Oxford: The Mughals influenced the Indian arts and culture deeply with the ideas from Persian and other West Asian countries, leading to new styles in cuisine, fashion, literature and arts.
The Persian-influenced miniatures of stylised court life are the paintings and drawing normally associated with Mughal art in India.
However, the painting style that flourished in the Mughal courts also spread to the other regions of India, influencing the art and depiction of mostly nobility in Deccan, Rajasthan and Punjab Hills.
The unusual and different look at the art of Mughal India is captured evocatively in the new exhibition of paintings, on paper and cloth, from the period at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which has the personal collection of UK artist Howard Hodgkin on display.
Hodgkin, famous for his abstract style and use of bold colours, has been a passionate collector of Indian paintings since his school days in the late 1940s when he was just 13-years-old.
“My collection has been seen before in an incomplete form but it’s grown considerably. I never bought paintings or drawings on the tempting but distracting basis of their topography, their school of art, their theme, period or style. I just wanted great art,” according to Hodgkin, who turns 80 this year.
Hodgkin, who helped Dr Topsfield curate his collection for the exhibition, was visiting just two days before its public opening to take a final look. As he put it, “You need things to look at, things to affect your feelings, and intelligence and heart.”
Hodgkin built his collection over decades, by buying and discarding pieces and has been a regular visitor to India for over 50 years.
Explaining the impulse to collect Indian paintings, Hodgkin, writes in the notes on his collection in a book at the exhibition, “Artists have always collected art. Perhaps it’s because it’s something from elsewhere. A professional artist sells what he makes. Buying art fills yet another space.”
The passionate collector has had an eye for the unusual. “Hodgkin has often acquired unusually big pictures. Most Indian paintings on paper were made as manuscript illustrations, or else to be held in the hand and passed round in intimate, appreciative gatherings of nobles or ladies,” according to curator Dr Andrew Topsfield.
The Hodgkin collection has large paintings with studies of elephants, one of the themes.
“Largest and most imposing of all are the two giant Kota drawings of elephants pushing cannons drawn by bullocks, both of them powerful, repetitive compositions,” says Dr Topsfield. The inclusion of drawings, rare as most of them were studies for paintings, in the exhibition provide a dramatic contrast to the highly stylised court life, hunting and battle scenes.
“The technique in both (Hodgkin’s art and his Indian painting collection) is very different – The India painting relies very much on the art of drawing and always has this wonderful sense of colour that clearly must appeal to him,” Dr Topsfield says when asked about the influence, if any of the collection, on Hodgkin’s art.
