Home N S Bendre
About
Narayan Shridhar Bendre was born on 21stAugust, 1910inIndore (India). His work was widely acclaimed and celebrated as a renowned artist, whose pioneering talent and contributions were instrumental in bringing glory to the modern Indian art.
He met Mona while working in Chennai as an art director and married her in the year 1942. The world lost this esteemed painter on 19thFebruary, 1992. Today, his work is widely acknowledged across the globe as a true reflection of various Indian themes and forms within them.
Education & Work
N S Bendre completed his early education at the Holkar College in Indore in 1929. In 1933, he earned a degree in Bachelor of Arts from the Agra University. Later, he received a diploma in painting from the Indore’s State School of Art in the year 1934. From 1947 to 1950, he studied printmaking from New York.
Between 1936 and 1939, he ardently travelled various places across the globe and magnanimously captured its beauty on his canvas. In the initial years of his career, he was keenly interested in immaculately designing the mystic and majestic landscape paintings. Later, his realms of artwork blended with different forms of artwork, encompassing portraits and landscapes in gouache and oils, as well as mural wall paintings. He combined Indian formal themes with a touch of European modernism reflection in his work.
Mr. Bendre went to Shantiniketan in 1945 and worked with eminent artists like Ramkinkar Baij, Binode Behari Mukherjee, and Nandalal Bose. In 1950, he became the Reader & Head of the Department of Paintings at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Maharaja Sayajirao University (Vadodara). While teaching at the university, he embarked his journey as an expressionist, cubist and abstract artist, wherein he experimented with pointillism art style.
He actively participated in various solo exhibitions in India and abroad, including “Bendre 1985” displayed at the Taj Art Gallery in Mumbai; “Retrospective” organized by the Lalitkala Akademiand exhibited at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai;“Traveling Exhibition” exhibited in countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia; “Abstract Works” at Baroda; and “Traveling Exhibition” at the Windermere Gallery in New York; to name a few. The artist also participated in the Annual Exhibition organized by the Bombay Art Society in Mumbai in the years 1934-39, 1941, 1944, and 1958-59.
Some of his recent posthumous exhibitions were “Radical Terrain: Modernist Art from India” exhibited at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York; “Manifestations IV” and “Manifestations VI' displayed at the Delhi Art Gallery in New Delhi; “Masters of Maharashtra” organized by the Lalit Kala Akademi at Piramal Gallery in New Delhi; “Ethos V: Indian Art Through the Lens of History” exhibited at the Indigo Blue Art in Singapore; “Baroda: A Tale of Two Cities- Part I” displayed at the Sarjan Art Gallery in Vadodara; and “N. S. Bendre Exhibition of Sketches” presented at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai.
Awards and Accolades
Narayan Shridhar Bendre received silver medals for his incredible work by the Bombay Art Society (Mumbai) in the years 1934 and 1935. The artist bagged Governor’s Prize from the Bombay Art Society (Mumbai) in 1935. Moreover, the Bombay Art Society celebrated his remarkable work for sketching “Landscapes of Benar” in 1941 by presenting him with a gold medal. In 1955, he won National Award for his remarkable artwork by the Lalit Kala Akademi (New Delhi). Mr. Narayan was honored with the Padmashree in 1969 and the Padma Bhushan in 1992 by the Government of India for his outstanding performance in the field of art. He was also the recipient of Kalidas Sanman conferred by the Government of Madhya Pradesh in 1984, and Gagan Abani Award bestowed by Visva- Bharati, Santiniketan (Kolkata) in 1982 for his remarkable contribution to the India’s glorious art realms
