, as Minal Vazirani, co-founder of Saffronart, puts it, Khanna was a true “archivist-artist”.
I witnessed the importance of private and institutional collection-building, in helping us access Khanna’s work, while researching the archives of Gallery Chemould, Mumbai. Kavita Singh, an interior designer and eminent art collector, had acquired her first work by Khanna in 1977, from Kekoo and Khorshed Gandhy at Gallery Chemould. It was a painting titled The Anatomy Lesson (1972), which offered a stark reminder of the 1971 Bangladesh War, with military men huddled over a shrouded corpse. Singh lent this artwork for the 60th anniversary exhibitions of Chemould Prescott Road, which Shireen Gandhy conceptualised and I curated, in 2023.
In the same vein, Radhika Chopra, an entrepreneur, art-lover and collector, lent the first canvas ever created by Khanna, News of Gandhiji’s Death (1948), to Asia Society New York for its 2018 exhibition, The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India. It was here that Kulavoor saw it before he painted Morning News.
The physicist Homi Bhabha, founding director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and a patron of many in the Progressive Artists’ Group, was Khanna’s first collector. He acquired The Spring Nude for ₹200 in 1954, the year Khanna painted it. A new generation was able to view this work in 2011, when gallerists Mortimer Chatterjee and Tara Lal curated an exhibition of the institute’s collection at NGMA Mumbai.
Later this year, on November 10, NGMA Mumbai will open a major retrospective co-curated by Zehra Jumabhoy and Kajoli Khanna titled Krishen Khanna at 100: The Last Progressive.
The centenarian has spent his lifetime contributing to and curating the cultural records of our time. At the same time, his all-encompassing perspective has held us, the viewer, accountable for what we observe and ignore.
Art historian Gayatri Sinha, author of Krishen Khanna: A Critical Biography (2001), describes the artist’s arc as one that moved “from the subaltern to grand narratives with humour and empathy”. Nowhere is this more visible than in The Great Procession, a mural Khanna created at the ITC Maurya hotel in Delhi in 1983.
Though opulent in scale and tone, populated with historical and mythological figures, a closer look reveals jugglers, mendicants, truckwallas with migrant labourers, figures unlikely to be invited into this elite space, but painted into its domed ceiling for everyone in the lobby to look up to.
Khanna’s legacy is that he won’t let us ignore the deeply unequal world we live in, and our role in shaping it for the better. At 100, Khanna endures.
(Shaleen Wadhwana is an independent arts educator, researcher and curator and is co-creator of the Immerse artist and curator residency)
In 2019, while taking a group of Delhi University students around the National Gallery of Modern Art in that city, I stopped in front of The Black Truck. This 1974 oil-on-canvas by Krishen Khanna depicts two shrouded figures sitting in the back of a truck hurtling into the night, swallowed up by black, white and grey strokes.
“How does this painting make you feel?” I asked the 20-something-year-olds. “Sad.” “Empty.” “Morose.” “Emotionally dark,” they replied.
The figures on this truck are witnesses to the times; they are the most invisibilised, the migrants who helped build India after Partition, but never benefitted from its progress. Khanna, a member of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, consistently documented the overlooked, using scenes both mundane and mythical, I explained.
Last week, Khanna turned 100, and I want to pose another question: What does it mean for him to be the last living Modernist of our times?
{{/usCountry}}Last week, Khanna turned 100, and I want to pose another question: What does it mean for him to be the last living Modernist of our times?
{{/usCountry}}In his over-80-year practice, Khanna has played many roles: artist, curator, writer, public arts administrator, photographer, documentarian, poet, collector.
{{/usCountry}}In his over-80-year practice, Khanna has played many roles: artist, curator, writer, public arts administrator, photographer, documentarian, poet, collector.
{{/usCountry}}I spoke with over 75 artists, curators, gallerists, collectors and auctioneers across India to understand his impact and influence on them. Each of them had connected with the arts polymath in unique ways.
