Hindu Prints from Trendy Bengal at MFA Boston » Artwork & Vintage Market

From 31 January to 31 Might 2026, the Museum of Advantageous Arts, Boston, presents the exhibition “Divine Shade: Hindu Prints from Trendy Bengal”

Supply: Museum of Advantageous Arts, Boston. Picture: Madana-Bhasma, revealed by Calcutta Artwork Studio, about 1885-95

Vivid prints of divinities are a part of every day life for Hindus in India and world wide, used for worship in houses, factories, and places of work, in addition to for adornment on automobiles, calendars, computer systems, and store counters. The artwork world has traditionally ignored these pictures, usually known as “calendar artwork,” as a result of they’re cheap and mass produced. However they’ve a wealthy and engaging historical past in and affect on Indian artwork, faith, and society.

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Divine Shade: Hindu Prints from Trendy Bengal explores these in style prints’ origins and highly effective impacts. When Indian artists encountered the brand new printmaking know-how of lithography in Nineteenth-century Calcutta (immediately Kolkata), then the capital of British India, they used it to reinvent devotional artwork. Depictions of Hindu gods turned extra lifelike, colourful, and accessible than ever earlier than. Shrines in houses throughout the financial spectrum got here to host these pictures, blended and matched in response to a household’s style. Although the lithographs of Hindu gods created by Bengali artists weren’t costly, they had been useful in different senses. Offered within the bustling bazaars of Calcutta the place presses competed to draw clients, the prints served an necessary function in dwelling worship, happy the inventive sensibilities of a Bengali society that had absorbed European nice artwork values, and helped to unfold new political concepts. The exhibition considers how lithography gave these artists—who produced hundreds of prints that traveled shortly throughout the nation—a method to vary not simply devotional but in addition inventive, political, and social life.

A spotlight of the exhibition is the MFA’s assortment of 38 vibrant lithographs from Nineteenth-century Calcutta. The MFA is one in all solely two American museums that collects this materials. This exhibition, the primary of its variety in america, options greater than 100 objects, together with different prints, work, sculpture, and textiles from the Museum’s South Asian assortment and choose loans.