It was against the colonial bias that nationalist art emerged, and the Bengal School of Art, as nurtured by Abanindranath Tagore and E. B. Havell, was a prime example. India’s first nationalist art school, Kala Bhavana, was set up in 1919 as part of the newly established Visva-Bharati University in Shantiniketan, conceptualised by poet Rabindranath Tagore. Apart from the famous Bauhaus exhibition that travelled to Calcutta modern European art influenced Indian artists through art magazines that were in circulation. Gaganendranath and poet–painter Rabindranath, knew about the international trends of Cubism and Expressionism, which had rejected academic realism and experimented with abstraction; They thought that art need not copy the world but create its own world out of forms, lines and colour patches. A landscape, portrait or still life may be called abstract if it draws our attention to an abstract design created by forms, lines and colour patches.

What artistic concepts did Cubism and Expressionism reject, as mentioned in the passage?

Academic realism

Answer: Academic realism and traditional forms

It was against the colonial bias that nationalist art emerged, and the Bengal School of Art, as nurtured by Abanindranath Tagore and E. B. Havell, was a prime example. India’s first nationalist art school, Kala Bhavana, was set up in 1919 as part of the newly established Visva-Bharati University in Shantiniketan, conceptualised by poet Rabindranath Tagore. It carried the vision of the Bengal School but also followed its own path in creating art meaningful for Indians. This was the time when the whole world was in a state of intense political turmoil in the wake of World War–I. Apart from the famous Bauhaus exhibition that travelled to Calcutta modern European art influenced Indian artists through art magazines that were in circulation. Artists from the Tagore family — Gaganendranath and poet–painter Rabindranath, thus, knew about the international trends of Cubism and Expressionism, which had rejected academic realism and experimented with abstraction; They thought that art need not copy the world but create its own world out of forms, lines and colour patches. A landscape, portrait or still life may be called abstract if it draws our attention to an abstract design created by forms, lines and colour patches.