K.B. Goel Revolt The sixties were critical years for Indian art: it was discovered that the secure landscape of the fifties and its well established hierarchy of cultural values were merely a projection of the colonial mind. The heroes of the fifties, it was admitted, were after all provincialists. To escape from the provincialist climate of Bombay, for instance, Souza, Padamsee and Raza migrated to Paris to settle there permanently. As expatriates they became instant successes, significant painters in the Indian art context which had always looked for foreign inputs to stay modern. And within the currently fashionable art categories of the fifties they were also identified as avant garde. The local artists naturally sought to adjust their vision with the advanced art rhetorics of these expatriates whose art works appeared as so many vindications of what was acceptable in the art markets of London, Paris and New York. After all, these artists have made a strong showing at the new art-making metropolitan centres. The revolt against this axiomatic superiority of the expatriate artist came from J. Swaminathan as one of the founders of the Group 1890 which held its first group exhibition in 1963 inaugurated by Jawaharlal Nehru. The revolt actually was against machine-minded western art historical values and not so much against those mechano-artists who after importing the western engine constructed it with a refined sense of mechanical knowledge: they could even make the engine run and, with the help of expatriate Indian artists, could even check on the engine's working. When this engine collapsed and was declared beyond repair by the western technologists operating in the metropolitan art centres in the west, our provincialists did not accept the fact of the engine's decomposition: instead they got down to the task of repairing it. The result was the deathlike repetitions of abstract expressionist modes. Instead of building a new engine they hugged the fragmented parts as brilliant, perceptive personalizations of what in the west is represented as advanced art. The Group 1890 painters had no ideology when they revolted against the colossal entertainment industry set up by the mechano-painters of the fifties. Some of the artists of the Group projected their artware as products of the 'whole' man. Their brave attempts did not make the kind of impact they had imagined; and for the simple reason that they had themselves been working within the system which set up such false categories as 'advance', 'new' and 'significant' art. What was significant in their art-making rhetorics was the belief that the writing of provincial art history through their local accents was as much an important historical constituent as building a wholly indigenous 'engine'. They had the know-how and experience and they succeeded in constructing a reality as convincing as that of the expatriates. And within the framework of the local art world they made a place for themselves which provided a foothold in art's emerging power structure of the sixties. They were, in short, recognized as a minority group. The result was the questioning attitude to- Numbers 27-28