Progressive Artists' Group

The Progressive Artists' Group was formed in Bombay in 1947, the year of Indian independence, by six painters including Francis Newton Souza, Syed Haider Raza and Maqbool Fida Husain, who rejected both the revivalist nationalism of the Bengal School and continued academic realism in favor of a modernist idiom that could absorb European movements, Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Expressionism among them, on the group's own terms as newly independent Indian artists rather than as colonial imitation. Husain's bold, gestural figuration and Raza's move toward geometric abstraction rooted in Indian metaphysical symbolism, especially the bindu, exemplified the group's range, while Souza's often confrontational nudes and religious imagery deliberately provoked conservative taste. Though the group itself dissolved by the early 1950s as members dispersed, several to Europe, the Progressive Artists' Group is credited with establishing the framework for Indian modernism and its members became the most internationally recognized generation of twentieth-century Indian painters.