A versatile artist, consummate teacher, and a well-known cultural figure throughout his career, Lalit Mohan Sen (1898-1954) was a leading Indian artist who lived and worked at the peak of the Gandhian era.
Born in Shantipur, West Bengal, into a family closely associated with the place’s famous handloom textile tradition, Lalit Mohan Sen moved to Lucknow when young and spent most of his life there. He studied art at the Government School of Arts and Crafts, Lucknow (1917) and later at the Royal College of Art, London (1925). Originally a pupil of Nathanial Heard and Sir William Rothenstein, he excelled in academic realism, portrait and landscape. Still, his works also show inspiration from Classical Indian art, the country’s rich craft and decorative traditions and the new nationalist paintings of Abanindranath and his disciples.
Lalit Mohan Sen worked in many styles and mediums, which gives his oeuvre extraordinary diversity. We witness him wrestling with what it means to be a modern artist while remaining sceptical about modernism’s desire for stylistic singularity and hierarchy of values. As an artist and pedagogue who taught at his alma mater Lucknow Art School for almost three decades and later became its Principal in 1945, he placed equal emphasis on the revered disciplines like painting and commercial/functional art, focusing as much on creative self-expression as on art’s communicative potentiality. The large body of his posters, graphic prints, book illustrations, and design works, which form a significant part of his oeuvre, is also crucial in understanding his unique place in the history of modern Indian art.
An avid traveller, Sen carried his sketchbooks and camera when travelling. He was a member of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain and showed a lifelong passion for photography. He took many powerful black-and-white photographs capturing the beauties of places and people, mainly the Jaunsar-Bawar in the Garhwal regions of Uttarakhand. Unlike his prints and paintings, his photographic talent has not been discussed