{{/usCountry}}I spoke with over 75 artists, curators, gallerists, collectors and auctioneers across India to understand his impact and influence on them. Each of them had connected with the arts polymath in unique ways.
{{/usCountry}}Among the contemporary artists I spoke to (at least 60 to 80 years his junior), most connected with the riot of colour on his canvases, recurrent motifs such as that of the bandwallas, and his style which was largely figurative but tinged with abstraction.
{{/usCountry}}Among the contemporary artists I spoke to (at least 60 to 80 years his junior), most connected with the riot of colour on his canvases, recurrent motifs such as that of the bandwallas, and his style which was largely figurative but tinged with abstraction.
{{/usCountry}}For some, Khanna’s lived experience of Partition, his compositional framing, treatment of colour, and his inner calling as an artist found their way into their practices.
Riya Chandwani, 29, said she felt “ek sannata aur bhaari cheekh (an eerie silence and a loud scream)” when she viewed Partition-era artworks such as News of Gandhiji’s Death (1948). Like Khanna, who fled with his family from Lahore to Shimla a few days before August 15, 1947, her grandparents fled Sindh overnight. They were among millions in India and Pakistan who crossed borders and witnessed communal violence, loss and death.
Chandwani’s painting, Carrying Across–2 (2022) centres the radio, bringing life-altering news of Partition, just as the newspaper does in Khanna’s canvas, announcing the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi shortly after Partition.
Sameer Kulavoor, 41, remembers being struck by the multiple vantage points of the anxious-shocked readers of newspapers in Khanna’s work. Inspired by it, he painted Morning News (2018), which depicts our modern-day addictive need to “reach out to our devices first thing in the morning, for news”.
Khanna’s shift towards terracotta hues and warm earthen tones, specifically in Dead and Dying (1971) and Untitled (1963), influenced 28-year-old Anoushka Bhalla’s depictions of grief and pathos. Referring to Khanna as the “historical ancestor” to her practice, she offers the example of her 2023 work, Foreteller, that follows a similar colour tone and emotional register.
The 44-year-old artist Chetnaa’s decision to “follow a calling regardless of age and circumstance”, quitting a four-year career in market research to study and practise art, mirrored Khanna’s trajectory. The latter was a banker for 14 years before he turned to art full-time, though he continued to paint while working at Grindlays Bank.
Asked how he would want to be remembered by younger artists, Khanna says: “People will say many things: He was an important painter; we like him. More than that I would like them to see and to understand how a painting is made… The person looking at my paintings should think: This man had a calling.”
***
Our understanding of who a Modernist is relies heavily on a timeline built around the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, of which Khanna was a part.
This timeline needs to be revisited with a more comprehensive lens that includes caste, class, region, language and gender. To understand Khanna, we must consider the doors that were open for him as a result of his inherited privilege, and those that he, in turn, held open for others.
Born in 1925 in what is now Pakistan, Khanna studied in Lahore, received the Rudyard Kipling Scholarship to study in England. He was fluent in Urdu, Persian and English. In 1962, when he quit his job as a banker, he received the John D Rockefeller III Fund Fellowship and travelled to Japan. He was also artist-in-residency at American University, Washington.
Well-travelled and globally known, Khanna forged vital friendships with contemporaries from PAG. He advocated with Kumar Gallery for a higher monthly stipend for Tyeb Mehta. Collecting was an integral part of his relationships with art and artists. His collection includes works by MF Husain, Mehta, Akbar Padamsee, SH Raza, Ram Kumar and Bal Chhabda.
“That’s how all of us survived, by helping each other. There was love and friendship,” Khanna said, in an interview published in the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) Art Journal in 2022.
Any visitor to NGMA, Lalit Kala Akademi or Bharat Bhavan today stands in an institution Khanna helped shape. He sat on their art acquisition committees, championed for artworks to be collected, and curated voices beyond his own. This wasn’t without friction. Gallerist Geetha Mehra recalls how, in the 1980s, disgruntled artists locked Khanna in a room at Lalit Kala Akademi in Chennai because they felt sidelined!
Khanna also mentored artists and writers across generations. Jitish Kallat still recalls Khanna’s encouraging words at his first solo show in Delhi, in 1998. At the time Kallat was 24 and Khanna, 73.
Nine years ago, Khanna encouraged Reema Desai Gehi, editor of Art India magazine, to uncover the under-acknowledged role of the German art critic Rudolf von Leyden in India, and this resulted in her authoring a book on him.
***
Khanna has lived through World War 2, Independence, Partition and a state-driven effort of institution-building around Indian arts and culture.
The India we live in today is vastly different. When I ask contemporary artists where they view Khanna’s works, they say “online”. Virtual exhibitions, online journals and archives, digital catalogues and newer media interventions that pair artworks with AI-generated poetry postcards or ‘remix’ subjects in his painterly style have made Khanna infinitely accessible.
Yet, for the art-viewing public, private and state-run institutional collections are crucial. Khanna’s dual market presence — in primary and secondary markets — makes it possible for collectors even today to acquire his works, says entrepreneur and young art collector Jaiveer Johal, an opinion echoed by auctioneer and gallerist Dadiba Pundole.
When his early artworks are up for sale they provide an art-historical roadmap for collectors because, as Minal Vazirani, co-founder of Saffronart, puts it, Khanna was a true “archivist-artist”.
I witnessed the importance of private and institutional collection-building, in helping us access Khanna’s work, while researching the archives of Gallery Chemould, Mumbai. Kavita Singh, an interior designer and eminent art collector, had acquired her first work by Khanna in 1977, from Kekoo and Khorshed Gandhy at Gallery Chemould. It was a painting titled The Anatomy Lesson (1972), which offered a stark reminder of the 1971 Bangladesh War, with military men huddled over a shrouded corpse. Singh lent this artwork for the 60th anniversary exhibitions of Chemould Prescott Road, which Shireen Gandhy conceptualised and I curated, in 2023.
In the same vein, Radhika Chopra, an entrepreneur, art-lover and collector, lent the first canvas ever created by Khanna, News of Gandhiji’s Death (1948), to Asia Society New York for its 2018 exhibition, The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India. It was here that Kulavoor saw it before he painted Morning News.
The physicist Homi Bhabha, founding director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and a patron of many in the Progressive Artists’ Group, was Khanna’s first collector. He acquired The Spring Nude for ₹200 in 1954, the year Khanna painted it. A new generation was able to view this work in 2011, when gallerists Mortimer Chatterjee and Tara Lal curated an exhibition of the institute’s collection at NGMA Mumbai.
Later this year, on November 10, NGMA Mumbai will open a major retrospective co-curated by Zehra Jumabhoy and Kajoli Khanna titled Krishen Khanna at 100: The Last Progressive.
The centenarian has spent his lifetime contributing to and curating the cultural records of our time. At the same time, his all-encompassing perspective has held us, the viewer, accountable for what we observe and ignore.
Art historian Gayatri Sinha, author of Krishen Khanna: A Critical Biography (2001), describes the artist’s arc as one that moved “from the subaltern to grand narratives with humour and empathy”. Nowhere is this more visible than in The Great Procession, a mural Khanna created at the ITC Maurya hotel in Delhi in 1983.
Though opulent in scale and tone, populated with historical and mythological figures, a closer look reveals jugglers, mendicants, truckwallas with migrant labourers, figures unlikely to be invited into this elite space, but painted into its domed ceiling for everyone in the lobby to look up to.
Khanna’s legacy is that he won’t let us ignore the deeply unequal world we live in, and our role in shaping it for the better. At 100, Khanna endures.
(Shaleen Wadhwana is an independent arts educator, researcher and curator and is co-creator of the Immerse artist and curator residency)
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